Disgaea 2 Review
Played on:
PS2
Some games are released and become near-instant hits. HALO, The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Brothers never really had a problem selling during their respective releases. The two NES games were just good and HALO was so hyped that it sold well.
However, some games will come out and not seem to sell well for a multitude of reasons. Maybe they’re quirky and hard to understand. Maybe they’re really good but only to a small subset of gamers. Or, maybe they’re just short printed because the publisher didn’t estimate much success. The latter was the case with the first Disgaea – the game was and, to this day, is still rare and commands a price nearly double that of its initial retail cost. At the time, gamers had been clamoring for a strategy RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy tactics but nothing seemed to truly hit home. Disgaea’s fun gameplay, hilarious story and great characters made for an experience that made a popular game out of one that wasn’t initially expected to be one.
Given that, a sequel was inevitable. However, it took a few years for us to get one. Since then, we’ve had many Disgaea-like games come from Nippon Ichi – La Pucelle Tactics, Makai Kingdom and Phantom Brave all brought something different to the table for those in the States that had yet to play them. Fans, though, still clamored for a sequel to the game that some played for years and still play even today.
Disgaea 2 definitely does not stray from the formula set out in the original. You still have a grid based movement system, you have similar character classes and even magic spells. Some things, however, were added to the game to make it a better overall experience – the graphics were improved, some small changes were made to the way combat is conducted and new effects for geo squares were added. In all, Disgaea 2 is a lot of what you are used to with enough new stuff to spice up the adventure.
This time around, you’re thrust into the shoes of Adell, a human from Holt Village. The game starts off with your mom trying to summon Overlord Zenon, the main baddie in the story. See, he put a curse on all the humans in your village that turns them into demons while refreshing his power. So, your mom sacrifices some of the life energy from your brother, sister and dad (after beating them over the head to get them to stay in the summoning…cauldron thing) to try to summon the overlord. However, the spell fails and you instead meet Zenon’s daughter and your first party member, Rozalin.
Throughout the story, you’ll meet a hilarious cast of characters including some that are familiar from the first Disgaea (and I won’t spoil the surprise here). You’ll also run into some that seem to be spinoffs from characters in the original. For example, Axel the Dark Hero feels a lot like Vyers (aka Mid-Boss) from the first game – he appears early on and you fight him multiple times. They’re also both really into themselves and such. The characters this time around are just as funny as the ones from the first game and all of them have quality voice acting, too.
The story itself is just as funny as the one from the first also. There are many points where the game will have a cutscene of sorts (before the start of a map, typically) that is just downright hilarious. Most of them involve hurting Tink, a flying frog that you’ll meet early in the adventure. The story does take a couple of twists and turns along the way, some expected and others not so much. I’d highly recommend you at least start the game a second time – the opening cutscene may help to make something click in your head like it did for me.
Other story scenes in the game take anime-style pictures of the character on either side of the screen conversing with another character. These are pretty easy to follow and again show off some of the excellent voiceovers that are a part of this game. The backgrounds used during these scenes are also pretty and show off some of the talent of the artists involved with the game. Overall, the story plays a huge part in making this game’s first 30 hours enjoyable and it isn’t recommended that you skip over them (though, if you just want to play for fights, you can skip them by pressing the triangle button).
Without fun gameplay, though, you’re not even going to get a chance to enjoy the story. Thankfully, Disgaea 2 has some of the tightest and most fun strategy-RPG gameplay that I’ve experiences in a long, long time. First of all, your party composition has no real limits. You can only bring 10 of them in per battle, but there isn’t anything keeping you from having a ton of different types of mages depending on monster resistances, a fighter that uses each type of weapon and a fleet of battle penguins. Yes, battle penguins – prinnies are one of over 200 character types (most types are simply leveled up versions of the other types) available in the game for you to have as party members. On top of that, each of the story characters has their own unique class, giving everyone a chance to have the type of party that suits them.
Once you have a party that you are happy with, you’ll probably want to start tackling some of the story missions. Fighting in the game is simple on the surface but has a ton of nifty little elements that can make for some deep strategy. Take, for example, the ability to lift and throw your teammates – maybe you want to block off a choke point but can’t reach it in your normal movement. Problem solved! Just pick up your party member, toss him or her at the chokepoint and let them block it off. Throwing can get even more fun when you have a stack of characters, each one tossing someone after they land. Some of the stages even require you to do things like this to have any hope of getting past them.
Another neat element is the combo system. If you have characters right beside an attacking character or behind them, they’ll have a chance to combo if the attack used is a normal one. Comboing doesn’t take up their action for the turn, either – you can move them into range for the combo, execute the attack, cancel the move and then go off and attack another monster. Something like this seems like an exploit in the battle system but Nippon Ichi embraces this type of gameplay with the game, even encouraging players to use this to their advantage. Neat little things like this add to the many layers of strategy that can be revealed as you fight – the game’s combat doesn’t ever really get stale, especially considering some of the stage layouts.
