Who's got two thumbs and questions regarding whether this 1001 list has too many sequels? Disgaea! Dis guy. Me. Get it?
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories is the sequel to Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, which I thought was alright mechanically, but didn't want to spend much time, if any, with the main characters, or their plight, in whatever the setting was. It was a nice concept for a tactical RPG but needed a different lick of paint for me to be interested.
Can the sequel sort my problems with the first game out, or is it just more of the same?
Frustrations
An anime intro video sets the tone of Disgaea 2 and it's a tone I'm not too fond of, I must admit. What on Earth is this guy wearing? What isn't the other redhead wearing? Will this look be too off-putting to play the game? It's a brief intro video, though it does look well animated. Not that I'm the expert.
Disgaea might look simple but it's put together quite well. Sprites atop 3D environments isn't new, but it looks pretty good here, and all of this dialogue is voiced. I'm not a fan of the over the top and cartoony voices themselves, though, but it sounds like they employed some competent voice artists for these characters.
The writing isn't terrible. Clichéd, I suppose, but with twists and humour too. All of the humans in the land, save for our hero Adell, have turned into demonic monsters, or are at least on their way to becoming such. Adell and his family are attempting to summon and defeat Overlord Zenon to lift the curse that has blighted the land.
This kind of presentation is what you're going to get for the most part in Disgaea. Detailed artwork depicting characters in several poses and/or expressions. If you get a scene involving sprites, they'll be a bit more animated, but still, we're working to a certain set of limits here.
However, even though I'm not a fan of these characters either, nor what they're saying, in some way, I am a fan of how it has come together. Disgaea 2 looks really polished. Where have they cut corners? What is substandard? If I were a fan of the style or the story, I'd have value for money right here, surely?
Well, that depends on the gameplay as well, doesn't it?
Fun Times
I sped through the tutorials to refresh myself with the way Disgaea does things, and, satisfyingly, it does them in much the same way - perhaps even identically, I can't case my mind that far back. You have a bunch of fighters, skilled and equipped in their own way, and can get them moving and attacking and all the other actions until you run out of things to do/hit and let the enemies have a turn.
The big thing for Disgaea is that its battles skew ever so slightly towards the puzzle side of things with the introduction of Geo stones, which affect a certain number of tiles on the map in different ways. They might boost everyone's health, or generate more experience, but they could just as easily make enemies tougher so that you have to coax them out of that coloured zone and into a more favourable one.
Or you could just destroy the Geo stone itself, and watch a wave of damage radiate out to whatever hapless foe remains standing on that colour. At least, I think that's how it worked.
Further Frustrations
I was still very much in the thick of tutorial fights at this stage, but the same issue as the original Disgaea returns: fights feel disconnected from the storyline because they take place on mini-skirmish arenas that you are teleported to from a hub world of sorts.
At that hub world, you can recruit more fighters - permadeath is still a problem you'll need to deal with, so extra fighters are waiting in the wings - equip your party with items and weaponry, and even go to an item world of some description to fight for fancier loot.
There's definitely an RPG here, where maximising your parties potential is important, but it doesn't gel with the storyline. Adell has mistakenly summoned Rozalin instead of Zenon. He wants to defeat Zenon to lift the curse. The only person who knows where Zenon is to be found is Rozalin, who obviously doesn't want to just lead someone intent on killing her father directly to her father. But, as she has been summoned, she is duty-bound to Adell in some fashion. She's got to delay and hinder Adell's progress, right?
That's a good storyline. You can run with that. But when every other fight results in you being whisked back home to heal your party, it breaks whatever journey we were going on. Imagine if Frodo and pals had an encounter with some Orc and then zipped back into The Shire to heal up before popping back into the next fight with a troll or whatever. The storyline of going on a journey is meaningless.
You can approach the fighting in whatever way takes your fancy, or benefits your party. If they're standing next to each other you can perform fancy tag-team moves on an opponent, and they do look pretty good. They're over in a flash, though, so following what's going on might be tricky.
It's the same puzzle as the first Disgaea, though. What order do I tackle the problem in? When do I execute an attack order before the end of my turn? Do I get rid of the Geo stones now, or never? For fans of the tactical RPG looking for something a little different, Disgaea could well be that little different thing. And so could Disgaea 2, because apart from looking much better (if memory serves), they do the same thing.
In later flights, I'm sure I'd need to bust out the specialist moves and execute my orders to perfection, but I'm a scrub looking to get a job done, so hitting things with basic attacks until they disappear, preferably before I lose all my health, is fine by me. Not fine for earning bonus rewards, though.
Even with cutscenes, either in-game or not, nothing feels like it's really linked together, apart from the plot itself. The spoken words make sense, but they aren't connected to the environments I'm fighting in, and they're not connected to each other in any logical way that I can see. The enemies have no story, save for that they were once human. Should we not be destroying them, then?
It's weird to say such a thing when I also say that Disgaea looks nice and polished, but that's where I stand. It looks pretty good. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
After an hour, I left Disgaea 2 on this cliffhanger of sorts. It's not the first time Rozalin has muttered something under the breath, and probably won't be the last. It's just what she does. Again, there seems to be the makings of a decent story here, but I just can't see myself getting into it.
Final Word
I would play more of Disgaea - either game - if I cared more about the characters and their stories. The look, while I'm not a fan, is at least well done in Disgaea 2, so I'd probably go for this sequel over the original. From what I can tell, you don't need to know the plot of the first game to get into this one. Some characters crossover, but I'm sure you could manage just fine if you weren't to know that.
Once again then, like Pikmin before it (and others, I'm sure), the 1001 list throws up a sequel that does everything the original did but, because it does so 'so well' that it warrants another spot on a must-play list. I'm not terribly fond of that logic, especially when the paragraph before the argument says 'nobody was really crying out for a sequel, but here it is', but can see their point.
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories comes across as a great package. It's got faults, sure. What game doesn't? It's got a presentation that won't win everyone over, be it the artwork or the cartoony voices to match, but it does them well. It's got gameplay that is perhaps better in short bursts than long stints, which is no bad thing.
I just wonder why both games are here when Disgaea 2 is clearly better, if only because it was able to improve upon the original. Then again, that's easy to say when you've just finished playing it, and haven't touched the first in however long it has been since I wrote about it.
So there you have it, another useless conclusion. Play it if you like it, don't worry if you don't, I don't have any real reason for saying anything one way or the other, but Disgaea is, as a series, ever so slightly more attractive as a thing to play thanks to Disgaea 2.
Result.
Fun Facts
This game was remade for the PlayStation Portable, a nice fit for this type of gameplay, where it included more content for fans of the series. It was itself remade for the PC, which doesn't seem an amazing fit, but then PC gaming does cover quite the range of genres these days, doesn't it?
Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, developed by Nippon Ichi Software, first released in 2006.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2006, via emulation.