The famous SRPG/timesink Disgaea is coming to Steam early 2016!
…DOOD.
The port will use the PSP’s Afternoon of Darkness version, and adds improved UI and sprites, Steam cards and achievements, mouse+keyboard support.
I guess this is spurred on by the popularity of the recent JRPG releases on Steam over the past year. If this does well, expect the onslaught of the rest of the series.
Can’t wait! I had watched a good bit of a D5 playthrough on Twitch and was sad that I’d never really have the opportunity to play the series. Sometimes a good grinding game just fits the bill, I’ll be grabbing this for sure.
I’m SO getting that one. Though I should probably finish my other JRPGs in the queue.
Hah, as if. Disgaea is more of a SRPG than a JRPG, isn’t it?
Yeah pretty much. It’s all tactical battles with the RPG parts being between battles. At least from what I watched of Disgaea 5.
So kinda like Fire Emblem? (I’m a newbie of sorts to JRPGs/SRPGs myself)
Some of my best(?) memories in college are vegging out on my buddy Morgan’s couch, doing homework and eating delivery Fat Bastard sandwiches (because she never had anything other than cheese and soda in her fridge), and watching her curse at Prinnies for hours on end in Disgaea 3(?). Watching the characters lob 15-person-high stacks of mages and tamed beasts at each other was frickin’ hilarious.
Mind you, I’ve literally never played a single second of any of the games. . . but I think I got the bulk of the experience in, regardless.
Edit: For those unfamiliar with the series, they generally involve you being some sort of young demon in Hell, usually(?) operating in a school of some sort (think Evil Hogwarts) collecting units to do battle with and then embarking on some sort of grandiose (or stupid) quest that involves lots and lots and lots of tactical battles, slowly training up your forces and equipment. Most things in the game can gain hundreds of levels. . . and most things can also undergo some form of evolutionary change, preserving some of the stats gained from leveling, but resetting the count. . . so you might very well sink a dozen hours into leveling and evolving a super sword over and over again to create an uber-weapon. . . that’ll probably be outclassed eventually.
The battles themselves are fairly standard grid-based stuff, though some games/fights brought in extra meta-elements, like colored squares that affected ability usage or whatnot. Characters can also “stack” by holding each other up, allowing you to do these goofy-ass tower-of-character attacks, and there were elements of monster collecting in there, too. And somewhere in the background were weird, very anime-esque school politics and plotlines.
Yeah that’s a good basic comparison, but Disgaea really goes over the top. Team combos, picking up other team members and throwing them around the field and a huge post story grind if you want to dig deep into the character customization and boost their power through the roof. I’d suggest looking up some videos on youtube, Disgaea can be hard to explain.
An extremely quirky, grind-heavy Fire Emblem.
With Prinnies! I’m going to eat you DOOD!
I like the sound of that. Thanks!
Only nominally. It’s an SRPG for sure. But with pretty different gameplay from FE.
Disgaea is what happens when you take classic “find ways to exploit the game to achieve real ultimate power and then break the game” as the main game mechanic. With the ability to scale enemies (to a point) where they can still be challenging. It’s about figuring out how to gain hundreds, and later thousands, of levels on a character in hours at most. It’s about doing so much damage that it breaks the hard coded number limits (that does take a lot of grinding, though).
And it’s all terribly fun.
The campaigns of Disagaea are linear affairs. You proceed through a series of “chapters” which each tend to have 4-5 canned missions. Mission maps can be repeated over and over to taste. But that’s not where you spend most of your time. It’s the item world. Every item in the game - weapons, armor, accessories, even consumables - contains inside itself a procedurally generated dungeon. Floors are never the same. What you find on the floor is never the same. And is highly dependent on a variety of factors. Items have 3 tiers of rarity broken up amongst the item rarity score, which ranges 1 (most rare) -255 (lease rare). Items are also procedurally generated.
“Common” items are rarity 255-31 I think. They have a max of 30 floors. As a general rule, rarer score == harder enemies, but this is greatly influenced by other factors. There are 40 tiers of each item (think, “starter sword” all the way up to “omega end game doom weapon”, 40 types total), and tier matters. You can use the in-game Meta Mechanics (see below) to adjust enemy difficulty up or down as well.
“Rare” items are rarity 30-11. They’re proportionately harder with all other factors equal (so there’s a bump going from 31 to 30, as it were), and contain 60 floors.
“legendary” are 10-1, and contain 100 stunningly visual floors.
