My co-writer may complain bitterly that I infected him with the shopping virus, but from my perspective, turnabout is fair play. I have spent the past month mostly ignoring any game that doesn’t have “Disgaea” in its title, and it’s all his fault.
I finished the main storyline of the first Disgaea game, and then switched to the second game. It’s time to talk about it a bit. But first, let me tell you a little something I’ve noticed about our web traffic. A few months ago I wrote a fairly in-depth and critical review of Persona 3 called Ferris Bueller’s Day Offing Himself. Tweaking the nose of the world a little bit, I gave the article the slug “Persona 3 Hentai”, because of a throwaway comment late in the review.
That article has inspired more comments than any other in recent memory. Much of that article is from people who disagree with my review. Nearly all of that traffic, including the comments from people telling me that the save system is perfectly reasonable because “You can [save the game] within 30 minutes if you run past the enemies[...]” comes from people who followed the cheesecake picture from a certain search engine’s image search.
So because of the immense amusement value provided by this steady stream of passers-by, let’s just take a moment to admire this cheesecake image of semi-protagonist Etna. There. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk a bit about Disgaea 2.
On a purely technical level, it is a “better game” than its progenitor (which I initially discussed last month). The same basic turn-based game mechanics from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness are carried forward, but everything has been supercharged to be even more ridiculous. Characters level up faster. There are more optional areas and “extra stages,” and new mechanics have been piled on top of the old ones. I’m nearly done with the main story, and it is already apparent to me that this only covers perhaps a tenth of what the game has to offer. You could play Disgaea 2 for a year and still not have time for anything else.
And yet…and yet. There’s something about Disgaea 2 that leaves me a bit cold compared to Hour of Darkness. I don’t like the story quite as much, or the characters, and somehow the additional brightness and sharpness of the rendering has the completely unintuitive side effect of making it harder for me to see what I’m doing. I don’t quite know how to quantify this: taken individually, each element of the game looks better. But when they’re all put on the screen at once, my eyes simply slide off of them, like a patient’s body rejecting an organ transplant. This might simply be because I had been playing Disgaea 1 for several weeks, but I’d think if that was the case I’d have adjusted by now. I haven’t. Parts of the game, particularly the “birthday cake levels” in the item world, are so unwatchable to me that I just want to finish them as quickly as possible, and then avoid ever having to see them again.
Counterbalancing this is a very attractive truth: Disgaea 2 is, in some ways, the anti-Fire Emblem. It’s a turn-based strategy game that very, very explicitly allows you to choose exactly how difficult your next battle or set of battles will be (Literally. Don’t think a given map is challenging enough? Visit the Dark Assembly and pass a “Stronger Enemies” bill.) Apart from the somewhat inconvenient save system — you can’t save while in a battle — they nailed nearly every aspect of what makes games of this type addictive. Fun character design, challenging strategic gameplay, and a seemingly limitless ability to increase R. It turns out I’m willing to forgive a lot (including the ugly visuals) in return for those virtues.
In conclusion: hey, Pete, you should totally buy that Hattori HD Damascus Santoku. Buy two. They’re worth it!
Yo. Ancient ancient comment, but I came in through the Persona 3 link and read around, and I would just like to point out, an exact ‘bookmark’ or savestate of a PS2 game is 1.6MB
How would I know this?
Because of Drakan: Gate of the Ancients. That’s the exact format it uses. And it’s a bit on the heavy side on top of that, as I believe the two Summoner games used less space.
Most western ___-RPGs use that sort of thing. I even accidentally saved before I got pasted once on Summoner 2 because I didn’t see an enemy was still alive before preparing to revive my teammates, I only knocked them over. (I was poisoned and trying to hit it in between the damage frames)
The entry in question was the 2005/10 one about saves.
This is also the reason a majority of the games I crammed onto my PSP would be described as ‘casual’ (as I no longer have the stomach for most RPGs on either side, disliking grinding entirely in even its most minute form now. I’ve embraced the dark side and seek to break a game by power leveling ASAP and am pretty darn cheesed if the option isn’t there. As in most RPGs.) Western RPGs seem to understand this urge or tic or whatever you wish to call it better. A few stolen items, a few NPCs dead from shifty means, and you can terrorize the countryside. My favorites for this: Spiderweb Software games, Elder Scrolls games, Fallout, FF9 (killing the grand dragons at level 7-ish may or may not have been intentional), Phantom Brave.
