This game offers everything Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness had, plus 10x more.
That said, this game is absolutely incredible. I got it a week ago and have been playing nothing else (i.e. Dissidia FF has been cast aside).
If you have played Disgaea:AofD on the PSP and enjoyed it, then this is definitely a must-get. Truth be told, I was expecting this to be a mere extension on the first installment, with only some minor changes to the storyline and so forth... but I was quite wrong. This game offers everything the first game had, plus 10x more. If Disgaea:AofD was considered a "deep" strategy RPG... then I don't know what this is.
The key differences between this game and Disgaea:AofD:
- Geo symbols can now "move" at random during the enemy's turn, making the game more challenging (i.e. your character could be on a perfectly neutral panel, and then all of a sudden the panel changes to Damage 60%)
- "Treasure chests" are now in play, which contain rare items, EXP points, or HL (these can also be found in the main "lobby," or main town, in this case, at the beginning of each chapter)
- In the Item World, there will be impromptu visits by random groups of "pirates" (i.e. different monster types); maybe I should've read the manual before I started, but the first time such pirates appeared, I had no idea what was going on and started freaking out because the entire screen turned red (my first thought was that my PSP had froze... but then a siren started blasting, so I was like, "... huh?"); anyway, these pirates are usually higher level characters, and if you defeat the lead pirate, you obtain a piece of a "treasure map"
- This is a minor issue, but one of the things that annoyed me about Disgaea:AofD was the fact that every time you wanted to transmigrate, you would automatically lose the 100 mana, even if you changed your mind and cancelled, or found out that the character you wanted to transmigrate to required more mana than you had; in this game, this does not happen!
- There are A LOT more characters to create/choose from, and you don't have to level up 5 different characters all the way to lv 200 before a class becomes unlocked; in this game, once you have enough mana, you can try to pass a bill with the Dark Assembly to create new types of characters, such as "a lovely hunter" (i.e. archer), etc.
- For some reason, it seems a lot easier getting bills passed in the Dark Assembly in this game... there are also a number of items that you can collect/win in the bonus gauge that are specifically for the Dark Assembly. For example, "hard liquor" can get a senator drunk, and "smelling salts" will wake up a senator if it is sleeping
- Item Worlds now have "mystery rooms"... these appear once in a while and sometimes allow you to visit the Hospital in the middle of the Item World, or you can buy Dark Assembly-only items that you can't otherwise buy, or you can level up the item you are in
- Felony/Subpoena - as if this game does not already have enough "new stuff" to get used to... here is yet another thing. Once a character commits a crime (i.e. if you achieve a long geo chain, etc.), you can obtain a subpoena, and once you go into the Item World of that subpoena and get to the stage where the Dark Court is located, you can obtain a Felony. This is kind of the equivalent to the character "ranks" that were in Disgaea:AofD... the more you have, the better
- There are now three shops - Weapons, Armor, General Items
The Questionable (but not necessarily bad):
- The story this time seems MUCH longer than the one in Disgaea:AofD. I'm not a big fan of the story in general (I like this game for the gameplay), but I do like to have an idea of what is going on, so I try not to skip the story sequences... honestly, I don't remember Disgaea:AofD having such long sequences, and if I remember correctly, there wasn't a story sequence before every single stage... which is kind of what it's like in this game
- Monster classes now have to be leveled up if you want the higher-level monsters... whereas in Disgaea:AofD, you defeat it once and it automatically becomes unlocked