i forgot how incredibly cute Disgaea is at almost all times. i'm not even talking about the artwork even though i was always terribly in love with Takehito Harada's style (i have an artbook even!!!), but the story and characters are just so adorable. sure they come off as one note a lot of time and Disgaea 4 unlike 1 and 2 do not greatly expand on their personalities, but they're still super likeable. and like even the shitty 2011 anime trope jokes are so light, Fenrich is more worried about not being called a tsundere than to beat the homossexual allegations and the game does use him and the kid character to say something akin to "Heh... women..." but said women are still extremely present and relevant to the story all the way through also they're hella cool. so many Disgaea games (all of them till 4??) are about going against your father or proving yourself to him and carving your own identity and i think it handles it in a cute way even if not with the seriousness a topic like this may require.

i guess the moe artstyle or the characters with exaggerated proportions might throw some people off, but it really is a lighthearted fun game that i keep wondering what i was going through when i dropped it 12 years ago because i couldn't handle Desco anymore even though she's very precious. (i guess the geoblock maps are a bit tiring tho so that may have helped it)

Disgaea 4 is the very first SRPG or even JRPG that really enthralled me. Many people recommend the first game as a starting off point but my stubborn ass jumped straight into 4. After a few hours of scavenging wikis to get to grips with everything, the game just sank its teeth into me and had me hooked for days on end. Weither it was clearing the main story, messing around with the dozen of generic / unique units and seeing what would fit into my party the best , or minmaxing in post game areas or the item world, there is always something worthwhile to do to get stronger. As a first experience , the feeling of learning all of the little tricks to get a leg up like diagonal throws , finding perfect grind spots and tactics or learning duping, it was really magical. That said I couldn't stomach the ridiculous ammount of rng and just plain bullshit to even reach land of carnage and beat baal. Even with an anticlimactic way to end things, D4 made me a genuine fan of everything about the series and is kickstarting my journey to see which entry in the series I'll like the most.

(I totally forgot to mention the story, it was fine, nothing skip worthy mostly thanks to valvatorez and fenrich working off of each other in really cute ways, I even shed a tear at the end with one of the secret epilogues. That said it's really nothing ground breaking and as much as I like my corn, fuka and desco especially became one note joke machines I legit couldn't stand for the two side stories that focused on them.)

Overall, good shit , made a drooling idiot like me care a lot about minmaxing and stats growth , etna is a baddie too.

The PS3 era of Disgaea has always been a little messy, eschewing a lot of the strategic aspects causing the levels to oscillate between being pure stat checks or extended geo puzzles, but Disgaea 4 is definitely the most polished game from that era. Mechanically I still prefer D2 by a lot, but this game is very fine tuned and runs quickly in battles. The complete version adds even more options like animation fast forward, which is cool if you like to see the animations but don't want to spend 3 years on them. The balancing for progression is very inconsistent which is my least favorite thing. The early game it takes forever to get mana for good attacks, and when you can finally get it quickly the attacks themselves very quickly become to costly to use a ton. With the removal of level multipliers and the intense nerfing of secondary equipment like Orbs and Emblems, it can take way too long to get more than a single character up and running, The Chara World also way overcomplicates aspects that were very easy originally and I do not like it at all. All that said though, if you liked Disgaea 3 a lot you'll likely enjoy this one even more, and it's a great time killer game if nothing else.

Oh yeah the story. Not as funny as 3's but it hits the emotional notes a little better. I don't consider it to be as strong as 1 or even 2, playing out a lot of hackneyed tropes dead straight that the first two games approached with much more care and awareness. It is what it is. Valvatorez and Emizel are great at least.

There's a lot I could say about this game, so I guess I will say what's on my mind. By the way, this will be talking a lot about postgame because that's a big deal with these games.

