Disgaea 3 Absence of Justice Immediately

Title is a summary of it all, but here's the detail. This will mostly be comparing it to the other two games, rather than about Disgaea 3 itself much.

Disgaea: Hour/Afternoon of Darkness is absolutely one of the best strategy RPGs ever created. It's got a great storyline, great characters, fun battles and is hilarious as all Hell. The only other Nippon Ichi game that I'd say is close to how funny it is (and maybe even more) is Makai Kingdom.

Disgaea 2, however, strayed from this path and attempted to be more serious. While it did make some upgrades to the battle system, it almost entirely ditched the humor aspect of Disgaea 1 and made me sit there and wait during the entire game for the good jokes to pop up, my expectations having been set from Disgaea 1. Now, that's not to say I dislike serious games, Phantom Brave is yet another one of the greatest strategy RPGs made and also probably one of my top 20 favorite games, but Phantom Brave was its own game series. It'd be like if Terminator 1 was the slasher/horror flick that it is, but then 2 starred Will Ferrel and was a comedy. It just completely changes the atmosphere of the game, it's uncalled for, it's out of place.

Even if you take the title of Disgaea 2 off and name is something else, I still feel D2 is rather mediocre. It does add a bit more to the battles, but the characters and story, to me, are pretty bland. I was honestly quite bored with the game the entire time. It's a decent game, I had fun moments in it and it's not completely devoid of humor or style, but it's really just an average game.

Disgaea 3, however, goes right back to the roots, as if they realized the mistake they made with the second. It goes back to being a humorous game with nonsensical plot devices. That was the magic of Disgaea 1. It surprises you by ending up actually having deep characters who are more serious than what the game starts it all out to be. They actually care, have feelings, love, hate, cry and it's unexpected since in the beginning, it's a comedy where nothing matters. Mao even looks almost identical to Laharl. The game isn't QUITE as funny as Disgaea 1 and it's somewhat easy to see how the story plans to unfold, since it follows a very similar path as the first game, so while it's much better than the second, it does fall short of being as good as the first, mostly due to a slight lack of originality.

The last note about D3 has to be about the graphics. It's both good and bad that it's the same engine as the PS2 games. Since it looks the same, you could say it's good for being nostaligc. Plus, it's a comedy game, it's supposed to be cartoony. It just wouldn't come off the same if it had graphics on the same level as Killzone 2. However, at the same time, they could have upped the graphics a LITTLE and still have it mostly be a cartoony sprite style. It is on the PS3, after all. Might as well put it to good use, you know?

Now, about the actual game itself, rather than comparing. Disgaea 3 has excellent gameplay and characters. The story is a bit cheesy, but still entertaining, especially with Disgaea's setting. It's a great game, there's not much else to say other than to rant on about how much I love it, so instead I'll say what I really hate about it, the huge flaws.

One is the camera. There's three view modes: zoomed in, normal and overhead. Zoomed in has no purpose, it just makes the low-resolution sprite graphics incredibly jaggy and it's annoying that the default view in towns is zoom (yes, you can zoom out and make the graphics look like they're not trash)! Overhead view is useful for seeing around more corners so you don't have to keep turning the camera in circles, but whenever you try to do anything while in overhead (attack, use an item, end turn), you will have to press X twice instead of once, the first time sets the camera back into zoom, whereas if you're in zoom or normal camera view, you only need to press it once. After that, if you need to see in overhead again, you must press L2 twice again, so it becomes annoying to have to keep pressing L2, L2, X, X just to do ONE thing, repeatedly over and over. The camera also zooms in every time during an attack animation, making it bit annoying having to see those pixellated PS2-port graphics every attack.

Another thing is the absurd number of unnecessary monsters in every fight. For example, there is a boss named Prinny Mask, who himself states, "I am anti-social." However, in the actual fight with him, he's on a map with twenty or so other enemies. What is an anti-social person doing with almost two dozen allies on the map? And this happens in every single fight in the game. Every fight. Even the last fight in the game, with the cutscene showing just you and the boss, suddenly he has four other allies on the map, with no explanation for them. Sometimes, just you versus the boss is okay. That's right, NIS, you don't have to dump a load of monsters on every map for people to have a challenge, or to have fun. Lastly, this is worsened through the fact that every map must be totally cleaned of enemies before you can continue. You can't win by simply defeating the main enemy on the map.

The final annoyance with this game is that as it progresses, map puzzles become more and more frequent. My favorite levels are the small maps with just you, the enemy and nothing but bashing each other. I like getting to the point of things and doing the dirty work of punching one another's lights out, not dealing with dumb puzzles to disable enemy invincibility, or to cause all spellcasters on the map to be silenced and to not do those puzzles renders the map unplayable. It'd be okay and even fun if it was just a few maps, but midway through the game, this will become extremely annoying and repetitive when every map has some ridiculous enemy buff that you have to work around with a puzzle (specifically, it's with the geo blocks in the game, for anyone wondering what I mean by puzzles).

Despite those flaws, I highly recommend Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice. Overall, it's an incredibly excellent game. Everyone who likes RPGs and owns a PS3 has *NO* excuse to not own this.Get more detail about Disgaea 3 Absence of Justice.