Dominates the strategy RPG genre. This game will drain all of your time and still leave you begging for more. Addictive!
User Rating: 9.7 | Makai Senki Disgaea PS2
Let me start this review with a short background of my demographic. I am a 26-year old married guy with a 2-year old toddler and a 4-month old baby. I’m a member of the United States Navy (in other words, I work a lot) and I have several weekly obligations that take up my time. My wife and I have pumped 60 hours into Disgaea so far... and we haven’t scratched the surface. Seriously, in Disgaea you can level your characters into the thousands. My team of characters is currently around the mid-20’s. That should give you a good idea of the time you can spend on this game if you really want to. To put it quite blatantly, Disgaea offers up the closet thing to an endless challenge that may have ever been created. Don’t let the cutesy and simplistic 2D characters and 3D world maps fool you. The graphics in Disgaea do their job just fine, and the game’s sound and voiceovers are excellent. If you’re new to the strategy genre, this might not be for you. But don’t let that stop you from at least giving it a rental to find out. I’d never played a SRPG, and wasn’t really into turn-based games at all until I purchased Disgaea on a whim, and now one week later here I am taking a short break to write a review. Even as I speak, my wife is busy leveling up an item so that we can make a stronger weapon. Does that sound cool? Well, it should. The most unique thing about Disgaea (in my opinion) is the Item World. Every single item and weapon that you come across has a rarity level. For the non-rare and non-legend items, you can go inside of the item and face ten challenging floors of monsters. With every ten floors that you clear the item will level up and gain strength. Also in the Item World are Specialists. These little guys are like special monsters who give stat boosts to your item or weapon. Subdue them and watch your item’s power grow, or move them into your favorite weapon and destroy your opponents. Up to 10 characters can participate in any one map battle at a time. This is almost not enough, though sometimes on small maps it can seem crowded. The heart of the game is creating your own characters from the many, many class options. As you level them up, new classes will become available and you can start all over again! It’s eternal fun and if this game turns out to be something you enjoy, you can say goodbye to that girlfriend and find a stay-at-home job. The storyline of Disgaea is excellent, as well. The characters that the game itself creates, and are part of the actual story, are hilarious and cute. You can read all about the details elsewhere, but basically a young demon prince has awakened to find his dear old Dad has been dead for two years. Now every demon in Hell is trying to claim the throne of the Netherworld and your little pre-teen squad must retake it for the rightful heir. Oh yeah, this game is a real blast. I could go on and on forever. There are other features that make every map unique, like the fact that they are all randomly generated and most have what are called geo panels. The geo panels are mostly just a way to get cool bonus stuff. Of course, if you’d prefer, you can always just steal those cool items from a monster. Disgaea has found its way into our home and we couldn’t be happier. I expect to put in well over 500 hours playing this game and I may not even stop there. This is a quirky, fun, addictive and unique game that everyone should at least try. For those that love it, you’ll thank me, and for those that don’t.... well, Pac-Man needs some more fans anyway. 
