The Strategy RPG genre is all about fighting, with storyline taking a backseat to the gameplay. As such, you’ll find Disgaea’s story to be pretty simple. You play the part of the Dark Prince Laharl, who’s just awoken from a two-year slumber to find that his father, the Lord of the Netherworld, has passed away. There’s no time to grieve as every major demon in hell is trying to usurp Laharl’s claim to the throne. Etna, Laharl’s sassy and spunky vassal, quickly gets the Dark Prince up to speed on events, and thus begins his quest to take over the Netherworld. Once the introductions are complete, it becomes time to step up and fight your way through round after round of lesser demons until you come to match wits with the bosses.

The gameplay in Disgaea is all about turn-based fighting, leveling up and fighting some more. You’ll need to spend plenty of time learning the combat system in order to properly utilize teamwork, spells and the geo symbols on each level. Teamwork in Disgaea is all about positioning, as the more powerful the ally you position alongside your attacking character, the more powerful your character’s attack can become. Attacks can be combined amongst larger groups of characters, allowing for insane amounts of damage as three or more characters can enjoy the "proximity" attack boost. Along with the teamwork element, you’ll need to pay attention to the geo panels and their corresponding geo symbols. Geo panels are colored tiles that annotate their relationship to the geo symbols on the board. The geo symbols can boost your characters’ combat skills, experience points and health ratings. Some symbols have the exact opposite effect, and so by placing a negative health symbol on the appropriately colored panel, you can quickly siphon away the hit points of the enemy, making defeating them a piece of cake. Your characters can pick up geo symbols and move them, which is a very useful tactic, or you can destroy the stones, which will damage anything on the same colored panel. Destroying stones may seem like a great idea at first, as it quickly wipes out whole groups of enemies, but later on it will likewise deal extreme damage to your characters. While the geo panel/symbol system can seem confusing at first, it’s a brilliant addition and keeps this game from being just another generic strategy RPG.

Since Disgaea is also an RPG, you can expect plenty of experience-based character development in the game. The more you use a character’s specific attack, the more powerful it will become. Defeating enemies will generate plenty of experience points for your party, which can be spent on new skills and spells. During the game, you can also visit the Dark Assembly, a sort of netherworld Senate that you can petition to allow for the introduction of more advanced character development features. If you’re successful at lobbying the Assembly, you’ll be able to better customize the characters you generate. When not petitioning the Assembly, you can visit it to request new characters to round out your party until you reach a maximum of ten. I should mention that there’s a trick to dealing with the assembly...all of its members are also demons you will fight throughout the game. So as you defeat more of the members of the assembly, you’ll find it much harder to get them to respond favorably to your petitions. You’ll have to learn about the game’s diplomacy features in order to successful lobby the Assembly in the later levels.

The AI in Disgaea can be astonishingly brutal, even in the early rounds. You’ll find yourself losing characters pretty quickly if you don’t take the time to properly equip your party and manage their placement on the isometric 3D battlefields. Gamers who like to dump their entire party onto the battlefield will find them torn to shreds in no time flat. It pays to read the landscape, deploy a few characters at a time, and watch how the enemy responds. The AI likes to attack from all angles, paying special attention to your weakest characters while pulling off some ingenious flanking maneuvers. Thankfully, the early opposition is lacking in the hit points department, so if you deploy properly, you should be able to use the team combos to defeat them. You can also replay levels to gain extra experience points, which is something I highly recommend. The AI demands you play well right from the start, which means casual gamers may end up hating this game.

Presentation-wise, everything in Disgaea screams "PSOne title." The character designs are simplistic, as are the brief animated sequences. The isometric battlefields lack any detail, though there are some appealing weather effects. Actually, short of the amazing spell effects, Disgaea looks like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the GBA. The developers obviously chose gameplay over graphics, and I have to say that in the case of Disgaea, that’s perfectly acceptable since the gameplay is so incredibly deep. The game’s audio is just as basic as the graphics, with happy little tunes looping to near-irritating levels. The voice work has been dubbed into English, and is respectably well done, but nothing special.

For gamers searching for replay value, you’ll get your money’s worth and then some from Disgaea. There are 120 character classes to work with, and each character can be leveled up to 9,999. Just imagine the damage you could do with a character of that level, and you’ll just keep coming back to this game to gain just one more level. If you enjoy strategy RPGs, I can guarantee that you’ll blow dozens of hours playing Disgaea, and if you’re a hardcore fan, you could probably drop 100 hours into the game and still find reasons to come back to it.

Disgaea packs a ton of gameplay into a deceptively simple looking package, and being someone who values gameplay over everything, I really can’t say enough good things about it. However, there’s nothing casual about this game, and as such, I would only suggest it to fans of the genre. It’s a worthwhile rent for those who aren’t familiar with this style of game, but it’s not the type of game the "few hours a week" gamer will enjoy.

See more screens on the Disgaea media page