What is it with game characters and using foodstuff for power. If it isn't Pac-Man popping pills, Mario chewing on his magic mushrooms, or Kirby swallowing his enemies whole to pinch their power and use it against them, there are plenty of game heroes that can't march on an empty stomach. And then there's Valvatorez, a vampire and former underworld tyrant who's gone straight, and vowed never to drink human blood again. Instead, he gets his new powers from a rather unusual source - sardines.
This is Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited, a frankly utterly bonkers turn-based strategy game on the PS Vita. A remake/re-release with added extras of the PS3 version, A Promise Revisited brings with it a cavalcade of additions, including all the downloadable extras from the PS3 version, a range of new music tracks, magic spells, and perhaps most importantly, new levels and stories.
As you've probably guessed, the story is pretty much totally insane. Set in the depths of Hell, the former tyrant-now-Prinny-trainer Valvatorez seems happy enough with his life, making sure Prinnies are set for their new life in the underworld. You see, rather than being a fiery pit of damnation, when human souls arrive in Hell, they're squeezed into blue, penguin-y bodies instead, known as Prinnies, ready to pay their dues for an eventual return to the real world. It's Valvatorez's job to make sure the Prinnies all know what they're doing - and that they answer every sentence with "dood!" But poor old Valv's relaxing life soon goes haywire, as the Corrupternment (Hades' Government) issues an order for the destruction of all Prinnies. Swearing to protect them with his life, Valvatorez sets out on a quest to defeat the Government, and save all of Prinny kind.
Valvatorez is a tough teacher
For a genre perhaps wrongly famed for being incredibly po-faced, Disgaea does a lot to make delving in that much easier. It may not be quite as user friendly as the 3DS's amazing Fire Emblem, but the wacky cast of characters, and utterly bizarre storylines help soften the blow of the initially intimidating combat. While Valvatorez may be the leader of the pack, drawing his strength from sardines (and never breaking a promise), you're soon joined by two Prinnies, Sasha the healing character, Phoenix the mage, and the dastardly Sardine Thief - a cat who, despite his name, joins the prince of sardines Valvatorez on his trip. And that's before we mention Fuka, a girl who was supposed to become a Prinny when she died, but ended up simply being given a Prinny hat instead, because they'd run out of Prinny skins, and Desco - a half squid, half woman creature who apparently is a "final boss in training". Yessss.
Still, for the most part, Disgaea is fairly straightforward. With visual novel style static, talking-head cutscenes driving the plot on, it's up to you to move from mission to mission, defeating all of the enemies in each stage, before moving on. With levels divided up into grids, you take it in turns with your opponent to move your characters around, as you try to outmanoeuvre, out think, and outgun your foes. And that's easier said than done.
Keep an eye on the enemy names. A lot of them are eye-rollingly awful.
When you click on a character, you're presented with a list of options. You can move them around, attack, perform a special attack (usually a magic spell or some sort of other power), use an item, etc, etc. So far, so straightforward - but there's a lot more to it than that.
With systems overlaying systems overlaying systems, in Disgaea, everything works together, and you have an awful lot to think about before you make each move - one of the most important of which is where you position your characters. Unfortunately, there's no handy Fire Emblem style button to colour all the squares that your opponent can attack you on in red, so you know where to avoid, meaning there's a lot more luck to whether you get hit or not here - but there are plenty of ways you can make it work to your advantage.
For starters, characters next to each other have the chance to help each other out when attacking, and can team up to perform an over the top uber move. To do this, characters have to be right next to each other (i.e. not diagonally), with the chance of teaming up with each character shown on screen before you attack (as seen above!) Get lucky, and you could be teaming up with up to three comrades for a four person attack, which, in true Disgaea style, are a little bit fancier than simply slashing with a sword. Whether it's wrapping yourself in a shield to form a giant, human millipede before stomping over your foe, or all teaming up to push them at hundreds of miles an hour, over land and sea, before smashing into the side of a cliff face, the animations for the attacks are every bit as crazy as the rest of the plot itself.
The other handy way you can work together is by stacking. A pretty unusual idea, this does exactly what it says on the tin - your characters can lift other characters above their head, and basically eventually form a gigantic tower of your entire team (or at least, the human characters on it - monsters can't lift people up!), some ten or eleven people tall. When you're in tower form, you can't move - but you can all attack as one. If you're really clever, you can get around the lack of mobility by choosing to throw part of the tower around the map instead. You may only be able to move in a straight line, but nothing puts the fear of god into an enemy quite like when they see a slowly shrinking tower unravelling towards them.
