Disgaea: The Definitive Review
Dood.
Have you ever played a game so fucking good, it utterly poisons your expectations of an entire genre, forever?
[21]
I remember visiting a friend, who is now so indescribably important that I can’t even name them, while they were in the middle of a little bit of SRPG skirmishing on their PlayStation 2. The graphics were semi-3D, showing bitmap sprites next to polygonal terrain and weird coloured prisms. I asked what they were doing. “Oh this is Disgaea. I’m in the item world.” “What’s an item world?”, I asked. And boy, did I get told1. Suffice to say, the wild realisation that strikes when Disgaea’s item world concept is explained to you is quite something when you’ve literally just been grinding out Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the way over. All of a sudden, FFTA felt like some dusty relic; very old and very dull and very unimaginative.
I’ve noticed in writing Affectionate Discourse how much I praise and respect videogames that redefine my boundaries and widen the horizons of the form. My top five games ever would arguably be a suite of such things, those games that blew my mind with their bold ambitions as much as their quality of systems, narrative or audio-visual expression. But then, in a classic fashion, I’d listen to any of the Desert Island Discs inspired videogame podcasts and gleefully fantasise about filling in my own choices. My Perfect Console being particularly fun due to how some guests interpret that definition of perfect hardware. For me, it carries some of that root desert island sensibility. I’d be picking games I could play forever. And Yoshitsuna Kobayashi’s Disgaea would absolutely be one of them. This is because it has hilariously large level caps, but also caps on skill abilities that have less to do with the sensibilities of the designer and more to do with reaching the largest numbers the hardware can calculate within the maths used for game logic2. Long-missed RPG grinding expert Ulillillia had extensive documentation on this, wherein he detailed abusing invulnerability geosquares to grind out magic hits as a means of scaling to those machine-breaking heights, thanks to them calculating a theoretical maximum based on the PlayStation 2’s ability to multiply 32-bit integers. Ulillillia’s internet presence was entirely scrubbed, but their YouTube videos on Disgaea have been preserved. One shows how you can deliver 1.38 billion damage points in a single turn with appropriately hyper-levelled characters, equipment and skills.
I remember reading on some long-forgotten website or forum that Disgaea was, apparently, coded entirely in assembly. On a PlayStation 2. If true, the sheer commitment needed to carry out such a task chimes perfectly with how wildly iconoclastic the game is with the tropes and general air of restraint of the generic SRPG. Both offer a particular air of deranged madness and a fairly frightening corruption of norms, but contained wonderfully with a particular sense of focus. Disgaea is anything but generic, it’s instead brilliantly, quixotically individual. It’s extremely challenging to search for anything about the game being coded in machine code, because any mention of ‘assembly’ naturally brings up Disgaea’s Dark Assembly, which is yet another astonishingly brilliant bit of radical thinking. I remember my friend explaining a particularly nice exploit for fast levelling which, beautifully, requires an explanation of the Item World, the Shop, weapon modding and the Dark Assembly to fully understand. It goes something like this: to mod weapons to confer improved XP gains for faster levelling, you need to unlock certain items in the Shop, then Item World those items to subdue specialists. Specialists confer bonus buffs onto equipment and by defeating (subduing) them inside the procedurally-generated maps of Item World, you obtain them as stat buffs, plus you can combine specialists of the same type to level up the degree of buffing and also transfer them into other items. On lower level things, this is a proper grind. However one particular item, a set of glasses called Foresight, had a glitch where its specialists were insanely high-level and already subdued. Where the average specialists offer buff increments in the tens or hundreds, these Foresight people were offering thousands. Ranking the shop up to unlock Foresights for sale was a different matter; you had to pass bills in the Dark Assembly. Now, the Dark Assembly is like an evil parliament, where because you are also evil, you can bribe or sedate members to sway the likelihood of winning a vote on your proposal to add better things to the shop. And even if the vote doesn’t go your way, you can opt to fight it out! This takes some steel, as typically the Dark Assembly members carry a few mega-level badasses, but the fact that everyone who voted for you becomes an ally in the battle makes things slightly more manageable. And hey, what an amazing bit of side content, right? As with so much of Disgaea’s innovations, you see where the brilliance shines and how Disgaea follows through on its concepts with a delightfully playful logic. It makes you wonder if the Foresight specialists glitch is actually deliberate, as the levelling path you need to take to get to the point where you can exploit it is a superb way to get a really decent team together. It’s not deliberate, sadly, as the glitch was fixed for the Nintendo DS version. Incidentally, and perhaps as some circumstantial evidence to back up the coded-in-assembly claim, I exploited the glitch on PlayStation Portable when my buddy exploited it on PlayStation 2. MIPS code running on both, but ARM on DS, meaning that perhaps there had to be some old-school cross-assembler madness for the ARM version, or a complete re-implementation, maybe? I’m not sure if the PS2’s Emotion Engine and the PSP’s Allegrex can natively run each other’s code, but they are both broadly compatible with each other. In theory this would extend to the arithmetic underpinning Disgaea’s bountiful love of stats and values, and it's interesting that the PSP version keeps the ‘bug’ intact, along with several other glitches from the PS2 original. Can we presume that if genuinely coded in assembler, these were just too opaque to fix for an easy port?
