My love affair with Disgaea

As a horrendous weeaboo, it is my duty to enjoy grinding in RPGs. To swallow up whatever garbage Japan throws at me, whatever horrible, life-sabotaging timesink, and sit there in my darkened room, eyes glued to the screen, pressing the X button over and over and over again on the same pallet-swapped enemies in order to raise some tiny numbers on my character’s status screen. At least, that seems to be what some people think.

In reality, my relationship with grinding is kind of sporadic. I remember spending one summer when I was sixteen grinding away at the Monster Arena in Final Fantasy X, harvesting those precious fuck-with-the-sphere-grid items to maximise the stat boosts from every space in the board and get all my characters to 99999 HP, 9999 MP and 255 in every stat. I did this in order to fight Penance, the “holy shit are you fucking serious” boss present in the “International” (read: Japan only, HA HA NO PLAY IT STUPID ROUNDEYE) version of the game. Through a glaring oversight in Square-Enix’s Xenophobia Policy, this boss was actually also in the UK version of the game, which is how I was fighting it. But that’s neither here or there. The point is that I got bored and gave up just before I got there, because it literally was doing the same controller motions over and over and over and over again with no challenge and no differentiation in what I was doing.

This experience more or less put me off grinding of the ‘mash the same button for 8 hours of my spare time in a row’ variety. Consequentially, I’ve been very skeptical of games with levels in in general. This naturally extends to MMOs, but it’s prevented me from enjoying games that have in recent years become staples for filthy unwashed weeaboos such as myself, like Etrian Odyssey and its sequel.

When I first saw Disgaea, though, my curiosity got the better of me.

What’s this? Large-sized anime sprites on the screen? This was a FUCKING RARITY back then, in case anyone’s forgotten. Sure, we got a lot of Japanese games coming out translated, but they were mostly ones that could pass as NOT JAPANESE if you were missing half your brain. Stuff that’d be palatable to that mythical majority consumer who doesn’t like subtitles or anything that isn’t recognisably American. You know, that guy the movie and video game industries seem to believe comprises 100% of anyone with any money, for some fucking bizarre reason. And suddenly there was this game, and it was fucking oozing weeaboo out of every orifice, and RUMOUR HAD IT IT WOULD ACTUALLY BE GETTING TRANSLATED AND RELEASED IN ENGLISH. HOLY SHIT, EVEN IF THIS GAME WAS CRAPPY, I HAD TO BUY IT ON PRINCIPLE.

It took a week or so for the excitement to wear off, and for me to realise that the game could actually be an irredeemable pile of garbage. After all, a lot of the anime I’d seen was. I think there’s this misconception amongst people who don’t like anime that those of us who do will watch anything with big eyes, flat chests and cute little sisters dying of unnamed diseases. That isn’t true at all. Anyone with any sense who watches this stuff realises that it has the exact same worryigly high crap:good ratio as any other form of entertainment. Just because you like movies doesn’t mean you enjoy the BRATZ MOVIE, does it? Just because you watch TV doesn’t mean you’ll sit through daytime talk shows, right? Same shit is true with anime.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I realised this game could potentially suck too much to buy. Fortunately, though, an American friend got a hold of a copy and played the fuck out of it. The information she gave me was as follows:

* It’s actually really funny
* The characters are pretty awesome
* It’s very, very long
* You make changes to the game by petitioning a demon congress and beating them up if they refuse
* HOLY SHIT, THE MAXIMUM LEVEL IS 9999

“What the hell?” I thought. “You can get to LEVEL 9999? Surely to god, that must take more grinding than is humanly possible.” Then I stopped being a moron and realised that the game must actually work in one of the following ways:

* You gain levels roughly 100 times faster than in any other RPG
OR
* The game EXPECTS YOU to gimp, glitch and exploit your way up the level ladder as much as possible

Once my friend told me that she’d played for almost 100 hours and was only level 70 or so, I realised it must, in fact, be the latter. I found this idea to be fucking awesome.

So, the game arrived, and three things about it jumped out at me right away:

HOLY SHIT, THIS KID IS AWESOME!

