![]() ![]() With a raft of different character classes to explore and unlock, as well as a host of different monsters to enlist, you're free to develop your team and corresponding play-style in any number of different directions. Aside from the handful of storyline protagonists, you're left to create your own team, picking each member's class, name and equipment thus building up the team you'll be using throughout. ![]() Rather than doing away with that historical SRPG framework altogether, Disgaea instead heaps flexibility onto the fundamentals. Of course, all of this narrative framework and feisty dialogue exists just to drive you into the strategy of the game's labyrinthine underbelly. Etna's original voice actress has been replaced with the lady who voiced the character in Disgaea 2, which will irritate as many people as it pleases. In 2003 the lively and impudent story seemed fresh for a Japanese videogame and time hasn't dulled Atlus' brilliant original translation, which still fizzes with life and personality in this update. The game's divided into fourteen chapters, which makes it sound much shorter than it really is, each section introduced by an anime TV series style recap of what's happened so far. Laharl is flanked by a memorable cast of hangers-on, most notably the assassin Etna and the sugary, angel-with-a-saviour-complex, Flonne. Within moments he's off, tracking down the usurping rival demon Vyers, who comes to be disparagingly known as 'Mid-boss' as the game progresses. Heir to the underworld kingdom, Laharl's slumber has meant he missed his father's passing and, with it, his chance to take the throne. Set in the esoteric Netherworld, the game pulls back the curtain on the prissy but loveable anti-hero Laharl as he awakens from a two-year sleep in the belly of a hellish castle. Rather than trying to compete with the strait-laced storyline and aesthetic of all that had gone before, Disgaea instead opts for an irreverent art style and storyline in the style of a universally appealing comedy anime show (Excel Saga springs to mind). Indeed, following 1997's Final Fantasy Tactics, the near perfect expression and realisation of ten years of preceding tradition, virtually no developer or publisher tried their hand at the genre.Īll of which made Disgaea's arrival all the more of a surprise and goes to show how meteoric the rise of the game and its developer's reputation actually was. Until Disgaea's arrival the SRPG was a genre deeply entrenched in tradition, the grid-based mechanics - where games play out like two generals moving toy soldiers across a tactical map in a battle for domination - solid and immovable, nobody willing to venture far from their strict rules. First released for the PlayStation 2 in 2003 (as Disgaea: Hour of Darkness) it arrived without fanfare, the creation of an obscure Japanese developer, Nippon Ichi, known only to the most dedicated importers for the musical RPG Rhapsody. Celebration because both Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea are astounding achievements of intelligent design, assured form and delightful function annoyance because the proximity of their second comings will force free time-impoverished players to choose one over the other when, in all honesty, both are fiercely individual games and both make for essential playing.ĭisgaea is the younger game by some stretch. That the PSP should receive heavily embellished ports of two of the greatest strategy RPGs ever made within weeks of one another is, at once, cause for wild celebration and cause for mild irritation. ![]()
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