Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories
Don't even read this, just go buy the game. Now.
Published: August 29, 2006
The battles themselves will be instantly familiar to most strategy role-playing game fans (and, honestly, if you're a SRPG fan to begin with, you've probably already played the first game). Gridded-off, fairly tiny maps are populated by up to 10 team members (though you can make as many as you want, but that's again getting ahead of ourselves here) and a smattering of enemies. All characters are bound by simple movement and attack limits that control how many squares they can traverse or attack with, though the variety in character and enemy types means it's hard to predict exactly how far either side can move in a turn -- though you can always peek at a character and see all their stats.
What's unique about Disgaea is how it handles the turn-based system. Your characters can scoot around the battlefield in any order you choose, and will act according to what order you execute commands. This means you have complete freedom to move characters around for combo set-ups, and then pick what order they attack in, be it a physical blow, a ranged attack, or a spell. None of the characters will act until you Execute your commands from the main battle menu, and until you do so, you can freely move them around, back them out of their commands or movements, and generally just take your time setting things up. Until you select End Turn, the enemy won't even move.
What's so brilliant about the game is how quickly all this happens, though. The menus are all incredibly zippy, characters move fast, and backing up a little to re-coordinate the attacks is just a few button presses away. This is in start contrast to most other SRPGs, which usually lock you into a move as soon as you've made it, and it makes the series incredibly friendly to newcomers to the genre.
About the only area that's a puzzler (literally; some levels make you think your way through them) is the inclusion of Geo Panels, color-coded squares on the grid that hold special properties. It might be that you attack harder or gain more experience for killing an enemy on the square, or it might prevent movement past the square, make the enemies more powerful, keep you from using the Lift Command (nearly everyone can lift another player and throw them to get them to an area otherwise inaccessible), and so on. Luckily, you can destroy Geo Symbols, which then detonate all the Panels that were linked to that ability. If the Symbol was a different color than the Panel it was on, all the colors shift to that Symbol's color, and if you happen to hit other Symbols while the combo is going, it continues the chain.
All this adds to the rewards multiplier at the end of a battle, which nets you better items, more experience, more money (called, appropriately, Hell, and abbreviated HL), and so on. Sure, it's a little complicated, but it takes just a few battles to understand properly and if used strategically, the Geo Panels make the fights much more rewarding. Once you've got the basics down, it just makes the game deeper, not harder.
In fact, the game as a whole is rather easy, if only because, like the first game, the challenge is directly proportional to how much time you spend leveling up your characters, which can stretch into the hundreds of hours if you want it to. This is the core of the game, though, so people that get off on powerleveling will be in heaven, while those that hate it will probably feel the game is a little on the shallow side. In every sense, this is a game about getting back what you put into it, though, and for guys like me that love seeing characters grow stronger, it's pure bliss. Enemies will auto-level to keep the challenge fairly level, and you can always elect to make harder enemies appear in the Dark Assembly if you want more challenge.
