Disgaea DS for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

I wont review the game itself, I'll leave that for other reviews. I'll do a slight comparison, however.

First off, if you have played ANY of the other two Disgaea 1 (PS2 or PSP) SKIP this game. It has reduced graphics, horrible music, and is just a worse experience. I hate to say that because I LOVE Disgaea games, but this game just doesn't do anything good for the series. Only play if you have NO other means to. Even then, I'd say buy a PSP for the game instead (as you can easily rack 50+ hours it makes a rather good deal).

Avoud on DS, but Disgaea is the best Strategy RPG series out there. Play it, just not on DS.

Disgaea DS is a RPG strategy port from the PS2 game "Disgaea 2: Hour of Darkness".

The game features a relatively small cast of characters, and like nearly everything else in the game, they start out interesting and get progressively less entertaining as the game goes on. These characters (one in particular) are often involved in skits between chapters. The skits rarely make any sense at all, but they do succeed and being mildly entertaining... until you get tired of random nonsense around the 5th chapter.

Like the story, the gameplay expects you to have a lot of patience for doing the same things endlessly. When I started the first level, I noticed that there was a clear counter. It wasn't long before I realized what that was for: You are expected to level up by playing the exact same levels over and over and over again. To its credit, Disgaea does level up comparatively quickly, but it doesn't help much when you are expected to reach unbelievable levels. (100 is not even close to the cap here) Since only the character that kills an enemy gets any EXP points, you may end up having to clear one or two levels dozens of times just to get your party close to the same level.

Disgaea is by no means balanced, and the difficult level swings wildly until about the 9th chapter, when it promptly decides to become aggravatingly difficult. You'll suddenly find yourself outnumbered 2:1 by enemies that are not only nearly the same level as you, but often have ridiculous boosts applied to them as well.

The game world outside of battle is unbelievably small and features extremely little to do. You can buy items, level up items through a process that can take hours to make even slight changes, or try to get the laughably uncooperative senate to do something for you. There's always the option of forcing the senate to pass your bill, but that's not even close to possible until very late in the game.

Like doing the same thing repeatedly? Buy this game. Otherwise, stick to FFT.