Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited
With flames licking at our heels and fear in our hearts we entered the Netherworld. The screams of the lost souls of humanity carried on the dank, sticky, hot air. “Dood... Please may we have our sardines dood?!” No, that sentence is not a mistake: Disgaea is back and quite possibly even bigger and better!
For those who haven’t heard of the series, Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited is a traditional turn-based strategy game. You move your characters around a large grid, from tile to tile, and execute moves until all opponents are vanquished. There’s a great deal of depth in Disgaea as not only do you need to worry about where you place your characters, “Geo Blocks” and Panels add benefits and negatives to different areas of the map with effects such as no ranged attacks in their area of effect or giving your enemies a 50% defence boost if they’re standing on that area of land.
Don't worry if you've never played the previous titles as each one has a stand-alone narrative. Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten follows Valvatorez, a mighty vampire who was a powerful tyrant, but since losing his powers holds the lowly job of Prinny Instructor in the Netherworld’s prison. Prinnies are humans that have been transformed into penguin-esque creatures and serve penance for their indiscretions in their past lives. The story in A Promise Unforgotten is quite frankly nuts. Valvatorez promised his latest class sardines upon graduation but instead they’re abducted by order of the Corrupternment. Seeing as Valvatorez is a vampire of his word, he can’t rest until they’ve got their fishy treat. If you like humour in your video games then you’ll love this title – from Valvatorez’s stubbornness, to his minion deviously tripping up other protagonists – this is a laugh out loud affair.
The main story arc consists of ten episodes and they’ll take you around 30 hours to finish as you move through the Netherworld destroying monsters with your supreme tactics. When the final boss has been slain it’s not game over though as you can continue to level up your characters until they reach level 9999 (that’s not a typo). Grinding is the game in A Promise Unforgotten but replaying stages with different tactics ensures that it’s never painful. The game does suffer from a steep learning curve though and that’s simply down to how many gameplay systems there are in play at the same time. Don’t worry as there’s an in game ‘Cheat Shop’ where you can purchase bonuses such as extra EXP which helps a lot and a certain amount of Disgaea games is about learning and exploration of the mechanics.
Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten also features a “Cam-Pain” system that has you placing buildings within the Netherworld that strengthen your team. You’ll appoint Cabinet members and can even lobby the Senate to propose bills for your equipment and characters. You can even send your Senators to take part in other player’s hearings. That’s not the end of Disgaea 4’s online elements though, Netherbattle lets you create a pirate ship, assemble a crew and participate in invasions on other people’s games. If that wasn’t enough you can also delve into the Item World: a dungeon crawling exercise that lets you power up individual pieces of equipment as you move through the items ten floors – this could almost be a full game in itself.
Visually the game is an absolute treat on the Vita’s screen with the high-res characters and maps popping off the screen. The animations are also great and the combos look especially pretty. Music and audio is a big thing in a game that you’ll be spending hours with and luckily the music is cheery, unobtrusive and both the English and Japanese voice acting sound fantastic.
Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten comes with all the DLC which was released for the PS3 version which is quite frankly a mammoth amount of extra gameplay. You’ll also get four new characters and Time Leap (a scenario featuring Fuka and Desco). All in all, this title is a PC/home console sized epic, lovingly ported to handheld.