Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Review

No, your weapon isn't an electric guitar. I just thought this picture looked cool.

Platform: PS2 (also available on the PSP as Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness and later this year on the DS as Disgaea DS)

The Quick Version:

The Good:

- The story is anything but typical.

- Almost every character is dynamic and interesting, even unnamed enemies.

- The wide variety of available human and monster classes allows for epic party customization.

- There are talking penguins.

- The penguins have swords, bombs, and skulls that shoot laser beams.

- They also explode when you throw them.

- The game’s demented lifting physics allows for endless tactical possibilities, especially when combined with exploding penguins.

- The geo panel system adds an entire layer of depth to combat,

- The game’s Congress can be bribed (or threatened) to act in your favor.

- The story is divided into chapters, each one of which ends with an anime-style preview where the narrator just makes things up.

- Disgaea starts the trend in many Nippon Icchi titles where characters from previous games make cameos and are possibly integrated into the storyline. Most notably, Prier from La Pucelle Tactics is a hidden playable character here.

The Bad:

- The game throws a lot of concepts at you at once, which can be very overwhelming even with the tutorials.

- Later battles take forever.

- Flonne will piss the ever living hell out of you with her personality.

- Mid-Boss will piss the ever living hell out of you with his voice.

- You get more main characters than you could ever use, so it’s easy to sweep custom characters aside. In addition, they have slower growth than the mains, so they won’t be useful until you’re on your second playthrough or are pursuing endgame content.

- Geo panels make the maps look fugly.

- The Dark Congress seems needlessly antagonistic at times.

- There are multiple endings, but there are very few differences between the important ones. Which ending you get also depends on a questionable criterion: how many allies you kill (among other things).

- The game’s audio is inconsistent later in the game, so dialogue cuts in and out with no pattern.

- Disgaea continues La Pucelle’s unfortunate use of randomly-generated optional dungeons (story-related maps are fixed). Since you are in the Netherworld (aka Dark World) to begin with, you go to the so-called Item World, where you can go through a hundred stages of messy terrain and scattered geo panels that make it look like a giant clown threw up on the map.

The Ugly:

- There’s an item called the “Horse Weiner.” Take that as you will.

- Remember the level 2000 enemy from La Pucelle Tactics? Well, he’s back, but now he gained 2000 more levels and a whole lot of muscle. Even the main character says, “You’ve gotta be kidding me! Level 4000?!” The best part is that once you kill him, he comes back to life as an unexplodable penguin with roughly double his normal stats.

Rating: 4/5 (If aren't familiar with the scale, click here)
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The Long Version:

Background:
Disgaea: Hour of Darkness is yet another turn-based tactical RPG by Nippon Ichi Software and is its flagship title. I’m willing to bet that many of you have seen the ad for Disgaea in certain gaming magazines in which it was described as a laxative. I don’t know who the hell came up with that, but it was certainly entertaining.

Plot Synopsis:
Laharl is a demon prince and the son of the Netherworld’s previous Overlord, King Krichevskoy. After deciding to take a quick nap, he is wakened by his vassal, Etna. It turns out that two years had passed since he fell asleep and in that time, his dad had died after choking on a pretzel. The first thing you see after getting out of Laharl’s coffin/bed are maces, machine guns, and explosives littered around the room, which immediately brings up the question of whether Etna was trying to wake him up or kill him. Regardless, the Netherworld had gone to shit in the last two years with demon lords fighting for supremacy, so it’s up to Laharl to kick all their asses and claim his rightful position as Overlord. This won’t be easy, though, as he has to deal with treacherous vassals, worthless servants, and raising funds through pillage among other things.

I won’t say anything else, but the story only gets more and more bizarre. It doesn’t really stand out, though, as Disgaea is more character-driven than it is plot driven.

Characters of Note:
Laharl - Childish, selfish, heartless, and gluttonous, Laharl is the very picture of a jackass. However, he’s a very fun jackass to play as. Having quite a Napoleon complex, he constantly tries to prove his strength. Unlike other characters of this nature, though, he can actually back up his talk through his humongous sword and his special attacks, which include bombarding an area with dozens of fireballs and summoning a meteor, jumping on top of it, and crashing it into the enemy while laughing maniacally. His weaknesses include sexy bodies and optimistic sayings. He literally takes damage when someone says, “World peace.”

