Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice
Apr. 22nd, 2011 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIt's been a while since I played a proper Disgaea game, with geo blocks and item worlds and exploding penguin-demons (DOOOOOD!). If you liked the previous two games (or their remakes), all the good stuff is still here.
Backing up: Disgaea is a series of Tactics-style rpgs with various themes and gimmicks, all revolving around the Overlords of various Netherworlds. This one takes place in Demon Academy, where the Overlord's son Mao has decided to kill his father, because his father accidentally destroyed his game console and 4 million hours of grinding was lost with his save data. As his research indicates only a Hero and defeat an Overlord, he finds one (a young knight named Almaz) and steals the title, intent on using the power of "love" and "justice" to defeat his father...if he can figure out what those are.
As for the rest of the plot, Absence of Fourth Walls would probably have made a better subtitle. The characters are often humorously self-aware that they're in a game, making references to game mechanics and story tropes. It holds together very nicely and you care about the characters, though there is the issue of stopping to grind every couple of chapters before you can continue the plot. And as a friend of mine once described the series, "It's very Japanese." If you don't like that, you won't like this.
This game keeps grid-based and turn-based action, as with the previous two. Geo Blocks cause effects if you're standing on the same-colored square, or if you're standing on the block itself, and the new "Class World" mode relies entirely on the "stacked block" mechanic. (Hint: Stacked blocks stack effects. Don't stand on three Defense -50% blocks!) Monster characters have gained a new feature, allowing them to "magichange" into weapons for temporary use by their human allies. Some of the more breakable features of the previous games are altered--you need to spend mana to upgrade spells now, and staff proficiency doesn't improve range, so it's much harder to snipe everything with magic from far away.
Strategy comes in two forms: Be very clever, and grind more. I usually opt to mix the two, though when I got to the final chapter and my glass-cannon characters kept getting killed, rather than trying to balance them with better defense, I just opted to make them even better cannons. It worked delightfully well.
There are a few issues with camera rotation and non-transparent walls, which I vaguely remember the other games having, also, but because the game is turn-based, it's not that big a deal.
I wasn't able to download the patch for it, but apparently all that does is enable trophies for beating the insanely-powerful bonus bosses. Which I'm probably not going to do anyway. You see, Nippon Ichi games have a theme: You need to play 40-50 hours and get up to ~level 90 to beat the final boss and complete the main story. However, there are bonus maps, dungeons and bosses that are much, much harder, and your characters can get up to level 9999 with stats in the millions. You can also keep all of your stuff in a New Game Plus and try to get bonus endings by beating unbeatable fights or killing your allies repeatedly. So if you only play one game for a year, you can totally get your money's worth out of this series.
I very much enjoyed this, and despite not doing post-game content, I feel like I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it.
Backing up: Disgaea is a series of Tactics-style rpgs with various themes and gimmicks, all revolving around the Overlords of various Netherworlds. This one takes place in Demon Academy, where the Overlord's son Mao has decided to kill his father, because his father accidentally destroyed his game console and 4 million hours of grinding was lost with his save data. As his research indicates only a Hero and defeat an Overlord, he finds one (a young knight named Almaz) and steals the title, intent on using the power of "love" and "justice" to defeat his father...if he can figure out what those are.
As for the rest of the plot, Absence of Fourth Walls would probably have made a better subtitle. The characters are often humorously self-aware that they're in a game, making references to game mechanics and story tropes. It holds together very nicely and you care about the characters, though there is the issue of stopping to grind every couple of chapters before you can continue the plot. And as a friend of mine once described the series, "It's very Japanese." If you don't like that, you won't like this.
This game keeps grid-based and turn-based action, as with the previous two. Geo Blocks cause effects if you're standing on the same-colored square, or if you're standing on the block itself, and the new "Class World" mode relies entirely on the "stacked block" mechanic. (Hint: Stacked blocks stack effects. Don't stand on three Defense -50% blocks!) Monster characters have gained a new feature, allowing them to "magichange" into weapons for temporary use by their human allies. Some of the more breakable features of the previous games are altered--you need to spend mana to upgrade spells now, and staff proficiency doesn't improve range, so it's much harder to snipe everything with magic from far away.
Strategy comes in two forms: Be very clever, and grind more. I usually opt to mix the two, though when I got to the final chapter and my glass-cannon characters kept getting killed, rather than trying to balance them with better defense, I just opted to make them even better cannons. It worked delightfully well.
There are a few issues with camera rotation and non-transparent walls, which I vaguely remember the other games having, also, but because the game is turn-based, it's not that big a deal.
I wasn't able to download the patch for it, but apparently all that does is enable trophies for beating the insanely-powerful bonus bosses. Which I'm probably not going to do anyway. You see, Nippon Ichi games have a theme: You need to play 40-50 hours and get up to ~level 90 to beat the final boss and complete the main story. However, there are bonus maps, dungeons and bosses that are much, much harder, and your characters can get up to level 9999 with stats in the millions. You can also keep all of your stuff in a New Game Plus and try to get bonus endings by beating unbeatable fights or killing your allies repeatedly. So if you only play one game for a year, you can totally get your money's worth out of this series.
I very much enjoyed this, and despite not doing post-game content, I feel like I've definitely gotten my money's worth out of it.
