An amazing game and a must have for DS owners everywhere; you'd be crazy to miss it!
Story:
The game is broken up into a number of chapters, called episodes. The story revolves around the game's main Protagonist (?) Laharl, prince of the Netherworld, and the son of King Krichevskoy, the ruler of the Netherworld. In the netherworld exist demons of all sorts. Laharl, planning on sleeping for only a few days, ends up drifting into a 2-year nap. During that period of time King Krichevskoy passes away, leaving the Throne empty, and the place of Ruler of the Netherworld vacant. Many demons suddenly rise to the opportunity, and that's what Laharl wakes to - demons trying to become the new king.
You'll spend the first few chapters of the game putting these demons in their place, ensuring that no-one has a chance of becoming king, making Laharl's journey to the throne a lot easier. However, a more involved story unfolds in the later chapters, although I won't spoil that here.
Gameplay:
Disgaea DS is a Japanese Strategy RPG (JSRPG). In the game's main central hub area, the Overlord's castle, you can buy items for use in battle, purchase new weapons and songs (for use in the Item World, but more on that soon) heal your party members, teleport to different areas to fight enemies and progress through the story, and summon the Dark Assembly. By using the teleportation guide you'll go to different small yet interesting game maps where hordes of enemies wait for you to engage in battle.
The areas you go to will have several battle stages in them, the battle maps, usually 4 or more, where you must your enemies. Each chapter introduces you to a new area, and you'll beat the chapter after clearing the area, by progressing through the stages. Playing the battle stages is different to controlling Laharl in the overlord's castle. Instead, you have a single blue panel somewhere on the battle stage. From here, you select the characters you want to dispatch and place on the field, then move them to a position on the field. You can dispatch as much as 10 characters in a stage, and send them back to the panel to swap with others; but once you use 10 you can't dispatch anymore characters.
You assign commands to each character in your turn, and select the "execute" command to have each character perform their assigned commands. You can then give more character commands or end you turn, and allow the enemies to move around and attack you, before it comes to your turn again.
You can assign commands such as attack (a basic attack on an enemy), Special Attack (where your character performs one of many special attacks he/she has), lift (where you lift a teammate or enemy and throw them somewhere else), just to name a few. But here's where things get interesting.
You need to work out how you're going to position your party members and have them attack in such a way that you ensure victory. Each character can only move to a selected space and perform a command in each turn you have, which will require some thinking as how you'll plan out your enemy's defeat. For example, there are a number of enemies in a straight line protecting a larger, stronger enemy which can attack your characters from it's position at long range. Do you send your characters to gang up on the larger foe and take out the weaker ones after, or do you have one character distract the larger foe while the other party members take out the smaller ones?
Another worthy addition is your special attacks. As any human character can equip weapons such as swords, fighting gloves and even guns, they develop special attacks as they level up with their weapon, depending on their weapon. Each character also specializes in one or more weapons, meaning you should equip them with those weapons to ensure maximum damage. Laharl specializes in swords, so equipping him with a sword will give him sword-based special attacks. Each attack also has a different range or space it takes up; and since they damage allies too if they are in range, you need to think about how to utilize these attacks.
Summoning the "Dark Assembly" allows you to create characters, increase game difficulty, and more. You use Mana gained from defeating enemies to use the dark assembly. Creating characters is good fun; there are a large number of classes, human and demon alike, to create characters from, meaning you can customize your party as much as you like. You might not even want to use the game's original characters!
If you want better equipment in stores, you won't get it as the game goes on; you need to summon the dark assembly in a debate. Here you bribe the senators to get them to vote for you, by giving them items and such; but only if they want it. If you secure enough votes required to carry out the order you'll win the debate, but they get harder the higher the shop rank gets. Of course, being demons, you can just pummel them to win if you lose the debate, but you might not want to do that until you train your characters more; the senators are levels over 100 as the level cap is 9999, after all.
And if the many battle stages aren't enough for you then why not pay a visit to the item world? Here you enter an item in your inventory to explore a randomly generated dungeon within the item to power it up. The dungeons are always different for every item; and even the going through the item world can seem like a real chore more often than usual, it's well worth leveling it up.
Disgaea DS brings everything anyone could ever want in a JSRPG; funny anime-style humor, infinite grinding, infinite customization and endless gameplay... you would be crazy not to add this game to your DS collection! Hard to put down, Disgaea DS will have you playing for hours on end; literally.