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"Those Without OCD Need Not Apply"

A Review by DorkimusPrime
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Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is the PSP remake of the 2003 PlayStation 2 original, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. If you've played the original, here's what's new:

1. New Etna Game: Unlocked after completing the original quest or via cheat code, this is the original with a pretty major twist: What if Etna had actually killed Laharl at the start?
2. Multiplayer: Ad-hoc multiplayer to take your part of darkness against the next guy's.
3. Re-recorded voice acting: The voice acting is a pretty decent improvement over the PS2 original, as a couple of voice actors (including Etna's) have changed and I'm pretty sure the entirety of the dialogue has been re-done.

Now, if you've never played Disgaea, you should. Here's why.

Story: Laharl is the orphaned son of the late King Krechevskoy, ruler of the Netherworld. Laharl is accompanied by his vassal Etna and he meets a wild array of characters throughout the game. The entire point of the game starts out with Laharl looking to ascend to his father's throne, and that's really all I can tell you without spoiling major plot points. The story is told through the game engine, non-animated character stills, and voice acting. The plot is pretty well-paced, sprinkled among the battles. You always want to see what will happen next, and in this bizarre tale of twists and turns, there's always something around the bend.

Gameplay: When I played the original on the PS2, I was astounded at how deep this game is, and the entirety of the depth is brought along for the portable ride. Battle takes place not at all in real-time, but as a turn-based strategy game along the lines of Shining Force or Final Fantasy Tactics. Your party is dispatched onto a 3-dimensional grid, where each tile on the grid can be a different height. The party battles an AI party and when all members of one side are defeated, the battle is over. Disgaea has some additional rules, though, that make it deceptively complex:

1. Geo Panels: Each square on the map can potentially be colored. Those colors correspond to (possibly) a tetrahedon that possesses area affect attributes. So, for example, if a "Heal 20+" Geo Block is on a red Geo Panel, any character standing on other red panels gets that boost at the end of each turn.
2. Throwing: Party members and enemies alike can be picked up and chucked onto other panels. Enemies can be thrown onto other enemies and the result is that they are mashed together to form a more powerful enemy (which is good for power levelling). Party members cannot be combined similiarly, but party members can pick up other party members who may already be holding onto yet other party members for a totem pole effect, which can get one character across the map in a hury.
3. Geo Panels + Throwing + ?????? = Profit!: Chaining combos can be created when Geo Blocks sitting on Geo Panels can be broken. For example, if a blue Geo Block is sitting on a red panel, you can break that block and it will turn all the red panels blue and causing damage to anything sitting on those red panels. Enemies, party members, other geo blocks, it doesn't matter. But that means that if you have geo blocks sitting on panels that get converted and you break one of them, you can set off huge chain reactions, and possibly even clear the map of geo panels altogether.

In addition to all of this in-battle depth, there's also a shop where you purchase upgraded weapons, armor, and other itmes, and those items can be further enhanced by entering the Item World. Here, your party does battle against randomly-generated enemies in randomly-generated dungeons that can go 99 levels deep. Each battle you complete makes the item you chose stronger.

And none of this touches the Dark Assembly, which is a governmental body where you can try to pass bills to make enemies stronger, get better weapons and armor, unlock new types of items, and put your characters to the test in one-on-several combat. Nor does it address transmigrating your characters, where you can take a high-level character, reset them to level 1, and start over with increased base stats. Further, none of what I've written talks about capturing enemy characters or the fact that each character in your party can reach level 9999. On top of that, you're also not reading anything about group attacks, weapon proficiencies, or special abilities. The title of the review should start to make sense.

Audio: The audio is pretty excellent. There's a large and varied musical score, all of which fits the areas in which the songs are used. The shop theme will have you reaching for your credit card and the battle themes will have you reaching for your makeshift wooden sword. Disgaea is MOSTLY voiced-over. Some scenes don't have any voice acting, but the game has a very liberal dose of voice acting. Generally it's pretty good (and in some cases, like with Laharl, Flonne, Etna, Thursday and Captain Gordon, it's incredible), though occasionally the voices don't really match the character (such as Kurtis and the Seraph).

Graphics: Pretty spartan for a PSP game. 2D sprites on a simple 3D battle landscape are basically all you'll see. Most of the cut scenes do have higher-resolution stills of each character as they speak, which do look very nice. Despite all this, the game's graphics have a certain charm - the sprite animations look very nice and do well to capture the mood of the dialogue, and the battle animations are pretty nicely varied and intense.

All in all, I can't say anything else without giving more of the game away - in a sense I feel like I may have already told you too much. But run - don't walk - to your nearest game retailer and find it. Nippon Ichi's portable masterpiece shan't be ignored.

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