Breaking through an enemy by punching them so hard they traverse the entire globe before crashing back into place, teaming up with upto four party members to unleash a massive beating on an unluckily cornered foe, having a bipolar frog, semi-suicidal underage shinobi and a gun-wielding princess with a monster sealed inside her join your party as you pummel through level 100 minions and bribe powerful Dark Council members with either treasure or a closed fist; heaving exploding penguins at unsuspecting foes to send ‘em sky-high, and blocking an earth-shattering attack from a towering, Satan-like monster with your bare hands…If the above sentences couldn’t describe the sheer madness transpiring in Nippon Ichi’s Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories(sequel to Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the immensely popular Turn Based Strategy RPG free-for-all), then the upcoming paragraphs may not get the job done either. However, if you had to bet you’re hard-earned EXP points on one thing, it’d be this—Disgaea 2 is the be-all, end-all of such games on the PS2, a frighteningly hilarious and laid-back dippy head-trip into the domain of character skills, classes, stats, levels, weapons and pizza-delivering cell phones.

Adell, the red-haired brazen main character of Cursed Memories, is in a major bind: His entire family has been cursed by the all-powerful Overlord Zenon, and they’re slowly losing their humanity and becoming demons. Being the noble demon hunter that he is, Adell has sworn to face Zenon, beat the crap out of him (literally beat the crap out of him as he relies on nothing more than his fists to get the job done) and restore his family to normal before it’s too late. His mother comes up with a master plan to summon Overlord Zenon to Adell at their house using a summoning spell, but the spell goes horribly wrong and instead, Zenon’s bratty and devilish daughter Rosaline is conjured instead. Despite the mishap, Adell decides to cooperate with Rosaline to find her father and she, knowing that he could never beat Zenon, agrees. Thus begins their bold adventure together as Adell travels to different areas, pounding on the poor hapless souls who Rosaline claims might be her father, all while avoiding the hidden schemes of the latter to eliminate him before he can reach his desired opponent.

Those of you lucky souls who got to blast through the original iteration of Disgaea will know the obvious: For an RPG with demons, torture and high-impact fights, Disgaea doesn’t take itself too seriously, if at all. At times, you’ll bear witness to serious cutscenes featuring Zenon (and his odd, almost obsessive search for his missing daughter) complete with dark foreboding shadows, only to laugh it up at the Demon World news bulletin reading that accounts for all the activities happening between each chapter. Other funny instances include Rosaline berating Adell for daring to challenge her father, saying, “Are you on Level 1,000,000 or are you just plain suicidal?” and Etna’s account of her treatment towards her demon servants (ending with Adell stating plainly, “You’re evil…”) You’ll meet up with some ditzy figures like Tink, the suave, French accented floating toad with a split personality; Axel, a narcissistic has-been in the world of Dark Heroes who’s trying to make a comeback as a star by hosting ‘Trippin with Axel’, his very own travel show; Yukimaru, a noble female ninja who is pretty high on hara-kiri when she fails and on muttering the word ‘zam’ after every sentence; and tons more.

But then there’s that main ingredient which constitutes the main appeal of Disgaea—there’s never a time where you feel the humor is forced, and all of the dialogues have the easy-breezy, well-paced feel to them. You’re here to enjoy the game, and the game openly accepts that, never allowing more than needs to be known at once. You’ll encounter some admittedly serious plot-lines, but nothing that’ll have you huddled in the corner at night with a blanket over your head muttering religious phrases.

That Disgaea has a well-told humorous story and characters actually mask the inherent complexity of the game. Make no mistake—this is the purest anti-thesis of any Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game you ever played. Even though you play as a pre-made character, you get the option of not only creating your own party members, choosing from a wide selection of classes like Warrior, Fighter, Amazon, Samurai, Sniper, Archer and much, much more, even being able to create demon party members if you happened to defeat that particular species and also obtained a license from the Dark Council (more on that later) but you can also customize their stats and roll out as many as ten of them at once in battle. You also have the option of Resurrecting a character which is basically taking character you’ve leveled up (pre-made or created) and having them take on a new class as they start from level one and start learning new abilities. Such actions are usually necessary when you want to create the powerful Samurai or have an unstoppable Holy Dragon at your command. Performing this costs something more important than money however—when you defeat opponents in battle, you’ll get special points called Mana that can be used to either create these party members, upgrade them into newer classes or pass bills in the Disgaea 2’s most interesting feature—the Dark Council.

In the Dark Council, you’re choose a representative (determined by a percentage liking rating) and have them stand before a congregation of officials as you try to propose new bills that could benefit you in various ways. Some of these could be small, like making available some new exotic and expensive equipment in weapon and armor shops and being able to create new classes, while others could be as hefty (and at times, unachievable without raw force) as requesting military funds or running for a post as a member of the Dark Council. Obviously, you’ll have people who don’t want to agree with you while there are others who could be neutral and whom you want on your side. With a little heroic standing, some perseverance and a little ‘coaxing’ (read: bribing), getting that nice little bill of yours passed wouldn’t be a far off dream. Apart from the above, there’s also the Dark Court, a new feature for the franchise. Whenever you commit certain felonies in the world of Disgaea, you’ll be given certain subpoenas, which require you to enter the item world inside the subpoena so you can stand for trial. Course, this is a demon world, so instead of being punished in the real sense of the word, you’ll receive gold, items and other rare trinkets. Nice. You’ll also be able to send people other than the ones accused of the felony to stand in the court if you don’t wanna incur a bad record (even though its encouraged, it determines what kind of ending you get) or if you simply want another person to garner the rewards.