What might you find on a floor? Why, enemies of course. Each floor can be exited by either defeating all enemies or exiting through the gate. Sometimes the gate has a guardian, a stationary enemy who is generally more powerful than what you see on the floor who must be defeated. You can also find chests. Often there are these crystals called “Geo Symbols” that apply specific buffs/debuffs. They only work when placed on a colored square, which may or may not be present. They apply their modifiers to every square of that color on the current floor. Modifiers range from the minor (+10% damage given or received, e.g.) to insane and dangerous (things on square invincible, enemies on the square gain levels every turn, square does 20% of units max health in damage to units standing on it every turn). There’s an entire little sub game here, because you can set off chain reactions and score bonus gauge multipliers by messing with this stuff (every floor has 10 items rolled as rewards for exiting the floor; you fill up the bonus gauge by killing monsters spectacularly and also by kicking of chain reactions. Each level of the gauge unlocks one of the rewards. The items you get for maxing the gauge are usually rare and often “out of depth” tier wise). I should try to pull up a youtube video to show this off because it makes more sense in action.
You can also find special bonus things that lead to sub rooms, or cause crazy events to happen (in later games, you could get invaded by item pirates! Yarr).
But you can also find specialists. These are friendly dungeon inhabitants who represent the bonus stats on an item. Killing them frees them, which is really important. Because you can grow them in certain ways, and then combine them, and get crazy huge bonus stats on items (by transferring them between items, but only if you free them).
Why do item dungeons? It “levels” the item. At each 10th floor you fight an Item Boss (an Item King at 30, 60, 90, and the Item God at 100). This provides even more growth for both the base item and any spec ialists you find therein. A part of the Disgaea meta is farming specialists and leveling high level items to insane heights. So you can break the damage and the game! Disgaea is pure grind but it’s a lot of fun. There’s a ton of strategy to dealing with dungeon floors because sometimes you’ll have to really work hard to get to a far away specialist or get to the dungeon exit before all the monsters level past the point where you can do anything besides get hilariously one shot. The game does give you tools to deal with this. You can pick up and throw anything (except a floor guardian!), including geo symbols (unless they’re on a square with “no pickup”!). You can form huge towers and then make a series of throws to propel someone across the map to get to the exit quickly. Or you can just unleash unholy hell in the form of the game’s many spectacular special moves (movesets are tied to weapons).
There’s leveling of actual classes (each has 6 tiers; higher tier == better base stats. The highest tiers get huge multipliers to stats. So a high level character would have a leveled high tier, legendary item with huge base stats + crazy leveled specialists + class has a huge bonus multiplier in the stat that governs that damage == yay broke the numbers, killed everything. #feelsgood).
Item Running is one of gaming’s great “mental knitting” outlets, IMO. I am almost certain to pick this up. My questions are the following:
Okay, so Armando’s story description pretty much only covers Disgaea 3. The first game’s core plot is “your father, the Overlord of the Netherworld, died two years ago, and now that you’ve finally woken up from your ridiculously long nap, it’s time to murder all the pretenders to the throne and firmly instate yourself as the new Overlord.” There’s a bit of (mostly goofy) interplanar political intrigue in there, too. Other than that, the core gameplay stuff doesn’t change much between entries; there’s an Item World with procedurally-generated levels on a per-item basis, Geo Spheres that bestow positive or negative effects on all colored tiles of the same color as the one they’re sitting on (and can be used for full-map murder-chain combos for huuuuuuge end-of-stage bonuses), and a senate that’ll take votes on whatever upgrades you want to implement, and which can be FOUGHT TO THE DEATH if they vote no. It’s all a lot of fun!
I probably won’t pick up the PC version immediately, since I picked up the PSP version earlier this year, along with every other PSP Disgaea game, so I could have the entire series through Disgaea 4 on my PlayStation TV.
Hah, hilarious, I just started playing the DS version of this recently, and while it’s great, I do need breaks from the grind. It’s an amazing rabbit hole though.
Wow, peacedog, thanks for the detailed description. I really like the sound of all that, so I’m looking forward to getting Disgaea in February. :)
If they introduce mid-item-world saves, it’ll be insta-buy for me…although I suppose I can just suspend the PC instead.
I dunno if it was mentioned already: the story campaign is considered by most hardcore Disgaea players as a giant tutorial for the real game of power-leveling. A giant, 40+ hour tutorial for me when I played Disgaea DS. I love this series but I can never bring myself to play past the story end.
Wait, there are no mid-dungeon/battle saves? That would be a deal breaker for me. :(
A lot of the story levels are a bit more puzzle based, and there’s always at least another 10 hours or so of extra story missions that you can play w/o having to grind. There’s an absolute ton of content for people who don’t go all the way down the rabbit hole and I think it’s fulfilling on its own. It’s not like Diablo III where the story missions are basically just a pain in the way of the real fun (for me anyways).
One thing I would suggest is if you’re new to the series, play for a while before you look into a power leveling guide or whatever. It’s very easy to power level to make the story level puzzles a moot point because you can just annihilate everything if you pull all the tricks out of the book too early. It’s not really a concern otherwise.
