Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Preview
Atlus' next strategy RPG has a lot of charm and a lot of depth, so fans of games like Final Fantasy Tactics should sit up and take notice.
Strategy RPGs have carved a good niche for themselves among fans of traditional console role-playing games. Rather than bog you down with tedious random encounters like many other RPGS, these games put the emphasis on tactical battles between your forces and your enemies. So ideally, you'll be looking forward to each progressively more-challenging battle rather than groaning in frustration as your progress is impeded by yet another tediously slow-paced combat sequence. Well, maybe that's a little harsh. But then again, so is Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, a game that puts you in the role of the young, rebellious heir to the Netherworld, Prince Laharl. Laharl awakens from a long slumber to find that his father, the king, is dead and that many other demons are vying to become the rulers of hell. So the embittered prince and his coquettish vassal, Etna, set off to restore rule in Laharl's name by any means necessary. Or, rather, by engaging in a series of tactical battles reminiscent of games like Final Fantasy Tactics.
The similarities between Disgaea and previous strategy RPGs are obvious, but they're mostly superficial. Just from a visual standpoint, the game uses a graphical style and perspective that's nearly identical to that of Final Fantasy Tactics. However, the anime-influenced character designs are rather more lighthearted in this game's case, and in fact, Disgaea is filled with charm and quirky humor. At one point fairly early on, Laharl has a run-in with a foppish demon calling himself "The Dark Adonis," whose flowery speech clearly gets on Laharl's nerves. Just before he commences his attack, Laharl tells his foe that he'll simply refer to him as "Mid-Boss" from that point on. There are a lot of other amusing gags in the game, many of which can be directly attributed to Prinnies, penguinlike demons of the underworld that are basically Laharl's whipping boys. These guys pack knives and explosives and refer to themselves and others as "dood." Weird. But a good kind of weird.
The turn-based combat in Disgaea resembles that of previous strategy RPGs, but it seems as though the developers went out of their way to change up the usual formula, just to give fans of other such games some new systems to learn. One nice thing about the gameplay is that it's pretty fast. During enemy turns, all enemy forces move simultaneously, so you won't need to watch one bad guy after another take baby steps toward your squad. You also have the option of either executing a character's actions right away, or having all your characters' actions resolve in order at the end of a turn--this makes for some unusual strategic twists and also helps the pacing.
Then again, this faster pacing is necessary, because the battles in Disgaea can be much bigger than those of similar games. You can have up to 10 characters on your side in a given battle, and it feels like a lot--especially since each character can join with any adjacent allies to initiate combo attacks, which are one of the unique aspects of Disgaea's gameplay. The combo attacks not only look cool, but they can also help inflict a lot of damage on your foes, and they have the added benefit of allowing lower-level characters to ride the coattails of their more-experienced friends, effectively letting you quickly level up your relatively inexperienced comrades.
Another unusual aspect of the gameplay is that characters can pick up and throw either their allies or their enemies. This looks comical but has many tactical uses. You can pick up and throw a character in danger of running out of hit points out of an enemy's range. You can quickly gain ground on your opponents by throwing one of your more-powerful companions right at them. You can throw allies across chasms. You can pick up and throw enemies away from you--or into each other, in some cases. What happens in those cases isn't what you'd expect, though. Say you took a level-five Prinny and a level-10 Prinny and threw one into the other. You'd end up with one level-15 Prinny. Weird. But what did you expect from the Netherworld?
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- Atlus Co.
- Nippon Ichi Soft.
- Fantasy Turn-Based...
- Release: Aug 27, 2003 »
- ESRB: Teen
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