A game that is hard to like and very hard not to like at the same time.

User Rating: 8.5 | Makai Senki Disgaea 3 PS3
If you ever wondered how come some people have the tenacity to spend hundreds of hours on a game than you have finally found your answer. It's not that anything Disgaea 3 does is innovative or impressive it's just that is has so many interesting and fun things to do that you can't stop playing it.

Story: the main characters Mao, son of the greatest overlord is on a quest to defeat his father for breaking his video game console. While in starts as a childish story it soon turns into a twist filled frenzy of strange charters and plot changes. While the main story line is good the theme and the setting filled with originality and (less accessible) humor is the cherry on top. Non the less the story is interesting and will take you on a journey of self discovery and friendship in originally designed Netherlands.

Gameplay: you control a group of characters, each with specific classes, skills and items. You play all missions and maps as a turn base game in which you chose an action for each deployed charter and than wait for the opponents finish their turn. While it sound easy it is not. There are a lot of things to take into consideration like: panel effects on the ground, combos, special attacks, tower attacks, lifting and throwing, geo cubes and much more. It would take a lot to describe everything which also means that this game has a very steep learning curve. It will take several hours to get used to everything but once you do it you will not get enough. Aside fro main missions there are many other type of maps to play most of which are randomly generated so you never fill you are doing the same thing when when you are only grinding.

Graphics: sprite models on a 3D environment still feels like old-school so nothing ever feel impressive. yet the game still looks nice enough to be enjoyable. Some special attacks look incredible and some weapons look great even as sprites.

Sound: this is probably it's weakest point aside from the high learning difficulty. The voice acting is bad and the music is annoying most of the time. Each character has a wide collection of annoying grunts to punish you with every time they have to do even the most insignificant action. Played more that 80 hours on mute.

Bonus content: while some game pride themselves with the amount of content only a handful even come close to the amount of content offered by Disgaea 3. After you finish the game, aside from new game plus there are a lot of things to do. Just to name a few : item world where you play maps in order to upgrade items, class world for upgrading characters, extras maps, training maps, x-dimension and land of carnage, reverse pirating several special charters to unlock, improved version of classes you already have and so much more.

Over view: this game is complex and hard to learn. It requires a great amount of grinding in order to reach 9999 level, getting the best gear and clearing all extras content maps and zones. It also has great gameplay, variety, random maps, a lot of characters to create and upgrade, a lot of items to collect and a lot of things to do. It's difficult to get used to all the mechanics but once you do you will have a difficult time letting go of this great game.