Battles form the main crux of Disgaea’s gameplay. Whenever you start a new chapter, you’ll be able to head off into new areas where you’ll go through a story sequence before fighting the enemies of that area, either to proceed to the warp portal being guarded or to progress further. Movement is often determined by what character class you are but this matters most to you when you have to ‘throw’ a party member. Aside from special abilities, magic and attacks, you also have the option of lifting up a treasure chest, an item, an enemy or your ally and heaving them across the map in any number of spaces of possible. Sound useless? Try lifting all ten of your party members into one gigantic tower and throwing them one by one to reach the exit and avoid a potentially harmful opponent or escape senseless fighting to get to the next area. It works conversely as well—when ten party members form a tower and attack an enemy, he’ll feel all ten of their attacks (the disadvantage is that you’ll have to sacrifice every one’s turns for that one tower attack).You can also position a pair of your party members together to perform a team attack on the enemy and the amount of damage you can do increases with the more member you have, the max being 4. And unlike all other RPGS, Disgaea’s characters don’t stop at level 100. You can level your character up to the thousands if you so desire. Depending on the need of the hour, you can even turn to leveling up items, up to the point where they provide outstanding stats to whoever wields them. It may seem like a simpler alternative compared to leveling up your character but items can only be powered up inside the special Item World, an alternate dimension inside the item full of monsters, traps, treasures and of all things, wandering pirates. The more levels you clear in the item world, the more number of levels is bestowed to your item. A degree of caution is required though, because after every ten levels, you’ll run into stronger monsters and more baffling throwing puzzles, and for some reason, all the pirates want to kill only you. The more exotic an item is also contributes to how difficult your opponents in that Item World will be. If you don’t take the chance to escape after every ten levels you beat and lose in the middle, then all your hard work comes to naught and you’re left with nothing but a gaggle of corpses (and since you can’t save in the item world, it’s not as simple as loading your last save game and trying again). The Item World is definitely a risky gamble but if you’re smart enough, you can make off with quite a bit of loot, EXP and more powerful tools to wreck havoc on the enemies in the Story Mode areas.

Its things like the immense number of levels and the Item World that makes you think the system in Disgaea is unbalanced and even broken in some places, but then that’s the whole point. It’s supposed to be like this; you’re supposed to exploit every single advantage you can to be able to level up your characters, increase their proficiency with weapons and in turn elevate them from mere adventuring party to the level of Demi-Gods. Because no matter what you do or where you go, there will always be an enemy who is stronger than you, has more powerful high level equipment than you, whose more skilled than you or in the worst team killing scenario, all of the above. Disgaea rewards the most devious and cunning of players as much as its worlds reward the dastardly deeds going on in them. It’s all very intimidating and overwhelming, especially if this is your first time playing a Disgaea, but once you get the hang of it, there’s simply no end to the amount of customization or variety of strategies you can come up with.

With a game that’s so heavily focused on its gameplay and replay value, you’d either expect the graphics to be astounding or just plain muddy. Disgaea 2, bearing almost no difference in graphical style from the first, isn’t either. The characters, cut-scenes and portraits are all rendered in sharp 2D while the areas, the special effects and the movement are done in 3D. Disgaea manages these two conflicting styles well, thus creating a world which is easy on the eyes but doesn’t woo (or distract) you away from the core gameplay. Speaking for the sound, the music is not really too special, but it won’t get on your nerves. Typical anime sounding beats that compliment the non-serious story along with a few sound effects that pass muster some times and become one with the background after a while. Thankfully, the same can’t be said about the voices. Both the Japanese and English voice-actors do an exceptional job here as in the original, bringing out the personalities of each character perfectly and distinctly: You’ll never confuse the hotheaded brawler yet boy next door pitch of Adell with the typical attitude/ slang heavy grating of Axel. You just can’t help but sit back and watch the game’s lines being spoken one by one. Atlus has a good record of stellar English voice acting in their games like La Pucille Tactics and Atelier Iris and its good to see Disgaea 2 continue this trend.

Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories may provoke a bit of a mixed reaction from the hardcore fan at first, due to its remarkable similarity to the original. However, the addition of the Dark Court, new classes and items will be more than enough to satiate their desires, not too mention the benefit they’ll get out of the story since some characters from the original appear here as well. For your average role playing gamer, Disgaea 2 represents an enormous and overwhelming package. So many things like the Geo-Symbols (items that grant special effects like extra EXP, no tower throwing, 2X attack, etc. dependingon which colored areas they’re in), dual classing, the Chain system, the Pirate Maps that can be collected in the Item World from hunting different groups of rogues to access a whole new world full of terrifying foes, leveling up their weapons and summoning terrifying beings with the flick of a finger all play such important roles and yet they all form only the tip of the iceberg. While it has its difficulties and can be outright punishing if you’re not alert enough, the game still offers a great amount of playability to the average fan of either strategy or role-playing.

The ho-hum score, graphical déjà vu and intimidating nature aside, Disgaea 2 is one rocking quest that will eat away at your life, one level at a time and brings out a certain degree of hardcoreness that was all but forgotten in this age of ‘play-by-itself’ entertainment.

Rating: 9/10

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By N2H

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