Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories Review - IGN (original) (raw)

Three years ago, NIS America released a title that ushered in a renaissance of the strategy RPG genre. Disgaea made RPG veterans rethink the classic turn based tactics of battle with a humorous plot, hours of replayable strategy and unorthodox demonic heroes. Now, three years later, NIS returns with a new story, new characters and some adjustments to gameplay with Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. But is it a massively improved title over the original, or does it ride the coattails of its predecessor? In some ways, it does a bit of both, while not necessarily becoming any more accessible to newcomers to the series.
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories is the tale of Adell, the last human being on the world of Veldime, whose other inhabitants have been turned into demons. For some reason, Adell has escaped this curse from Overlord Zenon, a powerful entity also known as the God of all Overlords (thanks to the fact that he's killed more than a thousand other overlords). This curse has slowly been stripping the Veldime inhabitants of their memories and consciences, so to save his family and friends, Adell decides to defeat Zenon and force him to remove the spell. However, a spell cast by Adell's mother to summon the Overlord goes wrong, and actually summons his daughter, Rozalin, ritually binding her to Adell.

Adell and Rozalin -- The stars of Disgaea 2.

Rozalin is a stuck up princess who has never been outside of her mansion walls, that exist somewhere in a nether realm. She alternates between wanting to kill Adell because of his desire to defeat her father and being impressed by his dedication to his family, something that she has been denied from her insulated upbringing. : Adell's feelings of being continually tethered to the princess are practically mutual (even more so because everyone automatically assumes that they'd make a great couple). Because he still wants to confront Zenon, he makes Rozalin a deal: once she leads Adell to her father so he can confront the demon, Rozalin will be released of her summoned role. Thus begins the basic plot of the game, where Adell, Rozalin and their rag tag group of characters attempts to track down and defeat Zenon. Along the way, you'll wind up acquiring a number of additional party members such as: a ninja who's the last or her clan, a flying toad that was once Rozalin's best friend and servant, and Adell's little brother and sister. You'll even wind up tracking down and acquiring some familiar faces to the NIS franchise, including some of the characters from the first Disgaea title.

Disgaea 2 marks the return of a number of systems that veterans of the series will easily recognize. The Hub System returs: for the most part, Adell will always return to Veldime, although in one or two instances players will leave the confines of the city walls for a different location, albeit with similar character services to be found. The Netherworld Hospital is one such place players will continually return to, restoring their health from battles and receiving prizes for the amount of damage they've received. Similarly, the merchants in the game will always increase their stockpiles of premium weaponry, items and armor based upon the customer rating that you've achieved from consistent patronage.

The familiar grid and panel system are back.

The Dark Assembly makes a return as well, although there are a number of tweaks that have been made in the final version. For one, there are no more ranks to speak of when you attend a session -- the strength of the proposals you can try to get passed on the floor are completely governed by the amount of Mana that you have at any point in time. Some of these include boosting the number of counter attacks that a character has per round, the level of items that can be purchased in shops, and even how tough opponents will be in the next round. While it would've been nice to see these effects last much longer than one round of battle or one visit to a store, it's good to see the game abandoning the Promotion Rank system in favor of Mana. The Dark Assembly also lets you fill out the ranks of your squad, making warriors, ranged fighters or support characters, amongst others. You can even create monsters that you have defeated, allowing you to field parties of various abilities and skill levels.

While getting minor proposals like these passed are important, you can also pass more important bills such as getting nominated as a senator, seeing the "true ending" of the first game, and even unlocking new areas to adventure in. These aren't necessarily easy things to accomplish, but they can be done in one of two ways. The first is the standard method of bribing senators to your side of thinking by handing them items or weapons. Now, you'll need to worry about drunk and asleep senators, who will either act erratically during their vote or abstain completely. This can be combated with various items to get them to a sober and alert state of mind. The other way to influence the Assembly is to become an infamous felon, which raises your profile and gets various assembly members to see things your way, as well as getting you a discount in shops.

Typically, being a felon is a bad thing, but in a world run by demons, it's actually something that you want to encourage. In Disgaea 2, your party will receive subpoenas from a body known as the Dark Court, which tracks everything that you happen to do in the game. Every now and then at the Post Office, a party member may receive a summons to appear before the court for various reasons, such as defeating enemies too quickly or having too high a level. You can choose to accept or refuse a summons at any point, although if you actually want to appear before the court, you'll need to enter the subpoena's item world and battle your way down to the specific level that the court resides on. Like any other item, subpoenas have citizens that can be defeated, although you won't be migrating judges to other items; instead, when you finally reach that level, you'll receive your judgment. If it's guilty, you get a reward, as well as a stamp over your character profile with your felony count. If you're innocent, however, you can be punished with a variety of effects, including being confined in the body of a prinnie for a period of time.

Maybe he should appeal this one...

Although the concept of making your characters felons is cool, they could've been handled in some better ways. For one, you can literally let felonies sit at the post office without any positive or negative effect happening to your characters. You'd think that the court system might try to enforce their will at some point if you simply let these documents go, whether it was in the middle of a story battle or a different item world exploration. The second quirk is that while someone can be accused of a crime, such as having too high a level, anyone of your party members can stand in for them in the courtroom and take on their felony. This makes it entirely possible to avoid negative penalties as long as you make sure that someone in your party is guilty of that specific crime that you're accused of.

As you make your way through the various levels in the item worlds, you'll come across three new changes. First, monsters in the item worlds will continually vie with you for control of key elements, going out of their way to attack chests and the innocent citizens of items that you can migrate. This can sometimes be beneficial, although it does call into question the AI of the monsters: more than once I was spared from losing a level because a monster chose to attack an NPC instead of me. The second one comes in the addition of shops and hospitals that can exist within the item worlds themselves, usually at every tenth level of an item (up to 100). The kind of shops or citizens in these neutral areas will vary from level to level, and you may even find that there isn't a safe haven there at all, forcing you into a last second desperate fight in the middle of an "item town" but for explorers of every item, having the option to heal and equip your characters without leaving the item itself is a major plus.

