Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: NIS America
Genre: JRPG, Dungeon Crawler
Format: Nintendo Switch, PC, Playstation 4
Released: October 12th 2018
Purchase Disgaea 1 Complete here: https://store.nisaeurope.com/products/disgaea-1-complete-rosen-queens-finest-edition-nintendo-switch
You fiends and downright evil people. This game is one for you. Have no fears about getting your friends murdered or brutally maimed. In fact, do it and you’ll get rewarded with some beautiful trinkets. For those of you who aren’t so twisted, Disgaea is a game about becoming the overlord to the demon realm by any means necessary. By that I mean defeating all who stand before you in grid based combat and choosing your best skills to murderise as many as you can.
There are plenty of humanoid and not so human classes to choose from that can help do your bidding. You can unlock different classes by leveling up your current ones or by defeating monsters which appear as enemies. Simply put, if you can kill it, you can use it. As mentioned the combat is on a grid which the characters can move around based on their movement points. Both you and your enemies take one big turn each to move everyone around and do all your attacks before passing the turn over. The combat is pretty simple and easy to get to terms with yet it still makes you think about where to place your characters for the best outcome.
As mentioned previously the classes and enemies range from Angels to Zombies. When creating them you choose a mentor or parent character and use their mana which is collected by defeating enemies or as a bonus. The cool part of this feature is that when the pupil levels up and improves, it also gives the mentor a boost. This is a great way to enhance their strengths or even help with their weaknesses. There are also a good amount of different weapons for the humanoid classes to choose from and each class has their own mastery ranks and affinity levels to help get the most out of the weapons and equipment they have equipped.
As you have seen the graphics and character drawings are incredible cool, clean and vibrant in colour. The music is pretty darn funky and the voice acting is solid and most of the time utterly hilarious coupled with the downright bizarre writing.
Now unfortunately is the time for me to gave a grumpy moan at what the complete edition should have added to Disgaea to help alleviate the dated feel it has. Firstly let’s jump into the combat to help speed it up there should be an option for faster walking movement and the ability to skip enemy turns like Fire Emblem Awakening for example. Any player character who is killed can still have a little cutscene showing their death but the damage done is pretty obvious anyway.
Special skills should show their damage modifier. The only way you can guess that a skill does more damage than another is based on the amount of SP you use. Although this isn’t always the case when you have leveled up some of the earlier skills. Having the ability to see enemy equipment and movement range would also help. You can already guess how far they can reach based on your previous knowledge of the classes so it would be a simple feature to add. Finally a big one for me is having the option to show what stats increase when your characters level up.
This seems to be a more modern trend in RPGs where it shows a character level up yet hides the stats. Having a simple toggle option would be great. I love seeing my characters stats get boosted even if by a little. I don’t want to have to keep manually checking every time.
Anyways after all my little issues Disgaea 1 Complete gets a solid 8/10. Disgaea still holds up a great JRPG and the story is marvelously bonkers but this complete edition feels incomplete as not much has been updated. You already have these changes in Disgaea 5 so why not add them to the previous games to improve them.
Don’t they deserve to be the best version they possibly can? - Mamushi
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