HOLY SHIT, THOSE TITS ARE ENORMOUS!

HOLY SHIT, THAT’S A LOT OF NUMBERS!
(Okay, okay, so that’s someone’s screenshot of Makai Kingdom. But you get my point.)

This combination seemed amazing to me. The game was punishing, and at times it seemed almost designed to frustrate the player, but my suspicions about it had been correct: It was an AWESOME game, and it spat on you and stamped on you, fully expecting you to cheat it and screw it into giving you the levels you crave. It was great. Grinding was no longer about doing the same bullshit action over and over (although admittedly I can think of a few times when I used the same trick twice or three times in a row) but was instead about considering your options as intelligently as possible and making the game work for, rather than against you.

Case in point: Not that far into the main story mode, there’s a map which is mostly covered by an endless sea of panels which make anything standing on them COMPLETELY INVINCIBLE, with only one or two spots that aren’t covered by it. This map was populated by succubi, or some other equally big-titted enemy. I discovered completely by accident that lifting up one and throwing it ONTO another would combine them into one succubus that was the COMBINED LEVEL of the two that had collided. At that point, I got my entire team out, threw one succubus into another into another until there was only ONE succubus literally hundreds of levels higher than my puny characters, and threw it onto one of the non-invincible tiles. I then surrounded it with my team and spent many turns chipping away at its health, its powerful attacks utterly failing to damage me in return thanks to the invincibility effect. The character who landed the final blow got a fuckton of experience and rocketed up many levels at once.

Later, I realised that by passing bills through the Dark Assembly (the demon senate I mentioned earlier), it was possible not only to level the succubi up to a much higher point than they were originally (thereby yielding more EXP), but also to triple the EXP of the next enemy I killed. NOW I was thinking 4-dimensionally. I came up with more and more convoluted strategies to level up quickly and cheat the system. Every time I found something, I knew that it had been put in intentionally for me and many other players to find. This was a whole new angle on RPGs that I became utterly addicted to.

It wasn’t just the gameplay, either. Laharl, the main character, is fucking awesome. The son of the demonic Overlord, he’s essentially a selfish, exploitative egomaniac with the voice and body of a cute young boy. On the surface, he’s utterly devoid of anything approaching kindness or humanity… but it’s easy to tell there was a little kid in there, and it makes it not only hilarious to watch him but also makes him instantly endearing. Plus, he has two achilles heels: Optimism and tits. Early on in the game, there’s a scene in which one of his enemies sets a DEADLY TRAP for him – a trap involving huge-titted succubi soothing him with platitudes such as “It’s not the winning that counts, it’s the taking part!”. Throughout this scene, he was screaming in anguish and appeared to be in physical pain. It was awesome.

Aside from having a story and cast sprinkled generously with this unique charm, Disgaea also had ONE HELL OF A TWIST. It’s a twist which most people I’ve spoken to didn’t even really seem to register, but which impressed me enormously. See, I think that upon seeing all this angels-and-demons stuff, it’s normal to assume that the game is perhaps set in a more superstitious time, or at the very least that the equivalent time in our insignificant human world wasn’t a consideration when coming up with the setting. BUT HOLY SHIT:

OH GOD, WHO’S THIS GUY? HE’S LIKE A SPACEMAN OR SOMETHING AND OH FUCK HE CAME IN A SPACESHIP, DOES THAT FUCKING MEAN–

YES, that’s right. Disgaea takes place in what is, to us, something like the year 3,500 AD. Celestia (heaven) and the Netherworld (hell) are really just two planets locked in an eternal cold war, and the ambitious and technologically advanced Earth has decided it’s time to launch an invasion. They send a FUCKING ARMADA over to fuck your shit up and claim your planet as their own. This guy, Captain Gordon, is the 32nd (or something like that) Defender of Earth – a position which, historically, has been held by the person responsible for keeping the Netherworld’s forces at bay.

