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.

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)

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?

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.