On the list of games people have referred me to, and I've played just because they said it was the most awesome game ever, this is another winner. This is by far, the game that I have put the most hours into playing. I kid you not when I say I dropped 300+ hours into this game, and at that point I had to walk away and play something new because I could have kept on playing. That is how massive, and how amazing this game is, and that's why it easily makes it's way onto my favorite games that I've ever played.
When people ask me what this game is, and why I like it so much, I try to equate it to other games. The only ones out there that are anything like this (that I know of) are either XCOM or FF Tactics, but it's those games on steroids.
For those that have never played any of these games, I'll try to simplify it down as much as I can. Imagine a video game version of chess, where you have a board of squares and a bunch of pieces on the board that you control. Your goal is to kill the other side, and each piece can do something different. You take a turn moving your pieces, and then your opponent takes a turn to move theirs.
Now add the fact that your chess pieces can level up to level 9,999, be reborn back to level 1 so you can restart and gain even more power, have 30+ different classes they can be, have different weapons, cast spells, combo attacks with each other, have special attacks that depend entirely on which weapon that they're using, and let's not forget that depending on what square on the board you're standing on you can do different things depending on the board you're playing on. Then there's also the little fact that your weapons, armor, and gear can level up, and carry with them residents that can modify and adjust what they do as well.
Like I said- steroids.
The story line is interesting, and the gameplay within the storyline is cool, but this is one of those games where the story is just the start of the game, and all of the really crazy things happen in the 'post game'.
The best part about the game is that they expect you to break it, they want you to break it, and the more you break it, the more you keep playing. But to explain it the best, let me walk you through ONE character.
The main character of the story is Valvatorez
He's a vampire, who's been in retirement, but you help him come back out and start smacking heads together to get things organized. He starts at level 1 with the wimpiest of weapons.
You can level him up to level 9,999 and at any point in the game or progress you can rebirth him back down to level 1 and he keeps a percentage of the stats that he had gained up to that point. This way you can go 1 to 100, rebirth down to level 1 and grind back to 100, and he'll be significantly stronger than the first time you were at lvl 100. You can do this pretty much as much as you want. Officially there's a limit to rebirths, but if you ever hit it, good job to you.
Every time you kill someone with Valvatorez you get mana to spend in other places, like buffing up the skills that you know so that they effect bigger areas, hit harder, and all sorts of fun things like that. So grinding doesn't just give you levels, it gives you the power to be able to buff your own skills.
Then comes your items.
While grinding up your own levels, you have the ability to jump into ANY item in the game, and go through a dungeon that represents that item. The further you get into the dungeon, the stronger the weapon gets. And the further you get into the item, the harder the monsters get that you have to beat to get to the next level. This means that you need to level up items to go into item world, but to get those items to go deeper into an item, you need other items that you've already explored, and then typically while you're on your way through an item, leveling it up, you can find a new item that has better base stats than the item that you're in, which means that once you're done with the one you're in, you can start on the next one which will be even harder, but will make a stronger weapon, armor, accessory, or whatever else.
And that's just for one guy, and one item.
Then, comes the twist of rebirthing and the character world. Just like item world, you can jump into characters and modify them from the inside out, giving them skills or stats that they typically wouldn't have, and altering them even more than what you could imagine.
With that much complexity, let's remember that you can always create your own character. Where Valvatorez will always be Valvatorez, your created character can change jobs every time that they rebirth. That way you can make a tanky swordsman who rebirths as a magician, and suddenly you have a tanky magic user.
With that in mind, let's do some number, you have 20 human classes (each with 6 layers of classes within them, the higher the sub-class the better your stats will be) and then 19 monster classes (again with 6 sub classes each). This means that you can take your one created character, and run them through 39 different classes and never duplicate a job, and each time you do that you can go to level 9,999.
Then there's the items. Each type of item has 40 types, and then each of those types have 3 rarities. A common item only has 40 dungeon levels, a rare has 70 dungeon levels, and legendary has 100 levels. That means that there are 40 different swords, but of those 40, there are 3 rarities of each type of those swords.
There are 9 basic types of weapons, with 40 seperate ranks, and 3 rarities of each. And as you can see the numbers start to get very big and very diverse very quickly. But because of how big the game is, and just how much there is to do within it, instead of feeling overwhelming, it feels as though there's always something new that you can tackle or a new goal that you can set for yourself as you go.
Admittedly, the graphics and some of the animations aren't the best quality, but instead of pumping out a high degree of quality graphics, it puts the attention on the game. Disgaea decided that they'd much rather have a deep, quality, time intensive game, rather than a flashy game that nothing new ever came out of after the first 40 hours of play, but did I mention that you don't need to know the story line, or anything at all from any of the earlier games to understand #4
There is easily 1,000 hours worth of gameplay within this game. The story line, once finished, can be restarted in NG+, but you can also increase monster level and difficulty at any time as well, so even if you're super powered, you can NG+ with your ultimate characters and gears, amp the monsters up to the highest levels, and still feel scared for your life, just while doing the simple story line. This game is proof that you don't need high end graphics, or even super amazing audio to make a game that is playable and addicting. It knows it's audience, it caters to them, and makes an amazing turn based tactical game unlike anything else out there.
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