Previous Next

Good is bad, no, bad is good, wait, I'm confused.

Just in time for back to school, the new Disgaea heads to class. Welcome to Evil Academy, home of miscreants, malcontents, delinquents and good students? The backwards world of Disgaea is back with all the strategy, demons, heroes and overlords.

NISAmerica has done a fantastic job of making another strategy game to cause insomnia...again. Disgaea is a role-playing game well known for the incredible amount of stuff you can do, and as Disgaea games go this one does not disappoint. Let's get started with the returning stuff in the game. First, we have the ever popular item world. Here players can level up their items by defeating ten randomly generated floors. Second we have homeroom, which in this case is just like the senate. Here bills can be proposed like, more expensive stuff, the ability to create a new character class, etc. Once the bill has been selected, players can bribe the students in order to try and get a more positive response. Third, is of course the item, weapon and armor shop. As players purchase from these stores, their customer level goes up, and as a customer level goes up they get access to better items.

Next new addition is that of the Evality instructor. As characters take out enemies, they earn mana. Mana can be spent on several different things. Most of them are familiar with previous Disgaea players, reincarnating characters in different classes, and spending it on passing bills in the homeroom. Players must now spend Mana on special moves and Evalities (character upgrades). Instead of learning new moves through leveling up and using weapons, players must spend mana to do so. For example, you can purchase immunity to different status ailments. This allows for players to completely customize characters with their class, especially being that mages and priests have so many abilities, players can pick and choose which abilities to purchase.

The biggest change in this Disgaea game is the magichange and special move combinations that can be used. The magichange option is where a monster and a character are in the same club, the monster can be transformed into a new weapon for the character. Obviously, the more powerful the monster, the more powerful the weapon, in an effort to eliminate the use of this at all times, there are a couple of limitations. First, both the monster and the character need to be on the field, if not, it cannot be done. Second, magichange only lasts for three rounds. Of course, those three rounds can easily be enough to destroy the enemy, or at the very least turn the tide of battle one way or the other. The special move combinations, is where if two characters are committed to doing a special move against the same enemy before using the execute command, the two attacks combine, and do more damage than if you where to use them separately. This was a great opportunity for the developers to come up with new animations for each new combination, unfortunately, all they did was start the first animation, pause and go through the entire second animation and then finish the first. This was kind of disappointing; the developers could have done a lot more with this. But there is always the next Disgaea game.

The story of Disgaea 3 is not as good as the previous two titles. In fact, the story is the only reason I did not want to continue playing the game; however, the fun of the rest of the game is more than enough to make players come back for more. The main character, Mao, wants to kill his father the overlord. Oh and just so happens to be the dean of the school. All because his dad stepped on his video game system and cost him "millions of hours" of game play on his games. He comes to the conclusion that only a hero can defeat the overlord, and so he steals the title of true hero from a fake hero and starts to turn him into a demon. The characters are extremely anime-cookie-cutter, with the main character being extremely dense and short sighted, but his enemies are more intelligent, and more knowledgeable.

Overall Disgaea 3 is a good solid SRPG, and just like the other Disgaea titles, the fun really comes from playing the game itself. Players will find themselves wanting to play just to level up characters. Almost everything about Disgaea 3 is as fun as the previous games except the story. If you are a fan of SRPGs definitely pick it up.