I got pretty far in Disgaea, up to unlocking the Cave of Ordeals grinding maps. It was on one of those maps where I once showed a credulous journalist how you could go from level 1 to 100 in a single hit, thanks to all the brilliantly exploitable features Disgaea allows for such things. But as with so many grindfests, I can only grind for so long. But I never stopped buying Disgaeas. I got the third one with my PlayStation Vita, and ordered the fifth shortly after getting my Nintendo Switch. For me, it’s a simply wonderful handheld game, especially when plumbing the depths of Item or Class World3 (Disgaea 3). I’ve skipped four and six, but now Disgaea 7’s out, my friend tells me that it’s the best one yet with insanely great metagrinding. Funnily enough, I took at look at my Vita save for Disgaea 3 and found myself quickly sucked into an item world run to nab a Statistician specialist, as is entirely expected when booting a Disgaea save after five fucking years or so. There I found all the remnants in my team. Characters recovering after a transmigration, weird sub-types on levelling charges to unlock more classes, mages with under-developed spells in need of a bit of invulnerable geostone4 spellcasting. Amazingly, the thread was so easy to pick up again, and the grindplan re-emerged from my unconscious. I was thrilled, quite frankly. But I doubt I’ll be able to make it stick for the long run. Disgaea is one of the games I think I’ll really commit to when I’m too old to be able to move. Or possibly if I sustain (another) crippling back injury. The fact I know I could play it when extremely elderly is what cements it as one of my five games for My Perfect Console. The only problem is which fucking one? The knobhead purist in me says the original, Disgaea Hour of Darkness. But the others seem so oddly compelling with their expansions and ornate additions to the Hour of Darkness core. I mean, Disgaea 5 has some deep shit going on with a curry house and recipes you can craft there, while the third has a whole shtick about being at high school and arranging character’s desks in class, joining school clubs and whatnot. To be honest, if it’s as special a perfect console as others have defined it, then the correct answer would be Every Disgaea. Because they’re all fucking brilliant.
[I already gave the score]
Disgaea treats every item (weapons, armour, accessories, consumables) as a seed to create a ladder of procedurally-generated maps with increasingly difficult enemies. It gives you the option to escape every ten levels, and hence the item gains ten levels if you choose to exit there. Carry on in sets of ten to maximise gains, but each stage see progressively more difficult enemies to defeat. If you pop your clogs, you lose all your progress. Rogueliking before Spelunky, yo. Normal items have 30 levels, the rarest have 100. The implications for this ridiculously elegant and sophisticated formalisation of meta-levelling should be obvious: Disgaea is an actual work of genius.
Max character level is formally 9999, but Disgaea has a 'transmigration' feature that allows you to accrue a base starting level from which you can restart a character's level grind. Transmigration maxes out at 255. As this confers additional bonuses on character stats, in combination with maxed out buffs from other sources gives a theoretical maximum HP of 42.8 million. The actual expressed maximum may be lower, but when it comes to these kind of depths, rest assured that Disgaea is absolutely the game to explore them with, because it positively encourages this kind of behaviour.
Class World is Item world, but for created characters (as opposed to ones you are given as part of the story). As you complete each level, you add it to the level-up tally for the character you're plumbing. There are other details about Item/Class world that are far too complicated to go into here but suffice to say, the metagame in selective levelling is fucking intense.
I have realised far too late into this piece that these demand an explanation. Geostones are tiny pyramids that affect a selected area of any given map. They colour the floor tile and often add effects such as buffs/debuffs, invulnerability while on tiles of that colour, reverse damage etc. A wise player can arrange geostones so that destroying one will trigger a chain reaction that ends up destroying every stone and thus ramping up the stage's combo meter, which directly affects the quality of reward for completing the stage. As noted with Ulillillia’s mission to find the max possible damage of any given spell, casting against invulnerable enemies (or stones) increments the skill rating for that spell (to a maximum of 255), meaning Item World jaunts where you find an invulnerable stone are an invitation to level your skills. It's really quite beautifully generous to allow progression on raw damage dealt rather than damage received by the target.