I lose myself in your sword...

Predictably, I've fallen out of love with Disgaea DS. As I stated in my previous post, the game is simply deep to a fault. It is a min-maxer's playground, rife with opportunities to tweak characters in pursuit of optimal performance, from re-creating characters with better starting stats and stat growths to dungeon crawling in order to level a sword. It's a great concept, but one whose depth I find repulsing.

To be fair, one does not need to delve too deep into the game's cavernous character development system. In fact, one NPC in the game's main lobby area exists for the sole purpose of reminding the player that game may be completed with a minimal amount of understanding about what exactly is going on. Yet, aside from Disgaea's cute anime-style story, I simply don't find the game engaging enough to heed that lowly NPC's warning. I hope that doesn't cause him to have an existential crisis.

The main issue here is the combat system. Disgaea DS introduces some very interesting concepts that help to keep combat interesting. The most notable of these are Geo symbols - power ups or debuffs that affect the units standing on the particular colored tile the symbol happens to be resting upon. These symbols are far from static, capable of being moved to another color to affect different tiles or destroyed to unleash devastation unto units unfortunate enough to be standing on the symbol's spaces. While many of the campaign's battlegrounds have made minimal use of Geo symbols, item dungeons often introduce extremely complex levels that force the player to develop strategies to adapt to these power-ups, and even include levels with enemies only able to be defeated using a chain reaction of destroyed Geo symbols. This allows the player to approach each battle as an open-ended puzzle game, creating multiple possible strategies and a truly mind-boggling level of replay-value.

Yet, this level of understanding takes a large amount of time and devotion, and the game offers little to those unwilling to make such an investment. Without the use of Geo symbols, the game's core combat mechanics are bland, with relatively uninteresting level designs and little space for character customization off of the battlefield. One of the joys of the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance series was the development of truly unique characters through inventive combinations of job skills. With weapons governing most of the skills available to each character, there is little difference between my Samurai and my Centurion or my Ninja and my Battler aside from stat growth and aesthetics. This leaves me relatively uninvested in the characters and teams I bring to each battle. In a game that seems to demand constant combat for the sake of grinding, I find this to be a deal-breaker.

Disgaea's interesting narrative and over-the-top, anime-style presentation will most probably be enough to motivate me to complete the game. But that won't be for awhile. For now, I miss my all-purpose Gladiator-Dragoon and stealthy Sniper-Fencer waiting for me on my Final Fantasy Tactics A2 cartridge.

-- Mike