Disgaeappointment

Nobody could have been more excited than my husband and me when Disgaea II: Cursed Memories was announced for August of 2006. We preordered it, cleared our gaming calendar to make room for it, and dove right into it when it arrived. We haven't been playing it nonstop due to work, holidays, more work, and other games, but we've been playing at least a few times a week for the past several months, and we've finally beaten it. At least, inasmuch as a game of this type can be beaten. That is to say, we defeated the primary end boss and saw one ending to the game. It was a major let-down.

I realized straight off when we started playing that the plot wasn't going to be as engaging as that of the original. I soon came to realize that the characters weren't as deep as in the previous game, either. And the ending---at least the basic that we saw---was completely devoid of emotional impact and didn't bring any kind of closure to the game. We then sat through about ten minutes of credits, only to be treated to a little more "ending," which actually created more loose ends than it tied off.

There's still alot to love about this game. The main thing, I should stress, is the gameplay. One doesn't play a Disgaea game for the story, after all. All of the gameplay elements that we loved from Disgaea were present. The turn based, grid based battle, the two-dimensional character sprites, and the endless, unique Item World dungeons. The same basic leveling-up system for characters, skills, and items is still in place. And back for an encore is the colorful stable of completely customizable character classes making up our unique batallion of sprites including my personal faves Berrymelon, Emeril BAM!!!, Paris Hilton, and Optimus Badass.

I haven't really been able to decide how I feel about the changes to the gameplay. For example, the amount of leveling required to unlock the later iterations of the character classes has increased geometrically in this game. Where in DG1 you could level your Male Brawler to level 100 in order to unlock all of his later forms including his final form, the Eternal Fist, in DG2 you must level your Fighter to level 10 to unlock the Warrior; then you must reincarnate as a Warrior or start a new Warrior and level him to level 20 to unlock the Destroyer; and so on. This could be either a pro or a con, depending on how much time you want to devote to making the most powerful characters. The Majin class isn't even available on the first playthrough, which may be for the best since, once again, the Majin makes all other character types worthless.

Then again, to say that one has beaten Disgaea II is akin to saying that one has beaten Tetris. There's always more to do. And now that we have the pitiful plotline out of the way, maybe we'll eventually get around to playing through the hundreds of hours of additional/hidden content.