First off, some might be wondering about the story of this game. The story in Disgaea games tend to be really goofy, oftentimes cheesy as hell, and this game isn't much different. They're less one-note than a few characters from 3 and I came to like them. The cast of characters in this game is probably my favorite of them all, simply because I remember more than four of them. Yes, while the classic trio is great, most other characters in the original fell flat, and there were a good few. Characters like Emizel have good unique abilities too so it's not like all of them are made obsolete to other classes, unlike a certain game in the series which had one class above the rest, making the use of anything else pointless. (That game was 1, with the Majin class) I like that this game brought back Flonne and Axel, but I don't remember Flonne being that stupid (although the difference isn't that big) and I don't remember Axel being whatever he is in this game. Those were both my favorite characters in their respective games, but that's not to say I disliked them here since they did have some funny moments.

This game also introduced HD sprites to the series. 3 was the first game on PS3, and this was the second. 3 got a LOT of flack for not updating its style to fit new hardware, but this game actually did that, so that's cool. If you play the games in order, chances are you will enjoy 3, but I digress. You'll see the HD style with this, Dimension 2/D2, and 5. There's even a joke here about a certain character being stuck in the old style, and you can get her up to date, kind of reminded me of Culex in Super Mario RPG. 6 brought things to full 3D which is extremely divisive and if you want my two cents I think it works but it ruins a key part of what makes these games charming. I did make a review on 7, so I've already talked about that.

Gameplay, as usual, was very good, but not perfect. Diagonal throwing is still a thing in this game, and I got used to that, it's kind of fun. This game also made Magichange useful, and if you don't know what that is, it basically lets you morph a monster into a weapon for someone else to use a few turns per battle. Evilities are here too, and monsters get some use out of them due to having two extra slots rather than one. These are basically passives, but they can make or break a fight in some cases. By the end, I had a Tyrant Valvatorez with an 80% stat increase just by existing. There's also one that adds a 10% increase to evasion per step taken in a turn, which can easily go up to 100% evasion, which doesn't mean you dodge absolutely everything but it could be seriously helpful later on.

So if the gameplay isn't perfect, what are the issues? Well, my main issue was how heavy this game was on RNG, for the postgame at least. So I beat the game, what next? Innocents, which are basically extra passives you throw onto an item. You can get most of them normally, but in the case of certain ones like the Professional and the Guardian, you will need to do a little thing called Reverse Pirating. Basically, after clearing 20 floors inside the Item World (where you go to boost and level up items) you get to reverse pirate inside of it. You can do this a maximum of 5 times, once per 20 floors cleared. I used this to get certain innocents, but it took a few resets for the proper ones to show up. Then, after boosting my innocents to a decent enough level, I wanted to max them. How did I do that? The Puppy Paw Stick, an item which lets you take an item from an enemy sometimes. There's a unit that can become an NPC through a skill, so you'll want to abuse that to duplicate - that'll come a bit later though. To even get this item you either need to get 200 item spheres or do the sane man's method of capturing level 1000 Nekomatas and hunting their treasure. Before you get this damned item, you will probably obtain a lot of ship parts. It took me like 3 hours to get this item and that was not a fun part of the grind. After enough duplicating, I wanted to get the best item in the game, the Trapezohedron. First, I had to unlock the Land of Carnage, which required more ship parts. They didn't take too long to get, but as a middle finger, there's like 3 you can get for each part and you're supposed to get one specifically. I had to clear some stages too, but that's not based on luck and was fairly easy. For the next step, I basically just took an item I got from miscellaneous stuff, went to its item world (inside the Land of Carnage) and kept resetting the bonus gauge until there was a legendary Arcadia. This took maybe around an hour, I don't know the exact time. So then after that, I leveled up the Arcadia and got a Trapezohedron. While leveling it, I had to exit out every 10th floor using a Mr. Gency's Exit, which is a pretty valuable resource. I did this to get into the Innocent Town each time, and on top of that the Dark Assembly had to be available for me to upgrade item stats like movement and attack range, which just added yet another aspect of RNG even if it never took that long. In comparison, 5 lets you screw around in the item world for pretty much as many floors as you want, not just 100, and so all of this stuff is a hell of a lot more convenient.

