It only took 10 years, but Laharl, Etna, and Flonne are finally reunited and it was totally worth the wait. Disgaea D2 continues the capers of the original trio while delivering the same social-life-threatening grind of fighting, looting, and leveling the franchise is known for. All the over-the-top, prinny-tossing, tower-attacking mayhem is here, and the banter between the main characters is the best it’s been since the series began. What's more, the new monster mounts and Demon Dojo systems open up the already voluminous combat options, making Disgaea D2 a bottomless, color-soaked pit of endless depth that I was happy to tumble down.
The Netherworld’s most dastardly demons are up to no good again, and the story is so much the better for it. For a series that’s so consistently meaty in terms of gameplay, Disgaea has felt surprisingly off its game since it moved on to tell new stories with different characters, and the positive impact of the original cast’s return can be felt immediately. The writing is snappy, silly, and deliciously mischievous. The whole voice cast sounds like they’re having a blast, but Etna’s anime episode parodies really steal the show, firmly cementing the same self-aware anime campiness that made the original a classic.
Visually, D2 is about what I’ve come to expect from a Disgaea game. It’s unabashedly low-tech, but its vibrant, varied color palette and distinctive collection of playable classes and monsters have a charm that’s remained effective despite how often the franchise has reused much of its art assets. Its motley crew of cuddly, caricatured creatures paint a vision of Hell quite unlike any other in gaming, and though its overall look felt a little too familiar to me, you'd still never mistake it for anything else in the genre.
Disgaea has always nailed tactical, turn-based RPG combat - marrying whimsical skills and attacks with a dizzying number of options and mechanics. It’s never cared about catering to the uninitiated, and I couldn’t be more pleased to see that trend continue here. In a world of streamlining and focus-testing, D2 is unapologetically, and meaningfully complex, sporting a vast latticework of gameplay systems that work together in ways that make each feel worth learning.
Oh my monk's learning healing skills because he's an apprentice to a cleric? Maybe I should gear him up to have more skill points (SP) to cast spells with. I guess that means I'll have to level up this piece of SP gear for him in the item world, which means I'll want to get a better ship to delve deeper into it than before to get bigger stat bonuses...it's like an endless hamster wheel of mechanics, and at the end of the day, all of it helps make my party stronger and more fun to fight with.
Series vets have known these joys for years, but with every new Disgaea also comes newly tweaked or introduced features, many of which have backfired in the past. Thankfully, all the additions in D2 are well thought out and executed.
Easily the biggest new feature is the ability to use any monster class as a mount. It’s essentially NIS’s latest bid to make monsters feel worth using, and it totally works. Your mount takes the hits for you and handles movement, the mounted character is free to attack and use spells, and both units gain full XP in the process. You can put squishy magic users on a hearty dragon, or have archers ride a moth up to the perfect sniping perch.
This effectively solves two problems that have long plagued the series. Monster units were often tough to justify due to a lack of raw hitting power, and leveling a new human character from scratch was always painful because they could die so easily. Intelligently pairing humans and monsters with the mounting system eliminates these issues, while also giving you access to some spectacular-looking mounted attack skills. It's a win-win all around.
Another great add is the new Demon Dojo, which lets you accelerate the growth rate of a single stat per character as they level up. Training facilities rank up the more you use them, increasing the growth rate for the associated stat, and allowing you to assign more characters to that type of training. This gives you an incentive to reincarnate your characters and re-level them with the improved stat growth, and when used in tandem with mounts and the returning apprentice system, it allows you to create imposing hybrid units for almost any purpose on the battlefield. The possibilities are damn near limitless, and the urge to create a party of “perfect” characters becomes nigh impossible to resist.
And with a theoretically unlimited number of randomly generated dungeons to dive into in addition to the replayable story maps, you'll be chasing perfection for quite some time. If you know what you're doing you might be able to blow through the story in under 40 hours, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. New Game+ is the real game, with rare side bosses to find, and a towering level cap of 9999 for you to reach again and again. There's a reason some people are still playing the original 10 years on, and D2 looks like it'll have the same long legs.Verdict
Stepping back into the item world again and getting sucked in for level after level felt like putting on a favorite pair of shoes that never wore out. After some entertaining but hollow-feeling detours for the franchise, D2 puts Disgaea back where it belongs: the top of the strategy-RPG heap. Its ongoing tendency to reuse old, familiar visuals keeps it from being a revelation, but mechanically, this is the most finely tuned, feverishly addictive entry in the five-game series. I came with time to give, and a healthy appetite for old-school grinding, and just as its predecessor before it, Disgaea D2 took me for every free hour I had.