Another element that really adds to the gameplay are Geo Squares. See, all maps are composed of tiles. Sometimes, these tiles are colored. Normally, that wouldn’t mean much but if a Geo Symbol is on a square of a certain color, all of those panels on the map will have the Geo Symbol’s effect. Sometimes, these effects are beneficial to your party while other times they are detrimental. Some effects will help both enemy and player. Now, it seems simple enough, but there’s more. If you have a, say, red colored symbol on a green space, destroying that red symbol will turn all the green spaces red. This leads to some interesting puzzles in the game – you can create some massive chains by placing geo symbols in a certain order. Any square that has its color changed will damage whatever is on it (or, in the case of a geo symbol, destroy it). It’ll always do this in a clockwise fashion, too – you can use this as a chance to chain color changes and eventually clear all the colored squares on the map using a null symbol. For each square that has its color changed, your bonus gauge will increase a bit too.
The bonus gauge will determine what bonuses you’ll earn at the end of a battle. Damaging enemies and destroying geo squares will increase the gauge as far as nine levels. Whatever level you finish on at the end of the battle determines the prizes you’ll get – you can earn items, money and experience from this. Destroying all the geo squares on a map in a single chain will really shoot the gauge through the roof, potentially earning some incredible bonuses in the act.
Outside of environmental effects, the many different character abilities also do a lot for the strategy in the game. Each weapon type has different special abilities attached to it. Each of these abilities will have a different area of effect, potential elemental attribute and amount of damage. Some attacks may be geared around smashing a single enemy for a large amount of damage while others may hit nine enemies for lesser amounts. This also extends to buffing abilities, healing abilities and magical spells. The difference with these is that, the more you use them, the more shapes you’ll have for where they’ll hit. Some of the shapes can be huge, too – a 3x3 square will do a ton of damage with a spell when you consider how enemies like to bunch up around characters. Abilities and spells also don’t discriminate against friend or foe, so you’ll need to be careful with your targeting – I’ve accidentally killed a party member a few times when they were in the way of one of my wider area of effect abilities.
Combat is undeniably the meat of the game. While you’ll do a lot of fighting during the actual story portion of the game, you’re only scratching the surface of the combat available to you. There’s the cave of ordeals, the dark world missions, the land of carnage and the item world. The item world is particularly unique – you can actually enter items you have and, by traveling through the item world, power them up. Using this, you can get some ridiculously powerful weapons and armor for your characters. Some of the other combat areas are incredibly challenging too – they have monsters in the thousands of levels. For comparison, you’ll be around level 70 when you get to the end of the game if you don’t do any of the extra stuff during the game.
That is the true beauty of this game – with so much to do, you’d think it would be overwhelming. It isn’t, though. You can take this game at your own pace and do things when you want to. If you don’t feel like doing the item world, for example, you can completely skip it (save for one part where it is required for the story). You can never go to any of the extra areas and just enjoy the story or you can spend tons of time there and blow through each of the story missions with a single character. Levelling gets exponentially easier as you unlock some of the special areas, too – you can even increase the levels of basic monsters through the Dark Assembly.
See, the Dark Assembly is the governing body of the Netherworld. You can bring various bills to them and hope they’ll vote in your favor. Small things like increasing a stores selection, creating a new character or making enemies stronger are available. There are much bigger things, also – unlocking the ability to create certain classes and unlocking new areas to fight in also require Assembly approval. At first, though, you’ll find it hard to get things approved since most of the senators will hate you. If you just spend a bit of time bribing them with various items, though, you’ll have an easier time with it. They’ll remember you, too – this adds yet another element to the gameplay, one that isn’t even combat related in any way (unless you choose to beat the crap out of senators that disagree with you).
Another addition to the second game of this series is felonies. Getting high stats, killing lots of monsters and busting up tons of geo symbols will net you various subpoenas. See, demons like felonies – they take them as a mark of honor. To actually get the felony, though, you’ll need to go through the subpeona’s item world and get to the court. You can even toss in a tower of characters and have them all get slapped with felonies. While not essential to the game (except for, again, one time in the story), they can be helpful. They’ll increase the rate that you gain experience at and provide you with some nice rewards each time you get slapped with one. This is another neat system that adds to the game without being tedious.
The game’s graphics are also improved. While the sprites used in the first game weren’t totally hideous or anything, there was definite room for improvement. Nippon Ichi took notice and added a ton of color and quality to each of the sprites. They’re all bigger now and have a lot more character to them. Also improved are the spell graphics. They look much cooler than they did in the original. Some of the regular abilities look neat, too – they’ll smoothly zoom out the map and zoom right back in with a massive explosion effect that never slows the game down at all. The graphics may look tame but there is a lot going on at most points in the game.
Even the music has seen some improvements. Many of the tunes from the first game were ridiculously catchy and the ones from the second are no different. While I can’t share one of the song names so that I don’t spoil one of the returning characters, I can say that the song is incredibly catchy and will make you want to go out and buy the soundtrack. Characters seem to have more, well, character this time around too, making sounds as they walk around the map and such. It really is pretty nice.
Buy this game. Now.
Buy this game. Now.