On the topic of stuff 5 does better, let me tell you about Chara World. It's like the Item World, but for individual characters. I tried not to use it too much in this game because it SUCKS. It's basically the Item World but with a bunch of blocks that you can break for the chance to raise aptitudes - yes, even MORE RNG, and I don't feel like explaining what aptitudes are but they're something you'll want if you have good items. I made it a habit to mostly ignore the blocks, and I did this a lot to get more Gency's Exits. (Again, valuable resource) In 5, they made this into a board game, which may sound lame, but it's a whole lot more refreshing and you'll probably spend less time in it overall. 5 also has easy ways to break into the millions, with subclasses and eventually extracts. Extracts are kind of in 4 with serums, but they disappear upon reincarnation, and you may need to reincarnate a lot to max aptitudes, so you will have to do this as an absolutely final step. From what I've seen it's kind of a pain in the ass to do too, like for extracts in 5 all you have to do is get some and use it on 4 units at once for max effect. I didn't end up using serums since I only beat base Baal and I don't know if they're even necessary. Another thing 5 does better is that it gives you way more evility slots, allowing for all kinds of weird builds. In 4, you can just throw on one (or two in the case of monsters) and be done with it; usually there's a definitive one that'll work in most cases. In 5 there is just a lot more that you can do with it. Obviously it's the game that came after, so upgrades should be expected. I did play it before this one, though, so that's something to note, but I also beat all of 1 after 5 and I don't recall the RNG being this bad.

Going back to what 4 does right, additional content is one. I don't remember much of 5's DLC, and it removed certain cameos like Gig, Ash and Marona. I liked those, and I liked the nurse class that got replaced by the zombie maid. These have not appeared since (unless you count Dimension 2 which I do intend to play), which is a shame because Gig was particularly useful to me, and he just kicks ass in general. You can unlock Kurtis and Krichevskoy (Laharl's dad), which also haven't been seen since. 5 does have more DLC characters overall and there are scenarios for most of them, I just don't remember them much, and the Netherbattle Tournament from 4 gave them a few extra scenes too, which isn't present in 5. Absent is also any additional side modes, stuff like Axel Mode or Time Leap. Notably, 4 has both Time Leap and the Fuka and Desco show, and there's even a chapter detailing Fenrich. I didn't really like how Time Leap ended, but it gave me a bit more to do and the new base was neat. You can change your main base into any level or base in the game too, which you can't do in 5 for some reason, but 5 does let you edit a character's colors to whatever you want and I reaaaally like that.

Once I beat Baal, I felt accomplished. So many hours passed, and everything led up to the moment. It didn't even feel that long, I went from around 1 million in stats to about 30 after making the ultimate gear and duplicating it several times. I'm aware that the Carnage version exists, and there's a rematch too, but I'm not doing that shit - 5's already made me. I beat the guy himself, and to me, that's a game done to completion.

My recommendation? Save dealing with Baal for Disgaea 5, and do it in 7 too if you want since that one's a total pushover. All the story content still took me about 50 hours and I'm a somewhat fast reader. If you want to unlock (just about) everything immediately, enter X Y B X Y B A on the title screen. There's not much of a downside to using it.

Despite everything, this game kicks ass. Specifically mine. Sometimes I'm a masochist when it comes to games, I dunno.

this is important so i'm gonna lead with this: i do not care who you are. DO NOT TRY TO 100% THIS GAME. i spent a month of my life non-stop grinding for like three separate RNG achievements and i massively regret it. yes, this series is all about grinding and optimizing your bullshit but incorporating all items/ship parts into the platinum trophy was a monstrously stupid decision, and i feel like a complete moron for trying it anyway.

but other than that i really like this game. the humor's great, game mechanics are fun, and outside of those achievements i mentioned it's super fun to find out new ways to optimize damage. whether that be finding easier methods to grind or duping items, it feels like there's always some way you can get stronger. there's so much more to this game than just grinding an EXP map forever (even if you are doing that a lot)

still, i feel like this game is difficult to recommend. you can't really compare it to other strategy RPGs since grinding takes up so much of this game's appeal. this series has always prided itself on being a completionist's game for those who have no life - so if that's not you and you're just interested in the story or whatever, there's still stuff here but it's not as meaty.

seriously though. what were they thinking with this platinum?? this shit had me hunting for two hours for one singular ship part out of like 100. what the hell is wrong with me?