[jackofalltastes]

I'm honestly surprised there wasn't a Disgaea thread yet, so I decided this might as well be my first thread on the forum.

For those who don't know, Disgaea is a Japanese tactical role-playing game with absurdly over-the-top mechanics. Unlike most strategy games, you can speed up gameplay as much as you like to quickly grind your way to insanely over-powered characters with hilariously devastating special moves. This means that if you use a decent grinding method, you can obliterate the main story in any of these games in a few hours. I would recommend avoiding grinding for the most enjoyable experience on your first playthrough, but you may ask, "how is the game any fun if you can beat it so easily?"

Well, the truth is that the main story of these games is more of a tutorial for the real game, that is the post-game. You see, every game since the first Disgaea has had a huge number of optional stages beyond the final chapter of the story that require you to push your characters to the max. You can even pass a bill in the dark assembly (a bizarre court of evil) to make enemies more powerful (and yield more experience), meaning the potential highest difficulty requires you to get the best equipment and the best stats. Getting the best equipment requires diving into the world inside your items to power them up (crazy, I know) and getting the best stats requires reincarnating your characters to start their life over and stack their progress (even crazier).

Needless to say there's much more to this game series than I could pack into a single post, but it's goofy and fun as hell, with low-friction gameplay and insane possibilities that makes it hard to put down. So, for fans of the franchise and newcomers alike, let's talk about this wacky Japanese SRPG in all its glorious eccentricity and madness. Also, feel free to get meta and discuss any NIS game you like since they cross over so often.