Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories
Don't even read this, just go buy the game. Now.
Published: August 29, 2006
The Dark Assembly is one of the main non-storyline carryovers from the previous game. As you fell enemies with your characters, you gain mana, which is used to address a court of demons that vote on a bill that anyone in your party can put forth, from making better items appear in shops to creating new character types to even running as a senator yourself. What's so cool about the Dark Assembly is that it follows the basic tenets of the Underworld: demons are by nature amoral. They'll fall asleep during votes, they'll get drunk (which can make them vote completely opposite of how they appear to stand), and they can be bribed. If all that fails, you can always just elect to beat the snot out of them, though you'll have to be pretty well leveled-up and from then on, they'll be even more opposed to your bills.
The Dark Assembly is also the key to creating characters. Since anyone can approach the Assembly, if you create a new party member, they become apprenticed to the person that created them, making for a stronger bond that increases the likelihood of a combo attack (when two players are in adjacent squares on the battlefield, they'll sometimes do a combo attack, and it can extend on all three sides of a character and a few squares deep). They can also learn skills from apprentices that become permanent if leveled up -- making for characters that have skills they couldn't normally get.
With Disgaea 2, though, it's gotten even more complex. Now, characters can be reincarnated as a completely different class (or sex if you want an all-girl party or a sausage fest), but depending on how high a level they are and how much mana is spent, the skills and abilities from the old class can carry over. Though they'll start at Level 1 again, they're infinitely more powerful than a base Level 1 character. It sounds like a small addition, but it adds dozens more hours of play time if you really get into the system.
By far the most involved side questing system, though, is the return of the Item Worlds. Every single item in the game has its own world that can go triple digits deep. Each floor is randomly generated, and the enemies are based on the item's rarity (which is also randomly generated), but most items have a few residents, occupants that will embue the item with more powerful stats if captured. With every level down that you go in an item's world, the stronger it becomes. It's possible to take the cheapest sword in the game and upgrade it to the point of being as powerful as something 100 times more expensive if you spend enough time in the item world.
Now, as if the whole system wasn't addictive enough as it is (again, like the Dark Assembly and messing with character classes and reincarnation, you can spend dozens of hours just leveling up a few items), NIS added the ability to transfer residents or combine duplicate residents into a more powerful version. As you descend through an item world, you'll be able to stop and rest on safety floors (like, say, Floor 10) and heal, continue or exit out. Normally, you can't leave without an item called Mr. Gency's Exit, though, until you get to the 10th level, so it's wise to pay attention to the rarity of an item to make sure you don't get creamed heading into it.
What's more, just about everything in the game is tracked at some point. The more items you buy, the higher your customer rank in stores, and the better the items become. The more you heal yourself in the hospital, the more valuable the reward they give you, and the more enemies you kill or Geo Symbols destroyed, the more likely you are to have a Subpoena issued. This is actually a good thing, though, as anyone who is charged can pass the felony off to another character if they enter the final level of a subpoena's Item World. With more felonies come more skills, so it's certainly not a bad thing to be... wanted? (OOOHHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHOHO... So punny!)
None of this pulls away from the story, though, which is important. It may distract, sure, but you're never unable to jump back into things as you see fit, watching the whole game unfold through simple hi-res character portraits and text boxes. It's here that the game's humor really shines, though; character interaction is heavy in cutscenes, and throughout the course of the game, you'll meet plenty of new comers and familiar faces from the first game. There's a man cursed to be a frog with multiple personalities, a washed-up has-been actor that is trying to prove he's not dead, a pair of newscasters -- one of which is a bunny-looking guy with ears that form exclamation points with his eyes as the dots -- and oh so much more. You'll see predicable character growth (particularly if you played the first game), but that doesn't mean it isn't handled well, and the whole message of the importance of family and upholding core values might be trite, but it's not preachy.