Etna – Laharl may be the strongest demon in his Netherworld, but Etna is the cruelest and most cunning. She is the only one of Laharl’s original vassals who bothers to enter combat for him, but she always has an agenda of her own to the point where her true loyalties are never clear. She has a team of hired muscle in the form of a squad of Prinnies, the aforementioned talking penguins. While they’re lazy and disobedient, her threats of violence are often enough to get them motivated. Etna also writes in a journal under the guise of going to the bathroom and narrates the preview for each chapter in which she makes herself the main character, twisting the story around that assertion to the dismay of other characters.

Flonne – Every angel has to start somewhere, and that’s exactly where Flonne is. Despite being a trainee who can’t even fly, Flonne is charged with the task of assassinating King Krichevskoy. There’s just one problem: she’s two years too late. To top it off, she’s the worst fucking assassin ever. When she first meets Laharl, she spills the beans . . . all of them. Not to fear, though. Seeing how much of an ass Laharl is, she decides to stick around to give him an attitude adjustment . . . or try to, anyway. While tolerable by RPG standards, Flonne is still the most annoying character in the entire game. Before and after battle, she treats you to a speech on the power of love and why you shouldn’t randomly murder things for fun. While this eventually plays into Laharl’s development, I’d have really liked to hear less of her.

Mid-Boss – In the rat race for the Netherworld throne, the demon lord Vyers was in the lead until Laharl returned. After that, though, he became Laharl’s first target and after their meeting, is branded “Mid-Boss” in memory of his fruitiness. He becomes a recurring enemy and lives up to his name, taking a beating every now and then to let you know he’s still alive. The only beef I have with him is his horrendous English voice acting, which sounds like someone has a terrible cold. What amazes me the most is that his VA manages to stick around for future appearances.

The Prinnies – They are the talking, exploding penguins I was talking about. While they usually have little to do with the plot, they’re among the most entertaining characters in Disgaea. Unorganized and lazy, Prinnies do everything from menial labor to hand to hand combat for minimum wage. One of their more notable attacks has them confusing enemies by dancing around them like an idiot.

There are other characters, but I can’t afford to dedicate more space to them. There’s more to a review than just listing characters, after all.

Game Mechanics:
Execute/End Turn – This works almost exactly as it did in La Pucelle Tactics except they finally fixed the special attacks so they also delay until you “execute” or “end turn” as opposed to being uncancelable and instantaneous. In case you aren’t inclined to read my last review, Disgaea has a system where you move your characters and set their actions in advance much like other turn-based tactical RPG’s. The difference is that you can either “execute” to activate all your current actions and continue with your turn or you can “end turn” to both execute and finish your round. Like I said before, it’s a pretty handy system and opens up a lot of tactical possibilities.

The Castle – Laharl’s castle acts as a hub throughout the game. You go through a portal to access all the other stages and every shop is here along with the portal to the Dark Assembly. At least there’s no stupid backtracking.

The Dark Assembly – Everyone loves Democracy, even demons. If you want to raise funds, get better items in the store, make stronger enemies, or unlock new character classes, you have to go through the Dark Assembly. Each time you propose a bill, a randomly-selected group of senators votes to decide whether they’ll accept or boot your ass back into the castle. Worried about falling victim to sectional conflict? Not to worry. You can either bribe senators ahead of time to make them more favorable towards you or simply stick your boot up their asses to force the bill through. Don’t do the latter too often, though. That gets you a bad ending.

Character Creation – In addition to the story characters you have, you can create custom-class characters ranging from warriors to thieves to demonic abominations. Don’t bother using it in depth too early, though. The cost of making a good character is prohibitive and doesn’t pay off until you can power-level.

Reincarnation – Reincarnation brings a character back to level 1, but retains allows them to retain a significant portion of their abilities and stats. I would recommend using this on Laharl at least once after he hits level 1000. Don’t bother with this until you can power-level.

Base Panel – In every stage, this is your starting square from which you unleash your hellspawn. Barring the ten unit limit, any character can come out at any time and act immediately. They can also retreat into your base panel if they haven’t acted on that turn, where enemies can’t reach them.