For ELEVEN CHAPTERS you’ve played this game. That’s like… what, fucking 70 or 80 hours, and you had no idea that there was some kind of interstellar war going on or that the humans even really knew you existed. But holy shit, here it is, faggot. And guess what? If you feel like it, you can actually GO TO EARTH AND START FUCKING THEM UP. You can actually launch a counter-attack, conquer Earth, and have an ending where you become its ruler as well as the Netherworld’s. Holy shit.

Months passed and finally I wrung (almost) every single secret and hidden boss out of Disgaea. I went through extreme withdrawal. I wanted to play it again, but it was too recent. I couldn’t just play the same fucking game over and over.

And then, one day…

OH GOD OH GOD THAT ART LOOKS LIKE THE DISGAEA ART, OH GOD IT SAYS NIPPON ICHI SOFTWARE IN THE CORNER, OH GOD FINALLY IT’S MORE OF THE SAME ISN’T IT I’VE WAITED FOR THIS DA– Oh wait.

OH WAIT, IT’S TOTAL HORSESHIT.

I bought this game while salivating with anticipation. My experience with it was much like having my face held inside a toilet bowl. For starters, the main character is a total faggot. I’m not even going to waste my space and your time with a picture of him solo, you can see him right there on the box art if you care at all. He’s boring, whiny, and utterly devoid of interesting motivation. In fact, ALL the characters are like that. The most interesting character in the game is Marron, who’s ALMOST a cowboy, except he’s not awesome at all either.

Secondly, the story is boring and utterly devoid of anything even approaching a surprise. No, I didn’t beat it, but I read ahead.

Thirdly, the system just fucking sucks. You know those RPGs where they shovel in some fucking stupid system just to be unique, and it ruins the game? Yeah, it’s one of those. For a start, there’s no grid to move on. I never think this works in a strategy RPG. Instead, you have these little movements of unit roughly equivalent to one footstep. When you move your character, a little circle appears around them showing you the extent of their moveable range. Sounds okay, right? NOT WHEN ALL THE CHARACTERS ARE SPRITES AND THEY’RE ALL CLOSE TOGETHER AND YOU CAN’T TELL WHO’S FUCKING WHERE. There’s also the stupid fucking O.B. system, where anything that falls outside of the bounds of the level is classed as out of bounds, is removed from the map, and some totally arbitrary shit or other happens to it, EVEN IF IT’S A CHARACTER YOU WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF MOVING. Gone are the days where you had to actually earn new classes by fulfilling specific requirements, you can just make anything you’ve encountered or beaten even once now. And best of all – BEST OF ALL – you start each map with just the loli (who is almost impossible to level up at all) and have to “confine” your characters to objects on the map, which limits how many turns they can be in play for and affects their stats according to what you bound them to. It’s just clumsy, stupid, and doesn’t really work. Fuck it.

Okay, that’s enough about that shitty game. Needless to say, it shook my faith in NIS as a developer. They released Makai Kingdom after that, which was okay I guess, but still had a lot of the stupid shit that Phantom Brave had, and while it was back to AWESOME DEMONS it just didn’t feel as good as Disgaea and the plot was overcomplicated, weird and awkward.

Just when I was losing hope that I’d ever find another SRPG that was as awesome as Disgaea, the best thing ever happens. DISGAEA 2 GETS ANNOUNCED! And it uses Disgaea 1 as its starting point, not fucking Phantom Brave! It’s on grids and you earn things properly and you get to work out neat little tricks to level again, and oh god oh god the gameplay sounds like it’s improved in just about every area, I SURE CAN’T WAIT TO PLAY IT OH GOD YES.

So, I waited and waited, and got that shit the day it came out, eagerly popped it in my PS2 and grabbed my dick in anticipation. Oh god, they have a BUDGET this time, it has an FMV intro, and oh fuck yes look it start with Laharl and Flonne, and…

and…

…. What the fuck is this shit?

Serious business? In MY Disgaea? Sure, the original had some serious parts. Hell, it had some fucking HEARTBREAKING parts, but what is this shit? Surely they just wanted to make an intro that looked kinda serious and cool, right? The game itself has to be awesome, right?

WRONG.

