Endless Afternoon
Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness is quite possibly the longest PSP game ever made. It's also awesome.
Published: November 4, 2007
My love for Nippon Icho Software's Disgaea series is no secret. We ended up giving Disgaea 2 a 10/10 score and claiming it to be the finest example of a strategy role-playing game on the market. Now, finally, the series has come to the PSP, and for the most part everything that made the series amazing on the PS2 makes it just as good in portable form. It's not quite a 10, but that's only because there were things added to Disgaea 2 that make it hard to go back to playing the first one.
NIS America sure as hell tried to make it as easy as possible, however. Thanks to a Sony-mandated rule that PSP ports have to include new content, NISA took it upon themselves to pull out all the stops, creating a complete side quest starting Etna, the impish she-devil that actually starts the normal game by trying to wake up Laharl, the son of the Netherworld's Overlord who croaked a few years back. Instead of waking him, though, Etna offs the guy with an errant shot from her pistol.
For those that have played through Disgaea before (or at least seen the intro), that might sound like a lame setup for a side story, but the game is quick to poke fun at the excuse too, and in fact there are tons of in-jokes and references to the main story (handy since you normally unlock the bonus mode by beating the original game), all told from a slightly different perspective. Make no mistake; Etna's story is a far tougher, infinitely more grind-heavy experience, which should be music to powerleveler's ears, but it's an experience well worth going through if you were a fan of the original story.
Chances are, if you aren't a fan, you either hate SRPGs or you've never played the game before, because the single most important thing that the Disgaea games have done is completely rewrite how a SRPG flows. Going back and playing things like Final Fantasy Tactics feels downright antiquated when you realize Disgaea does things like encourages experimentation with moving and attack radii. Until you lock in a command with a character by executing any stacked actions, you can always back out and change the order your units attack, the kind of attack, even where they moved to.
It makes for a brilliant kind of play experience because you're free to mess around with things and until you finally tell the game you're done, you can keep playing around with possible attacks. This is a good thing, because Disgaea isn't an especially forgiving game after a few hours, requiring plenty of pre-planning and some carefully devised attacks. Additionally, nearby characters can have an affinity to each other and will automatically initiate a tag-team attack with up to four characters, so you can seriously beat on enemies before they have a chance to fight back (though of course they can do the same). This and things like the ability to pick up and throw allies and enemies alike (throwing one enemy into another will actually create a more powerful version of that enemy, which is great for leveling up), the fact that every single item in the game has its own randomly generated world to explore and a great storyline all make for an immensely satisfying game.
In fact, Afternoon of Darkness (a play on the PS2 version's Hour of Darkness title) easily wins the award for most possible gameplay for your dollar, offering a near-unlimited amount of replay value in the order of hundreds of hours of play time -- if you're the grinding/power leveling type. Throw in the fact that there's an Ad-Hoc two-player mode with special GeoCubes (specially power-ups that you can use during duels to change the field or your characters) and the ability to trade items between PSPs, not to mention extra characters from other NIS games like Makai Kingdom and even Disgaea 2, there's just a ridiculous level of stuff to chew on.
NIS America sure as hell tried to make it as easy as possible, however. Thanks to a Sony-mandated rule that PSP ports have to include new content, NISA took it upon themselves to pull out all the stops, creating a complete side quest starting Etna, the impish she-devil that actually starts the normal game by trying to wake up Laharl, the son of the Netherworld's Overlord who croaked a few years back. Instead of waking him, though, Etna offs the guy with an errant shot from her pistol.
For those that have played through Disgaea before (or at least seen the intro), that might sound like a lame setup for a side story, but the game is quick to poke fun at the excuse too, and in fact there are tons of in-jokes and references to the main story (handy since you normally unlock the bonus mode by beating the original game), all told from a slightly different perspective. Make no mistake; Etna's story is a far tougher, infinitely more grind-heavy experience, which should be music to powerleveler's ears, but it's an experience well worth going through if you were a fan of the original story.
Chances are, if you aren't a fan, you either hate SRPGs or you've never played the game before, because the single most important thing that the Disgaea games have done is completely rewrite how a SRPG flows. Going back and playing things like Final Fantasy Tactics feels downright antiquated when you realize Disgaea does things like encourages experimentation with moving and attack radii. Until you lock in a command with a character by executing any stacked actions, you can always back out and change the order your units attack, the kind of attack, even where they moved to.
It makes for a brilliant kind of play experience because you're free to mess around with things and until you finally tell the game you're done, you can keep playing around with possible attacks. This is a good thing, because Disgaea isn't an especially forgiving game after a few hours, requiring plenty of pre-planning and some carefully devised attacks. Additionally, nearby characters can have an affinity to each other and will automatically initiate a tag-team attack with up to four characters, so you can seriously beat on enemies before they have a chance to fight back (though of course they can do the same). This and things like the ability to pick up and throw allies and enemies alike (throwing one enemy into another will actually create a more powerful version of that enemy, which is great for leveling up), the fact that every single item in the game has its own randomly generated world to explore and a great storyline all make for an immensely satisfying game.
In fact, Afternoon of Darkness (a play on the PS2 version's Hour of Darkness title) easily wins the award for most possible gameplay for your dollar, offering a near-unlimited amount of replay value in the order of hundreds of hours of play time -- if you're the grinding/power leveling type. Throw in the fact that there's an Ad-Hoc two-player mode with special GeoCubes (specially power-ups that you can use during duels to change the field or your characters) and the ability to trade items between PSPs, not to mention extra characters from other NIS games like Makai Kingdom and even Disgaea 2, there's just a ridiculous level of stuff to chew on.