It's Prinny v Tree Golem. Move your units together to stack the odds in your favour!
However, despite a pretty impressive tutorial, you do sometimes wonder if Disgaea's trying to be too complex for its own good. There are a huge number of features here that you never really have to deal with to play through the game - yet there are some pretty basic things that are never really explained. Like levelling. We still haven't managed to figure out quite what you get XP for, or how much you get. You're never shown a bar filling up, and we're not sure if you only get XP when you manage to defeat someone, or if it's just you get so much more for beating someone, it just looks like it's the only way to level up. The Item World, which is an option in the game's hub, and lets you delve inside a stack of randomly generated levels, beating enemies "inside" your weapon to make it stronger is another odd addition. It seems like an awful lot of time to spend to make your sword that little bit stronger - and a mode made all the more awkward by the fact you can only save in it every ten stages.
Still, there are plenty of other areas Disgaea impresses, perhaps most significantly, with just how varied the levels are. While it's easy for games like this to offer the same old, same old every level, Disgaea mixes things up all the time, constantly throwing levels at you that feel more like puzzles than a strategy game. One of the most common ways it does this is through Geo Cubes - large, coloured boxes in the levels, which are often totally optional, but sometimes, have to be used.
Geo Cubes have a few rules surrounding them (and it's this the tutorial spends its time going over) - if you pick one up, and chuck it next to one of the same colour, it'll blow up every connecting same-coloured block it can. If you destroy a Geo Block on top of a differently coloured Geo Tile (essentially a fancy way of saying "a piece of coloured floor"), it'll change the colour of every connecting tile. It's a complicated thing to get your head around - but they can be essential to completing certain levels.
With the game putting up giant barriers made out of these Geo Panels, or sometimes simply sticking characters on top of a giant tower of them, it really forces you to change how you approach a level. Do you hunt down the right geo blocks, and throw them into the tower in the hope of slowly bringing it down to size? Or do you stack your characters up next to it, and take the fight up to them?
Bomb-Bat-Stic(k)? Geddit?
To make matters even more confusing, sometimes the colour tiles have specific status effects. Usuall, these work to your disadvantage - your enemies may all be standing on blue tiles, which gives them +50% attack damage, while you're on red, which warps your characters around randomly at the end of every turn. Usually, however, even if the odds are stacked against you, there's a way you can use it to your advantage. Making use of the fact that destroying, say, a red Geo Block on a blue coloured tile will set off a chain reaction that changes every connecting blue Geo Tile, you can often position the Geo Blocks just right, and create a chain reaction that changes the colour of every tile in the level - sometimes several times. The best part is, not only does this usually nullify the status effects - but it also damages your enemies every time the tile they're standing on changes colour. Make sure your characters are in the clear, and light the Geo Block fuse, and you can create a screen clearing chain reaction without having to get your fingers dirty.
If you've never delved into Disgaea before, there's no need to play any of the preceding games, and no. 4 is as good a place as any to start - but there are a few things newbies need to keep in mind if they're coming to the game fresh. The first is that you're expected to replay the levels, not just blitz through from one stage to the next. Levelling your characters is incredibly important, and the only way to really do that is to replay stages you've already completed, beat enemies up again, and gain yet more XP. The only problem is, the game doesn't explicitly tell you that you're expected to do that - so when you come up against a sudden brick wall having smashed your way through two or three stages, it's not exactly obvious that you've been playing the game wrong all this time.
Still, coming complete with all the downloads that followed the PS3 version, and plenty of exclusive stuff (not to mention the infamous Disgaea post-game, where dealing damage of 99,999 isn't uncommon), the Vita version is definitely the one to go for if you fancy delving into the strategy goodness - or just really like sardines. Hopefully, going forward, Disgaea will start to focus in a little bit more on the things that make it awesome, and trim off some of the extra fat to make it that little bit more accessible. It wouldn't take too much to make this a lot easier to get into - and let's face it. The more people playing Disgaea, the more terrible puns, weird characters, and fish eating vampires we'll be able to order around. And that can't be a bad thing.
Format Reviewed: PS Vita
