Disgaea 5

[DANGERMAN]

Got sent this to review and was a bit daunted by the prospect. I attempted the first Disgaea twice, on the ds and ps2. Got many many hours in to them but ended up dropping them. They're too much, too many layers

Good news, Disgaea 5 is easier. The story is essentially one long tutorial, things like the item world and the more complex mechanics are gated, and a lot of them you don't really need to worry about.

That being said I've hit one of those points. I'm 5 worlds in, 30 hours, and I'm at a point where I have to do some bullshit before I can linearly push on.

Basically there's a difficulty spike, the jump in enemy level isn't a huge problem, I can, theoretically dwindle their numbers down enough, but their placement is a problem. The enemies giving me grief are way up high, too high for my melee and gun characters to reach, but my archers and mages are too weak.

So I have a few choices. Grind them up a bit, they only level with a kill, buy them ultra strong armour, assuming it's available, or head in to the item world and level up some armour myself. This is what Disgaea is, at least from my experiences with the series, and that's fine if you've got nothing else on your plate. The combat is fun enough, I like the humour and nonsense of the series, and this is a good looking take on the series

There's a bunch of stuff in the game I haven't touched, like innocents, bribing the council, changing evilities. It's good, but it's Disgaea with everything that comes with that

[DANGERMAN]

I went back to this last night and ended up putting hours in to it. I went to the item world to warm up (you pick an item to level up, every level you pass in that world increases the stats of said item). It takes ages to get through, it's 10 levels before you can back out and I did 30 I think, but because it was fairly low level with all the battle mechanics in play it was a good warm up. 

 

After that I went to do a story level, I got through it but it's a proper rise in difficulty. I hadn't set my party up properly, I just picked all the story characters plus a few others but really I needed more range or better movement. I could do with another flying character really. 

 

I had another go this morning and took a look at people's gear. That's when I realised how out of my depth I was now. I suppose you're only really supposed to worry about it if you need to worry abouts it, on a simpler rpg you'd always be equipping the best stuff, there's just too much in Disgaea for that, too many options available. There was someone who was missing stuff so I picked an item for him to equip and took it to the item world. 

 

It's a fun game but it can be a long process