Disgaea: Hour of Darkness for PS2

Atlus has brought us a gaming gem from Japan. Disgaea: Hour of Darkness for the Playstation 2 is a full-featured turn based strategy game set in a chaotic netherworld. In Disgaea you will help prince Laharl, the young son of the late netherworld king, and his so-called ‘loyal’ vassals reclaim the throne from hordes of competing demons. Disgaea is Final Fantasy Tactics combined with The Nightmare Before Christmas and a quirky anime series making it one ‘hell’ of a game.

Disgaea’s battle system is extremely well designed; it borrows pieces from Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Vandal Hearts, and streamlines them into a liquid-smooth interface that is free from tedious quirks that plague most strategy-tactics games. Moving, positioning, and commanding characters is very easy and effective thanks to the well organized menus and button controls. The fantastic interface is a well-needed bonus considering the plethora of information presented to the player.

Disgaea features a huge list of different humanoids, monsters and special characters that you can enlist in your army. Everything from killer penguins to ronin samurai, mages, priests, dragons, ghosts, martial artists, swordsmen, yeti, chimerae, angels and succubi are available at your discretion. The cast of characters is large, but you are allowed to dispatch up to ten characters per battle and substitute any of them in the home base panel. This allows heavily experimentation and encourages test-driving different classes, despite the daunting size of the cast list. Each character serves an important function in Disgaea, and they never feel ’lost’ in the shuffle, even in the most heated battles. What’s more, characters whom are created by another share a special bond with their masters. When masters and pupils are standing beside each other in battle, they can use and learn each other’s abilities. Characters also pair up with each other for combo attacks in battle, which increases your bonus rewards and allows weaker characters to gain experience points without risking their necks.

Character building is a significant feature of Disgaea. Characters gain levels and learn abilities as in any other strategy-RPG, but they can go to a new level of development: Transmigration into new bodies, an innovative method of upgrading characters. Characters go back to level 1 (usually in the body of a more powerful class), but they carry ability bonuses with them, in addition to having more potential for improvement. Leveling them back up to par with the rest of the army takes a short time, and as a result, they become far more powerful than they would normally be. Thankfully, you can revisit any map you have previously fought on, and progress the storyline at your own pace.

Disgaea is not only about battle; it contains a political section essential to the game itself: the demon senate. The senate votes on proposals such as character upgrades, item store pricing and stock, and military funding. Of course, if the senators are not complacent to your demands, you can bribe or attack them at your discretion. Individual demons in your army can take promotion exams where they fight creatures to gain rank and influence in the senate, which allows them to flex their political muscles more strongly.

Deepening Disgaea’s gameplay even further is the Item World. In Disgaea, you can dive into any item in your inventory and fight its demon inhabitants. The denizens of the item world can be tamed and added (or traded) as a special feature on items, and fighting in an item’s world upgrades its statistics.

Disgaea’s graphics are low-tech compared to today’s flashier games; in fact, it looks almost PSOne in quality. The special techniques are fairly impressive, although they do not stand up to the best of Squaresoft’s efforts. The art and character designs are excellent, however; and the game has a certain charm to it that makes it immensely appealing to play and watch. Storyline segments are presented in highly amusing dialogues between characters, with portraits detailing exaggerated emotional expressions.

The audio is somewhat ‘quirky’ and lighthearted in nature, but it suits the game perfectly, capturing the essence of a dysfunctional netherworld in music as well as visuals. An English dubbed voice cast is set by default, but the acting quality is inferior to the original Japanese voice cast, which is also available. Characters shout out taunts and yells in battle as they perform their actions, contributing to the game’s peculiar charm.

All of these elements combined with a slick interface make Disgaea’s gameplay easy to learn and play, yet incredibly deep at the same time. If the game has a glaring flaw, it is the lack of the speed/time based character turns featured in Final Fantasy Tactics, but it is not as apparent in Disgaea as it was in Tactics Ogre: The Knights of Lodis. The humorous storyline, huge replay potential of the item world, and expansive character upgrade system makes Disgaea one of the best strategy games ever designed.

Note: Disgaea is a limited release; it will be difficult to find at large retail chains. Check game specialty shops such as Amazon.com, Gamestop and EBGames.