Lifting and Throwing – That’s right. There is an entire set of commands dedicated to grabbing things and chucking them. Their basic effects are self-explanatory, but their applications are numerous. When you lift something, it becomes immobilized (ally or enemy) and can’t act. However, if an enemy’s turn comes up while you’re holding them, you lose HP proportional to their level. Thus, you usually want to ditch them one way or another. Unfortunately, you can’t throw enemies off a stage. However, you can either throw them to an isolated area, at another ally or enemy, or in your base panel. Isolated areas normally only occur in the Item World and are platforms that can only be reached by throwing units. With the exception of a few attack abilities used in the correct situation, there is no way to enter or leave these platforms without lifting and throwing. When you throw someone at an ally with whose hands are free, they catch it and can continue throwing, thus transporting enemies to remote areas, moving injured allies back into safe territory, or moving assault units immense distances in a single turn. When you throw an enemy at another enemy, they fuse and combine their levels. Yeah . . . don’t do that. The base panel is the most interesting place to throw an enemy. If the target is a monster, your allies inside the panel fight it and if they win, capture it. If they lose or the enemy is a human, however, the base panel explodes and spits out the pissed-off enemy, thus leaving you with no way to retreat or get reinforcements.

There are two special applications of lifting and throwing that I would like to note. First comes tower lifting. You can place numerous characters in a row and have them all lift each other (defying the laws of physics in the process) in order to make a huge tower of up to ten characters. Utilizing this, you can traverse vast expanses in a single turn and usually send at least one character to the other side of the map. Unfortunately, you can’t use your allies as weapons, a problem that Phantom Brave and Disgaea 2 deal with later-on. The second special application involves Prinnies. Yes, those lovable penguins. Don’t you just want to pick up one of those cute buggers and throw ‘em? If you do, expect a surprise in the form of them fucking exploding. It doesn’t matter if they’re allies, enemies, or whether someone is at the landing zone to catch them. They go boom the second they hit something. The best part is that if there are any other Prinnies nearby, they also explode and create a massive chain reaction.

Geo Symbols – Occasionally, you will see colored squares in a given map. When placed on a colored square, these bestow effects on every other square of that color. Effects can range from “heal 20%” to “no entry” to “invincibility”. While this spices things up a bit, you might not want to deal with a map that has "100% Damage" on every square. Luckily for you, all geo symbols (aside from the invincibility one) can be destroyed or lifted (ignoring the “no lifting” one, of course).

On an unrelated note, the colored squares (aka Geo Panels) make maps look like a unicorn took a dookie on your screen. It’s not a pretty sight.

Item World – While I consider this to be a hellish place that I would rather not enter, the Item World isn’t a single location so much as it is you entering an item of your choosing and battling it out on randomly-generated stages. Each stage has an exit portal that you can enter if you want to avoid fighting and just move to the next stage. Every ten stages, you can fight an item boss to increase the item’s stats and you are given the option to leave the item. The latter can also be done with a specific item. While I suppose the item world extends replayability, I found the random stages difficult to navigate and rather tedious.

Cameos:
Prier from La Pucelle Tactics and Marjoly from Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure are both available as hidden characters. You’re mistaken if you think you’ll be purifying demons like in La Pucelle, though. Drawing from one of that game’s secret endings, Prier appears as the Overlord of an alternate Netherworld and is a demon through and through.

I suppose you can count Baal, the level 2000 enemy from La Pucelle Tactics, as a cameo character.

Rating:
If nothing else, Disgaea is a tactically deep game. However, it can be too deep for its own good. Without a guide of some sort, it’s impossible to properly use the character creation or reincarnation options and only hours of grueling battles can accustom someone to the Item World. Also, the wealth of tactical possibilities extends to your enemies, leading to turns that can take upwards of five consecutive minutes given the sheer number of foes you have to deal with later-on.

While this would normally earn the game a 3/5, the sheer personality that the title has and the strength of its main characters push it above the threshold into the 4/5 range. All Disgaea would have had to do was streamline its mechanics and make the Item World friendlier to use and it would have earned a much more solid 4. While Disgaea 2 does this to an extent, it does so at the expense of its characters. No Nippon Icchi game would be able to provide such as dynamic a cast as Disgaea: Hour of Darkness until Soul Nomad & the World Eaters.