The main character of Disgaea 2 is the last “pure” human on a planet that’s been converted to a Netherworld. Right away, we’re off to a bad start, because we’re into all the meta Multiverse shit that nobody really gives a crap about. (I should briefly explain – Makai Kingdom took Disgaea’s concept of “holy shit, heaven, hell and earth are just planets” and expanded it into a massive cosmic clusterfuck full of multiple overlords and netherworlds and weird shit that nobody really understands. Disgaea 2 took this as canon.) Also, we have a main character whose primary motivation is to kill the Overlord who corrupted his world and return everyone to being human again. Compare that to Laharl’s primary motivation of “AAAAHAHAHAHAHA SLAUGHTER EVERYONE AND RULE THE GALAXY” and you know you’re taking a GAME ABOUT DEMONS in the wrong fucking direction.

Throughout the game, Adell (the aforementioned protagonist) meets Rozalin:

WHO IS NOTABLE ONLY FOR HER TITS. He also, later meets Etna, from the original Disgaea:

Thankfully, she’s as awesome, loveable and worryingly sexy as ever, and is more or less the game’s only redeeming factor.

The story is a generic cesspool of stupid shit, including a NINJA CLAN DECIMATED BY SOME GUY AND THE LAST HEIR WHO HAS SWORN REVENGE or some uninspired crap, and a WHAT A TWIST moment where it turns out Rozalin was the Overlord that Adell had vowed to kill all along. Nobody cares. Sure, the gameplay was actually awesome, and much improved from the original Disgaea in practically every way, but it just sucked. The whole game was an exercise in how to completely remove the appeal of the previous one and screw up a series.

After this, I figured I was better off leaving Nippon Ichi games well alone for a while. My overwhelming sense of withdrawal later caused me to play La Pucelle, which predates Disgaea…

… and has pretty much the hottest girl IN THE HISTORY OF GAMING as its protagonist. While it’s fun, it was obviously made before the refinement, direction and polish that Disgaea brought, and it was difficult for me to get into. No disrespect to it, it’s an awesome game, but it’s kind of like playing Hitman: Blood Money and then trying to go back and play the earlier installments. You can tell they were good games at the time of their release, but now you’re a spoiled brat and want it all to be perfect.

Anyway, I’ve been going somewhere with this whole post, and that somewhere is Disgaea 3. I bought this game recently, and awaited its arrival with heavy skepticism. I’d been burned by anticipation for Nippon Ichi games twice before, and I wasn’t about to suffer the same disappointment again.

Bracing myself for mediocrity, I put the disc in my PS3 and HOLY SHIT:

WE’RE OFF TO A GOOD START RIGHT HERE. The music is back in the original style. There’s humour. There’s actual, you know, DEMONS. Not bullshit “oh we’re humans oh we’re losing our humanity” demons, fucking DEMONS. Everything looks right.

The game itself is no disappointment, either. The story revolves, as you can probably tell from the intro video, around an academy for young demons to learn to be as evil as possible. In this academy, students which ditch classes, resort to violence, behave badly and exploit, extort and bully others are Honour Students, while the delinquents are those who turn up to classes on time, always do their homework, and study diligently.

Our protagonist this time is Mao, the son of the principal (who is also the Overlord), and the top Honour Student. He’s never been to class once since he enrolled at the school, has never washed his hands since the day he was born, and most importantly, his motivation is to kill his father. Why? Is it becuase he wants to be the Overlord himself? No, no. That would be awesome too, but it’s even better than that.

IT’S BECAUSE HIS FATHER ERASED HIS DISGAEA 1 SAVE FILE.

I don’t think I need to say any more than that. This game is totally back on track. It improves on Disgaea 2′s gameplay as much as that game improved on Disgaea 1′s, making for a totally polished, awesome experience, but this time it actually has the setting and cast to back it up. Finally, after so many games in between that failed to captivate me in the same way, NIS hit the nail right on the fucking head and made the most brilliant grinding game ever.

So, there you have it. Looks like series that went awry actually CAN get back on track, after all. Except Sonic. That’ll NEVER get fixed.