also none of those twerps apparently paid attention to the first few fights in the game. If you have an attack that a Shadow is weak against or cause a critical hit, you get an extra turn. Couple this with striking the shadow in the back with your sword and you get at least two free hits. You should be able to complete a battle with no damage relatively quickly when properly prepared. 4-6 half-minute battles, add in another two minutes to deal with that card shuffling thing (you can skip the animation but won’t know where the cards went), another minute for exploration, and zap back down. It’s never taken 15-30 minutes in between save opportunities except for those few story-related ones. (which I think is still an oversight mind you, it’s one of the reason I shall never touch a Xeno-series RPG, having heard that this sort of thing was supposed to be a FEATURE or something based on how the fans talk about it.) There’s a one in ten chance (about, maybe more like 15% on a ‘good’ day) that a level spawns without a green teleporter. No probs, run to the next one and head back down. If you go three floors without seeing one, it would be a bad idea to play the lottery that day.
One other thing that annoyed me about P3, no way to see a larger version of the automap. Easy to get lost if you get three or four of those four-square pillar-in-the-middle rooms next to each other.
As far the topic goes, I prefer Phantom Brave for playing, Disgaea for storyline. Phantom Brave is just too darn cutesy and “WAFFy”. But it’s a lot more fun and has less thinkystuff and with 550 different skills to maim people with, only about 40 of those are taken from Disgaea, and their properties have changed. (Hurricane Slash looks the same, but now disarms your opponent.)
other pros: Only use one item instead of four. No more #$(*^&@#*&^ing item worlds/specialists, random dungeons are simply random dungeons with differing ‘theme’ layouts, weapons are beefed up the old fashioned way, blacksmiths and fusing. No more grids, free-roaming circular system. Terrain effects like being bouncy or slippery. Battles go much quicker since you can knock off enemies by simply throwing them into the water. (instead of adding their level to the other guy, it’s seemingly random. Two level 190s, you throw one, you end up with one level 250 to level 280. Probably a simple 1 or 0 result for every single level that could possibly be added calced before you can blink) Non-character skills much easier to level. (just find an item with that skill and fuse it to get the attack xp, for innate skills you need to have those people attack high leveled enemies a couple times then combine them all). Characters (other than Marona) also much easier to level. (Objects now carry their own mana. A few characters have the EXP raiser innate skill. They can all be fused. Throw a couple high-level spirit trees into that character and then fuse a bunch of similar characters together, then fuse that final guy into the person you want to keep, presto EXP raiser level 90+.) Weapons now vitally more important than simple character levels. (but can now be stolen by enemies. Only two to really watch out for though, mushrooms and bottlemails, thief-types.)
It only sounds complicated on paper, took me about two hours (which during this time you should level your bottlemail just to steal Raphael’s swords) to get the hang of it(deceptively straightforward), then most of the next five hours played was just listening to story. (as about a half hour of weapon-pumping demolished everything in my way. Mystery box is obscenely strong for such an early attack, though it does have a fire element.) Another half hour after that and I blew past towards the ending.
Also you can save at almost any time, unless an enemy picks up the last object on the map. (You use items on the map to summon characters into play, replacing the static entrypoint of Disgaea. You can bring your own items in to add more people by setting up a chain. Summon one guy, he throws his sword, summon another guy, he throws his potted plant, summon another guy off that, and so forth. A dungeon monk character will warp you home for a fee based upon strength of enemies + dungeon level. Marona may learn this skill but it costs 10 times as much to warp.)
The only grinding involved in PB is if you want to push up the percentages on weapons or level a title. Percentages directly relate to the person summoned from that item. +50% means they get +50% power in that stat when coming onto the battlefield. At first it’s easy to raise, but it goes up by an ever increasing rate, which means more items before the next boost. Also the item put into it has to be higher (obviously) than the one it’s raising.
Pumping a title really only ever needs to be done once (for marona) so that she can’t be stolen from.
I find the best weapon for Marona to be the egg, by the way, though if you want to waste the time any weapon can become the best eventually.
…as an aside, I’ve fallen asleep 6 times while playing Disgaea to date. None for PB. (Damn those geosymbol combos) First time ‘dumbing down’ a game has been a good thing! And the link in my name is NOT a remake but a complete rebuilding of an old classic.
whoa…..that looks a lot shorter in the comment box.
link is a nifty save-anywhere rogue-like, has graphics unlike many others. Made by one guy (and translated by one guy too.) Even has its own soundtrack! Incredible amount of shit to do, check the wiki.