Disgaea Infinite
Oct. 14th, 2012 05:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroLord Laharl has been assassinated! Well, only sorta, but he’s planning to cut all the prinnies’ salaries anyway, and only one prinny with a magical time-travelling stopwatch can change history to fix it!
You could kinda call this a Choose Your Own Adventure book in Visual Novel form, though also with some elements of Sleep No More: Basically, if you do nothing, you can choose a character to follow and certain events will play out. At certain points, you’re given the chance to “mind control” certain characters (assuming you’re with them at the time) and depending on your choices, this can change the events that occur. The game also provides a list of mysteries and a very convenient map of which characters are where at what times. A lot of the amusement comes from mapping out the plotlines that are going on simultaneously and finding the points where you can edit them.
I suppose the problem is that the game is fairly short (only a few hours to play—incredibly short by Nippon Ichi standards), and in that time you see a lot of scenes repeatedly as you try slightly different combinations of actions. There are 14 different endings and a ton of special-scene “collectables”, but even insane completionism won’t stretch the game more than a few hours beyond that. They were trying to be innovative, but I don’t think this is going to catch on as a hot new genre unless they find more things to add to it.
The story is cute, if simple, and there are some funny bits. I was entertained, but part of that came from coming in with a working knowledge of the setting. While the NIS games have an overarching mythology that makes them hold together, pretty much all of them can be played in any sequence without losing much—the references to other games are either explained reasonably well or they come in the post-game. Well, except this one: Because it’s so short, it pretty much assumes you already know the cast of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, and what their quirks and motivations are.
Overall: This is a cute try at a new style of game, but it’s very short and doesn’t have a lot of depth, and relies on preexisting knowledge of the Disgaea-verse canon. I’m glad I got it used very cheaply, because this would have been very disappointing for full price, especially if I was expecting a standard 50+ hour NIS grindfest.
You could kinda call this a Choose Your Own Adventure book in Visual Novel form, though also with some elements of Sleep No More: Basically, if you do nothing, you can choose a character to follow and certain events will play out. At certain points, you’re given the chance to “mind control” certain characters (assuming you’re with them at the time) and depending on your choices, this can change the events that occur. The game also provides a list of mysteries and a very convenient map of which characters are where at what times. A lot of the amusement comes from mapping out the plotlines that are going on simultaneously and finding the points where you can edit them.
I suppose the problem is that the game is fairly short (only a few hours to play—incredibly short by Nippon Ichi standards), and in that time you see a lot of scenes repeatedly as you try slightly different combinations of actions. There are 14 different endings and a ton of special-scene “collectables”, but even insane completionism won’t stretch the game more than a few hours beyond that. They were trying to be innovative, but I don’t think this is going to catch on as a hot new genre unless they find more things to add to it.
The story is cute, if simple, and there are some funny bits. I was entertained, but part of that came from coming in with a working knowledge of the setting. While the NIS games have an overarching mythology that makes them hold together, pretty much all of them can be played in any sequence without losing much—the references to other games are either explained reasonably well or they come in the post-game. Well, except this one: Because it’s so short, it pretty much assumes you already know the cast of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice, and what their quirks and motivations are.
Overall: This is a cute try at a new style of game, but it’s very short and doesn’t have a lot of depth, and relies on preexisting knowledge of the Disgaea-verse canon. I’m glad I got it used very cheaply, because this would have been very disappointing for full price, especially if I was expecting a standard 50+ hour NIS grindfest.
