I’ve been playing Tactics Ogre and find it terribly boring. I loved FFT though. Will I like Disgaea? So many people seem to love it here, but, I have reservations. Should I stay away from Disgaea and FFT GBA and just get Culdcept?
If you loved Tactics, you’ll love Disgaea. I’d still be playing it if I hadn’t been waylaid by Culdcept.
What are your reservations about Disgaea? The main difference between it and FFT for me was that the story in Disgaea is much less serious
Fire Emblem!
-Scott-
I too hated Tactics Ogre, but loved FFT.
My favorite tactics-y games in rough order:
- Advance Wars / Advance Wars 2
- Fire Emblem
- Disgaea
- FFT Advance
- Dynasty Tactics
How could you hate Tactics Ogre?
BTW, is that the SNES/PSOne Tactics Ogre, or the GBA one?
The GBA Tactics Ogre.
Gladius
Fire Emblem
Disgaea
Those are my three favorites, in that order.
I didnt like FFTA.
olaf
Tactics ogre advance does suck. The main problem is that the characters have about 4 times the hit points that they should have. It just takes an hour to play out a battle that should only take 20 minutes. Disgaea is awesome, AWESOME baby. It’s the best strategy RPG out there.
did you play the original FFT? Or the Shining Force series? both pretty good. Disgaea is great…just noting there are other quality games out there.
Y’know, I was loving Disgaea for about the first thirty hours, but then I kind of lost interest. Ultimately, for me, there’s zero tension in the game. Since you can just diddle around in the Item Worlds to your heart’s content, levelling up your guys, and take on the story missions whenever you feel powerful enough, there’s no real sense of having to make tough decisions, no feeling that anything is at stake. Maybe if character death was permanent I would have cared more, but my interest petered out once I realized there were no limitations on out-of-story character advancement, and hence, no real strategic or tactical challenge in the game.
I definitely got my money’s worth out of it, and there’s no doubt it has contributed a lot the genre (even while I despised the annoying characters and insipid story) , but for me the overall game design is flawed in a pretty basic way. Fire Emblem is an example of a tactical game that hits the mark in the tension department. I guess what I’d really like to see is a game that combines the tactical depth of Disgaea with the path-of-no-return structure of Fire Emblem. I’m probably in the minority here, though.
That’s an interesting counterpoint to my own preference, since I absolutely require unlimited character advancement to enjoy a game like that. Probably why I hold Disgaea in such high esteem. I have no interest in playing through a set of scripted story missions if my characters’ advancement is limited. In that case, there might as well be no experience system or levelling up at all; your characters could just instantly become stronger between missions and you have your strategic and tactical challenge as the developers intended.
I kind of drifted away from Disgaea, but I’m intending to start up again. I enjoy the gameplay, but the thing that makes the game great to me is the bizarre inventory system. In my warehouse right now, I have a rare bottle of barbecue sauce, which contains (as ingredients, I suppose) the damned souls of a stockbroker and a physician, which I intend to harvest and graft onto Zedina’s the Ronin’s (formerly Zed the Warrior’s) sword. I love that. Once I’ve stripped the sauce of it’s specialists, I’ll probably try to bribe a senator with it.
Despite it’s wackiness, there really is a kind of internal logic to the whole thing. It’s no worse than Dark Cloud 2, anyway, where you can take time off from saving the world in order to play golf.
After getting combo attacks, Gladius became terribly easy.
Yeah. If you are good at getting crits with the meters on, its pretty easy for the most part. There are some optional tournaments that are real hard though, and it was fun for me to build my team up. With the meters off, the game is a lot harder. Too difficult IMO, I would have had a hard time beating the game w/o crit meters.
olaf
That’s an interesting counterpoint to my own preference, since I absolutely require unlimited character advancement to enjoy a game like that. Probably why I hold Disgaea in such high esteem. I have no interest in playing through a set of scripted story missions if my characters’ advancement is limited. In that case, there might as well be no experience system or levelling up at all; your characters could just instantly become stronger between missions and you have your strategic and tactical challenge as the developers intended.[/quote]
I hear ya Bob. Just to be clear, I dislike scripted story missions just as much as you seem to, and in general I too prefer unlimited character advancement. The thing I feel Disgaea lacks, simply, is any sort of tension. There are plenty of ways to inject this into the existing design. Character death could be permanent. Or, in keeping with the game’s approach, if a character died he could get consigned to the tenth level of an underworld, and you would have to go rescue him in order to have him rejoin your party.
As it is, Disgaea just feels to me like an empty exercise. Unlike other games… :)