The open-ended combat system practically defies you to find ways of exploiting a battle to turn the tide in your favor. Building the perfect squad is a never-ending and interesting challenge. Many different character classes will become available as you play, so eventually you can marshal squads containing warriors, geomancers, samurai, gun-toting cowboys, demonic penguins, thieves, and more. Your characters all level up as they fight, becoming stronger while gaining new skills and abilities. For instance, enemies are more vulnerable if attacked from behind, and a balanced party of close-combat specialists, ranged attackers, and magic users tends to be the safest bet for any new encounter. The familiar-looking isometric perspective and basic properties of other strategy RPGs all apply. A typical mission requires you to defeat all opposing characters on the map by deploying up to 10 characters of your own.
Once again, you'll get to run around in a little hub area before each mission, buying new gear for your characters and chatting with various sometimes-helpful creatures, but the brunt of the game consists of a linear sequence of turn-based strategy missions. It would be difficult to pick the gameplay tweaks out of a lineup, but they're there to help give you more stuff to play around with (like cell phones for mid-battle pizza riously) and the game plays a little faster than before. It's very similar in tone to the story from the original Disgaea, but for better or worse, the hero isn't a mean-spirited, spoiled little brat in this case.įrom a gameplay standpoint, Disgaea 2 plays just like the original. The game's colorful anime art style and many suggestive jokes won't be to everybody's liking, but there can be no denying that Disgaea 2's story is filled with humor and delivered with much enthusiasm. The story plays for laughs almost constantly, and it frequently succeeds. Along the way, Adell and Rozy will reluctantly (and predictably) grow to like one another-and they'll meet up with a strange yet likable supporting cast, including a French-accented, slightly lascivious flying frog, a washed-up intergalactic celebrity looking to regain his former stardom, a polite ninja girl looking for excuses to honorably end her own life, and more. There are fully voiced story sequences both before and after most of the game's dozens of missions, divided into more than a dozen episodes. Now Adell and the gun-toting Princess Rozalin must venture forth together in search of the Overlord, each for their own reasons.ĭisgaea 2's story strikes a fine balance between coherence and pure silliness. Things don't go quite as planned, though, and out pops an attractive, haughty young lady claiming to be the Overlord's only daughter. At the beginning of the game, Adell's mom attempts to facilitate this by performing a summoning ritual intended to make Zenon appear right then and there. So Adell intends to find Zenon and beat him down. Apparently it's all the doing of one Overlord Zenon, who's cursed the people to lose their consciences as well as their memories (hence the game's subtitle). The main character is a confident young man named Adell, who seems to be the only human remaining in a town that's become infested with monsters. However, this is a self-contained story that doesn't require previous knowledge of Disgaea. The game turns out to be connected to the original, so fans may look forward to seeing some of their favorite characters back in the sequel. Like the original, Disgaea 2's anime-inspired, lighthearted characters and storyline are playfully self-referential. There's just so much charm and wit to the presentation, and so many interesting ways to play through the game's turn-based battles.Īdell and his companions are out to find Overlord Zenon, and they'll face many challenging encounters and meet many bizarre characters on the way. While too much familiarity might be a bad thing for sequels to games with a lot of room for improvement, somehow it's just as satisfying and rewarding to play through Disgaea 2 now as it was to play the previous game years ago, provided you're not looking for a completely new experience. It's got a great new story and a ton more missions and content, but it's fundamentally very similar to its predecessor. Now Disgaea is back in a sequel that really doesn't mess with a successful formula. Has it really been three years since the first Disgaea? Though Nippon Ichi Software's memorable cult classic was unmistakably similar to other strategy role-playing games like 1998's popular Final Fantasy Tactics, it had its own weird, goofy style and many nuanced gameplay twists that made it unique.
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