As your characters level up, much like in any other RPG, they will gain better stats and abilities. However, not only do your characters level up in this game, but their skills do, as well. Each skill will get better the more times a character uses it. For example, not only will your magic users get bigger attack spells, but they will start to cover a bigger area, as well. This means you will be able to target more foes from farther away. This applies to your healers, as well. Your characters will also gain skills based on which weapon they have equipped. If you let someone use a sword for a long time, they will gain special sword skills, or if they use a gun, they will gain skills for that, and so forth.
After each battle, you will want to visit the hospital in the world hub, as your characters will not regain HP and SP after battle. The hospital will restore all the lost HP and SP, as well as revive any characters you may have lost in battle. This will cost you cash, of course, but the good news is that after you reach certain total amounts of HP or SP restored, the hospital will give you a prize. These items are some of the best the game has to offer.
One of the first features you will be shown is the Dark Assembly—think of it as the congress of this world. From here, you can create characters and monsters for your party, upgrade the shop’s inventory and, utilize many of the other services that are offered. You will see on-screen the cost of mana it will take to get the assembly to consider your motion and the percentage you have of it passing.
If your percentage is really low, you can do what we do in real life: bribe the senators with items. That’s right, a good ol’ fashioned bribe will work wonders. The menu will show you if the senator is interested in the item you have; the more you give, the better the chance you have of getting them on your side.
If, by chance, you cannot drum up enough support this way to get what you need, you can always try it by force. But be warned: some of the senators are really high-leveled and can wipe you out in an instant.
The characters and monsters you create in the Dark Assembly will start at level 1. You can spend more mana to give them better base stats starting off if you would like. Each different class has some special abilities. The Healers, for example, have a high resistance to elemental magic, while a Dragon has complete fire immunity. When your characters reach a certain level, a new character class will be unlocked. These will be slightly better than the previous ones and will give you three choices.
Your first is to reincarnate your current character as a new class, which will cost you more mana. The more you spend, the better the skill retention rate you will have as well as better base stats. Your second choice is to just make an all new character. And your third is to make them a different type of character altogether; think of this as multi-classing. The better character classes will usually have a higher weapon grade, and their passive abilities will be greater, as well.
There are three different shops in the world hub: a weapons shop, an armor shop, and an item shop. You will be given two ranks in each shop: an item rank and a customer rank. The item rank shows what level items are available in the shop. Remember the Dark Assembly, as raising the item rank there affects the shops here. Also, if you have gotten bills passed to put different kinds of items in the shops, they will be here in the shop. The higher the rank, the more costly the items are. Your customer rank goes up by how much money you spend in the shops. The higher your rank, the greater the chance of a better item showing up.
One of the other residents of the world hub is the Item Worlder. The Item Worlder takes your items and generates random dungeons from them. These will vary in size and in what level the enemies start out on. As you crawl down through each level, you will usually find many chests on the maps filled with treasure. The battle end bonuses are better here, as well. You can escape to the world hub every 10 levels down into these dungeons, or if things get really tough, there is an item called Mr. Gency’s Exit, which will take you straight back to the hub.
You clear floors one of two ways: you either wipe out all the enemies on the floor, or you step on the floor exit panel. Sometimes, a floor may have two exits, and one of them will take you to a mystery room. There could be anything in this room, from treasure to a special shop; as best as I can tell, they are totally random. Once you escape back to the hub, the item you used to generate the dungeon will level up, making it a bit stronger, as well. This is also a great way to grind levels, which you will do lots and lots of in this game.
After a certain point in the game you will be able to talk to another resident of the world hub: the Post Officer, who delivers subpoenas. These will be unlocked for each character as certain conditions are met. Once you obtain one, you take it to the Item Worlder and go into the random dungeon. You will find a special gate on one of the floors that will take you to the Dark Court, where you will always be found guilty. Those Prinnies are ruthless. Each one will carry a certain amount of felonies with it, and these are well respected in the demon world. The more felonies you get, the greater a discount you will receive at the shops, as well a little more pull with the Dark Assembly. There may be other unforeseen results for having a high felony count, as well.
This is one of the deepest and most detailed games of this type I have ever played. The sheer amount of information this game bombards you with can feel overwhelming, but with a little patience, this will be one of the most rewarding games you will ever play. I had a blast with this one. I loved the characters and the story, as well as all the customization that the game provides.
There are also a lot of extra tasks to complete towards the end of the game. These include special dungeons, boss battles, and other hidden goodies. You will have to grind out a lot of levels to complete most of these tasks. The game even has a couple of different endings based on your choices. I can honestly say this is one of those games where the more you put into it, the more you get out of it. There is so much content in the game that even this very long review barely scratches the surface.
In the end, if you are huge fan of this genre of games, then this one is definitely for you. With its wonderful combat, great story, and tons of content, any strategy buff will be in heaven. If you are not really a big fan of this type of game or are just a casual player of the genre, you may want to skip out on this, as it can be overwhelming. I really loved this game and cannot wait to dig into the rest of the Disgaea series, including the recently announced Disgaea 2: A Brighter Darkness.
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Game was provided by the publisher for review.