Ninjas are bad, pirates worse, but Ninja Pirates? Deadly...

What is a serious bummer though, is the increased chance of running into Item World Pirates in Disgaea 2. Every now and then, a pirate of indiscriminate class will fly by and land on a level that you happen to be fighting on. Unfortunately, you really won't have a chance to defeat them at all -- they're designed to be able to kill any member of your party with one strike of their weapon during an attack (although I've seen some pirates fire off two or three attacks in a single turn). The only way to escape these killing machines is to literally run for an exit and hope that you can get there before your entire party is slaughtered. Escaping can be easy if you have one party member that's close to the exit to begin with, but if you have to fight your way through the monsters on a level and try to avoid the pirates, you'll usually lose a ton of your characters to these enemies. They may also choose to pop up back to back in a level, finishing off the job that a previous pirate started. I can't count the number of times that I'd sunk two or three hours going deep into a couple of items, simply to be slaughtered by some one-two punch of pirates.

That brings me to the battle system, which, for the most part, is the same as the original game, but with a few minor tweaks. Allow me to provide a quick summary of the original: battle is a turn based, chess-like affair of moving your characters across a battlefield often dissected by various Geo Panels and Geo Symbols. Geo Panels are colored squares that bestow certain effects upon a character that happens to move onto them, such as invincibility, extra Mana or the inability to cast spells. These panels are controlled by Geo Symbols, which are little pyramids that power these effects. By targeting and destroying these symbols, you can strip the effects from these panels, inflicting damage upon anyone or anything that stands upon them. You may also wind up turning the panels a different color if you don't eliminate them from the battlefield entirely. If you learn how to master the Geo Symbols and Panels, you'll inevitably have a better time making your way through a battlefield. You'll also receive more points for a reward at the end, including money, items and experience.

One of the newest tweaks to this system added in Disgaea 2 is the addition of Geo Monsters, little creatures that live under random Geo Symbols that are completely neutral on a level. Not only will these creatures literally pick up a pyramid and move them to another panel, potentially stripping any beneficial effects from monster and party alike, they will also launch attacks at whoever they choose. It's pretty funny to see an invincibility pyramid run around and attack monsters, knowing that it can't be harmed at all. It can also be potentially frustrating to arrange your party for an attack that will clear a massive field of Geo Panels, only to watch the Geo Symbols get up and walk out of the path of danger. If anything, Disgaea 2 forces you to be much more aware of which symbol you'll need to attack, and the further you go, the more panel puzzles you'll encounter. Many of these have massive invincibility pitfalls, which can accidentally cause you to render both you and your enemies impervious to any attacks and force you to reset the game.

Hope they don't have a fear of heights...

You'll also discover for many of these massive panel puzzles that combos is the lone way to actively survive, especially during later stages. Not only will you need to master getting at least two or more attacks in a row on monsters, but during some of the later stages, you'll need to concentrate on team attacks as well to maximize your damage. You'll also need to utilize the ability to fire off tower combos by stacking your party members on top of one another and knocking an opponent literally up the chain of allies, creating a ton of damage. It may not seem like it's important, but in case you wind up uncovering the Shadow World, (one of the newer secrets in Disgaea 2 that's a mirror of the real world) you may need to use this new skill to quickly eliminate foes and unlock new stages. Then again, the shadow world is governed by its own random effects created by the Dark Sun, which randomly produces effects ranging from strengthened party members and monsters to instant kills. While you have no control over the Sun itself, you can actually try to defeat the Sun by sacrificing a character via a tower attack to try to beat it into submission. It may sound crazy, but it's pretty cool if you can actually see your characters win a battle against the sun and the monsters on that stage.

Disgaea 2 looks a bit cleaner than that of its predecessor, but in some ways, that's not really saying much, considering that the game always had an old school appearance in its visuals for the character models. Some of the animations for the newer attacks are pretty nice, and hold up the often over the top nature of the battles that NIS games are known for. While the 2D appearance of the game still holds its own within the confines of the strategy that the game presents, the camera still sucks when you need to get a sense of who's attacking you behind certain objects or what levels you may need to navigate for an attack, and way too often you'll have to watch the AI fire off a strike with the background blocking the view of the intended target. Fortunately, the sound of the game is still spot on thanks to the voice acting that doesn't miss a single beat with its delivery of humorous lines and innuendo. You will find a number of seemingly recycled music from other places though.

Verdict

In some ways, Disgaea 2 is almost exactly like the first title in the series, it suffers from a lack of explanation of various terms or features. There are a couple of times where you'll wonder just why making certain moves in the Senate are important, or why doing specific things in the item world can help, and they're not explained as well as you might need them to be. Even though there's a continual amount of help present, you may discover that you'll be somewhat lost every now and then as you journey through the game.

Many of the new additions are mild modifications to the original title; the subpoenas are literally extensions of the item world, the Geo Monsters are relatively mild additions of the pre-existing battle system, and the game still hasn't fixed things like the camera issues. While the hardcore won't have a problem with that, even sinking multiple dozens of hours to defeat certain bosses at early sections of the game, casual players may find themselves literally feeling like they've been here and done this before a ton of times, especially if they've played a lot of strategy games. That being said, Disgaea 2 is still an awesome strategy title that manages to provide an obscene level of depth and strategy with at least 8 endings, hundreds of characters to create or discover, a new court system and an additional Shadow World on top of the Item World. Plus, when you get to an estimated full completion around 200+ hours, you know you have a title that will keep your attention for some time to come.