Friday, October 2, 2009

Disgaea

I'm craving a game that I can't play.  One it's on PS2 and two I don't own a copy.  Since I can't play it, I'm gonna review it, or something.  Most of my friends, those who love the 80's and those who live off of chicken fingers, will not hear anything here they don't already know.  This is mostly just for me to stifle my craving, hopefully.


Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

I'll use my normal format really quickly and then I want to get to the good stuff, as this is more commentary than review.

Presentation - Disgaea has beautiful high definition art during cutscenes and brightly colored over-the-top special moves.  It may lack some in animation, but makes up for it and more in artwork.

Full-Marks for Pres.

Entertainment - Providing one of the most intricate strategy RPG systems I have ever seen with a plethora of levels, many of which are optional, you could literally play this game for hundreds of hours and still find new stuff.  Trust me, I have a friend who's done it.

Entertainment gets Full-Marks

Literary Value - A heart-felt divine comedy with several plot twists and a fresh from the villain perspective.  It may have a little anime cheese to it.  But just enough to make it better and not hinder it.

Full-Marks for Story (seeing a pattern here?)

Respect - Now here's where I get picky with my review.  This game is obscure, it used to be a lot more obscure than it is now.  Now it's very in with the nerd crowd and the anime crowd.  Popular? No.  Well-known?  Not really.  Highly acclaimed?  Definitely.  It's not a perfect game, but it's damn near close.

Respect? Half-Cred.  It's good enough for me.

Disgaea gets 3.5 exploding prinnies out of 4


Enough review, I just wanna ramble.  Disgaea Commentary starts here.  One of my favorite things about Disgaea was Item World.  When you need to level up, Item world is there for you.  Not only does it provide random dungeons to train your peeps in, but doing so makes your items better too.  Also, Item World was chocked full of goodies to be had in case you were low on cash or needed some better gear.

It wasn't just easy pickings either though.  If you went into Item World unprepared or picked the wrong item to jump into to, you'd find yourself over your head fast.  Mr. Gency's Exits were a godsend, and made it so that even if you did get in over your head, you could still salvage the situation.

I think the combo system made the game ten times more fun as well.  Both the physical attack combo and the stringing together several commands combo.

And the game was so funny.  Even the battle system was hilarious.  Your stats had practically no limits, throwing your teammates around was a strategy, and if you couldn't get a bill passed you could just beat up everyone who didn't vote for you.

Disgaea 2 and 3 weren't as good.  Disgaea 2 would've gotten a 3/4 and I didn't play Disgaea 3 enough to know what it would get.  I think Disgaea 2 made a lot of good changes to the game system, but the story was much weaker.  And it didn't have the deep character development of the first one.  I think Rozalin was the best character and she didn't have that much going for her.  Despite Axel's attempts at being the next Mid-Boss, he couldn't quite live up.

I think the fact that you could use a ton of different strategies really helped Disgaea too.  You could power-level Laharl to kill everything, or you could work with a huge rotating cast.  You could pick your favorite characters and even mold them to your preferences to a degree.  I made Flonne a gun user, best one I had, because I made her that way.  She would've been much more suited to healing or working with a bow, but I said no, she's gonna pop some caps.

Last word, if you're reading this and you don't know about Disgaea, play this game.  If you're reading this and you do know Disgaea, please send me a copy, a PS2, and million dollars, please?

I worked on some Visual Basic projects today.  Visual Basic is really easy to use.  It also seems rather limited in its capabilites, but I'm taking the class so I'm learning the language.

And then...

I used Googalaxy to search for leads to finding Lee, but the words of Sayoko still swam in my head.  She had said that Lee had killed herself when she activated the weapon of mass destruction.  Hey, Ash had died and she was standing over my shoulder right now.  Maybe it was genetic?

"What's bothering you Keelhaul?"

"Sayoko said your sister was dead."

"Sayoko says a lot of things.  Keep looking."

I could see I wasn't going to change her mind about this one.  I found a chat on PirateLinks about someone saying they thought they saw Lee Edwards' spaceship landing on one of Fraction Corps asteroid mining bases.

Sounding like a good enough place to start.

The nanobots I picked up had the ship up and running.  Her beautiful hardwood floors glowed in the unfettered starlight.  Her completely useless sails fluttered in an artificial breeze.  Really stunning and completely superfluous.  The boards even creaked as you walked across them, just for added effect.  The photon cannons were molded into age of exploration cannons with powder kegs next to it and everything.

The only thing it was missing... a crew.  The decks were huge and completely empty.  Thanks to the nanobots neural interface, I could pilot the ship all by myself, but it still needed a crew.  I could use the extra hands too.

At least I had a first mate.

"And these, my lady, are your private quarters."

"So I can paint the walls pink right?"

"Well, you, I mean..."

"I'm just kidding.  It feels weird to have a place to call my own.  I've been on the road for several years now."

"You and your husband?"

"No, ex-husband, and he was too ADD with me anyway, sans travel."

(Cha-ching)

"By the way Keelhaul, you look a lot like him."

"Related maybe?  What's his name?"

"Bob Citsrk?"

"Don't know him.  It actually sounds like a name I'd use as an alias, but I've never met you before.  I'd have to get really drunk not to remember getting married."

"Yea, guess so..."

"Anyway, get some sleep, we'll hit that asteroid tomorrow."

"I hope not."

Until next time fellow pirates.

4 comments:

  1. Chicken tenders do indeed kick ass.

    Also I agree with you on Disgaea 1 being the best. I did like the 3rd one more then then 2nd one though.

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  2. I did like the Kung Fu Emeril from the 3rd one.

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  3. You can play Disgaea on your DS. The port came out last year.

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  4. You know, I might actually get that after I get back from fall break. I could use some Disgaea and the screenshots look like they took the smaller screen into consideration with the text.

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