Disgaea: Hour Of Darkness (PS2) is a great game with colorful characters and a humorous story that you can't resist.
You play as Laharl who has plans to become overlord after his father's passing. Some things he cannot stand: love and women with sexy bodies.
Etna is his assistant and leader of the Prinnie Squad (ah those loveable penguins) and is pretty sarcastic. She's a pretty funny character in her own right.
The gameplay is turned based much like Final Fantasy Tactics and the object of the game on every map is to lead your forces to victory. This is achieved in many ways.
You have a number of missions that you take on from the central hub. Here you can manage your team, heal them, as well as other things. You can also replay any mission that you've completed as well. Missions involve a cutscene to introduce you to the mission and another one at the conclusion of the fight.
The objective is based on a grid based board. Each character has a set amount of moves and actions in which they can perform. They also have a special attack. Once the action has been performed they can no longer move that turn. You are also able to do combo attacks if one or more characters happen to be in the area of the enemy. You'll see a pics of the character slide together letting you know who's involved in the attack.
Geo Symbols are placed throughout the colored field. They can either cause a bonus or penalty to ALL that are on the board. You can destroy these geo symbols thereby causing damage to those on the color based on the geo symbol or field.
You can also recruit for your army. Also, you can receive better armor and weapons. Then there is the item world where you can actually go inside the item and improve its abilities by going through randomly generated levels and enemies.
What's good about this game too is that it can be played mulitiple times for the game contains multiple endings. The maximum level that can be acheived is Level 9999.
Another thing worth mentioning is the court system. You can petition the courts for various things and the court will vote nay or yay on your request. You can always take matters into your own hands and literally fight the courts but, I have to warn you: some of those on the bench are pretty powerful characters AND there are alot of them. I'd do this if you have leveled up alot of levels and have a few powers you can call upon to aid you.
FINAL VERDICT: if you love strategy games then you can't go wrong with this game as it is done very well in a anime style, it has a great sense of humor, and it can be quite addictive. I found that as I finished an episode I couldn't wait for what the game has in store for me in the next episode. It has a great cast of characters and many different types of characters you can add to your army. I enjoyed this game from start to finish and I think you'll enjoy it too. It's a PS2 Greatest Hit now so there really is no excuse to get this cult classic.