No, but let me provide some information that might change your mind. There’s an item that returns you back to the surface world. Err, underworld. Whatever. Your base! If you use such an item (Gency’s Exit), you can restart the item at the level you left. You must replay the level you left in it’s entirety. I want to say there’s a modest bonus to the leveling of the item for doing 10 straight levels and then killing the boss, but this might be me being crazy. Also, the tier 0 level bonus for each 10th level is a Gency’s exit IIRC (as in, you automatically get it for floor wins Memory might be failing me here as well). And you always go into item town at level 10 (or can get the option too; afaict thereafter it’s random at each 10th level interval), which allows you to exit out cleanly. Except Item Towns showed up in a later version of the game than Disgaea 1 so I’m not sure if they’re in the PSP version. Can anyone comment on that?
10 levels is generally not very tough to do. Once you start to get into the rhythm of “how do I traverse this level quickly”/“deal with the crazy Geo Chain I need to unleash” you can easily do 10 levels in quick chunks. Exceptions are when you are deliberately dealing with tough monsters (rare/high tier/enhanced foes), but even then you can be speedy. Remember, whatever crazy horror show the game can throw at you can be trumped with your super characters du jour and a little more power leveling. Power leveling is almost always done on replays of specific campaign levels, enhanced to taste. These levels tend to provide (1) geo stones with xp bonuses (2) good clusters of foes and I do mean clusters (3) using certain abilities tied to certain weapons. Abilities with great damage and tastey AoE. It was always thus with Disgaea and thus will always be.
And you will learn to traverse levels quickly. You’ll have 1-2 “hunter killer” characters who are great at obliterating all the things (see: damage, aoe abilities, breaking the numbers. These guys usually have high move). A “runner” to get to unguarded gates quickly (typically very high move and you equip them with nothing but boot accessories to boost that move further), and of course “ally” towers! You’ll create large towers of people (or creatures! you can make creature characters) to throw lonf distances to position either your runner, or one of your bad asses, to get to a gate or clear a guardian quickly (and then a runner to follow up!). There’s a joy in this process, I find. Of course I get to the point where I need breaks just like everyone else. It’s not a hard game to pick back up. And I like taking off bite sized chunks. 10 item levels + a few specialists here, 10 more levels there, 5 minute chunks of power leveling Bruce Lee over here (this won’t be true at first, but you’ll very quickly hit a point where you can clear the initial power leveling map that quickly). It all works well.
On that enhancing thing. . . each game has some mechanic that allows you to alter the game state in certain ways. Better items in the shop (or worse; this means accessing higher tiers of items. Which are more expensive and dangerous to go diving in of course). Higher level monsters (or lower!). You can boost stats on characters/get better starting stats on characters. There’s more. In Disgaea it’s the Dark Congress or somesuch. I think in 3 it was Home Room. These measures are sometimes difficult to pass and will require a combination of bribery, fisticuffs, and luck to get passed. You use a special currency to do this “Mana” (different from “spell points” which yes exist). You earn a little ever time you kill foes in a dungeon, and can earn it as a bonus from completing a level. There’s items that boost mana gain (or rather, specialists!), as well as dark congress ways to boost mana gain.
Also, I agree with this:
And note that you can’t per se “ruin” the game by running away from the story content either. Because if you want it, there’s hidden endings that tie into all the crazy power gaming. But you will trivialize that content through power leveling. It’s usually easy to progress far in the story while barely touching the item world (you’ll get accessed to stop and make it to level 10 in an item - any item - at one point, this being the only time you are “forced” to do it). Story maps will take a little bit longer to clear than some (but not all) dungeon levels and replayed levels for power leveling purposes. But they can be quick, it depends on the level.
OK, that’s a lot of info. But how much time does one (a newbie) take to cover 10 levels without powergaming? 15 minutes? 30?
Because of the randomness, it’s hard to say for sure. Basically you’ll speed through 4-8 levels and the rest will be trickier. If you ignore setting up geo chains (and frequently I find myself in this mode), it’s quicker. Stopping to set up a chain requires thought. The levels that get you are ones with Item Guardians, or ones you cannot beat in a single turn (and there will be a bunch that you can! just but using runners and throw chains), or a combination. Certain Geo symbol combos are very dangerous and/or tricky to deal with. The farther you get in an item (crossed with it’s “monster leveling factor” which is a thing I just made up but could exist, derived from afformentioned mechanics) the tougher it gets and the guardians keep getting harder. But you can play and beat the story game with only that single 10 level trip into an item, remember.
And even with only very light “power gaming” (which I would simply define as a lot of item world diving which will level your characters a good bit over the time), you can get to a point where it’s mostly quick dives. I want to say that I’ve had 10 level chunk times typically vary on the order of 20-60 minutes, but it has been awhile. A little slower at first - when you’re still getting momentum. And sometimes you just make a series of shitty consecutive rolls for map generation.
You can always abort and restart from the last hard save. And there’s always Gency’s exit.
If you don’t buy right off the bat, I’ll make it a point to record my diving times (along with other factors like character levles/general power/etc) so you can see what it’s like.