Game: Disgaea 4 Complete+
Genre: Action, RPG, Strategy
System: Nintendo Switch
Developer/Publisher: Nippon Ichi Software, Inc.| NISA
Age Rating: EU 12+| US Teen
Price: US $49.99 |CA $62.99 | AU $ 75|£44.99 |€49,99
Release Date: 29th October 2019
Review code used, with many thanks to NIS America!
A Small, Oily Forage Fish In The Herring Family
I am going to use a few phrases to describe how I feel about Disgaea 4 Complete+: “tongue-in-cheek” and “perplexing”.
Back in my PS3 days, I played Disgaea 3. For me, I compare the Disgaea franchise to Fire Emblem; mainly because both games use the same kind of battle system.
Missions in Disgaea take place on a grid-battlefield. Each character has a certain amount of spaces they can move on the grid per turn, and certain types of terrain on the ground can affect your, or the enemy’s, stats.
I also liken these games (Disgaea and Fire Emblem) to chess; you have your game board full of squares, and your pieces being the characters in the story.
Anyway, I hadn’t played a Disgaea game since around 2008 (whew, that was a long time ago!). I was excited to get back into one, as I remembered the game’s silly sense of humour, and good use of satire.
A Natural Source Of Omega-3 Fatty Acids!
Disgaea 4 Complete+ for the Nintendo Switch is a re-release of the game (then simply titled Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten that originally came out on PS3 back in 2011.
The game takes place in the Netherworld, where the Corrupternment (a fun little nod to politics now-a-days) rules over the various monsters and keeps the Netherworld in some semblance of order.
The main character of the story is Valvatorez, a vampire who used to be a feared tyrant in the Netherworld, but now has been bumped down into the lowliest-of-the-lowly jobs: Prinny Instructor. He has a special obsession with sardines; after vowing never to drink blood again until he instilled fear into a certain lady (who died before he could actually instill said fear), he eats sardines with gusto, believing them to be the reason he has “regained” his powers.
Valvatorez has a lot of pride, and thus takes the job of instructing the prinnies very seriously. He also has a lot of honour, and NEVER EVER breaks a promise. I think he seems like a pretty swell dude! Who doesn’t want a friend, or partner, who is loyal and never breaks their promises?!
The wonderfully cute and delightful Prinny – the little blue penguin creatures with peg-legs and tiny bat wings – are basically the inciting incident of Disgaea 4’s story.
After another successful round of re-educating and training a group of prinnies, Valvatorez is just about to keep his promise to them to give them each a sumptuous sardine before they go. BUT BLAM! Suddenly all the prinnies are stolen away! Well, for someone who’s number one value is keeping his promises this will not stand! He has promised each and every prinny a sardine!
Thus our quest begins, to get back the prinnies and overthrow the Corrupternment who want to destroy all the prinnies for… you know, budget cuts…
I think, and I am sure many Disgaea fans will agree, that the prinnies are the cutest part of the series. They are the souls of humans who sinned while they were alive. So now those human souls get stuffed into a premade peg-leg-penguin outfit and are extremely unstable, prinnies will explode if thrown, use with caution, dood! Oh, and part of their re-education is that they must always say “dood” at the end of their sentences.
The story and characters are what I really loved about the game. It is where that whole “tongue-in-cheek” aspect I mentioned comes from.
The game has our characters with one foot in the political issues of the story, and another in their own personal quests. Again, it is a delightful nod to current politics now-a-days – especially on my side of the pond – where there seems to be a lot of corrupt things happening.
Woah… maybe the point of this game is to get everyone up out of their comfortable lives, and live like Valvatorez: fighting against the machine, standing up for what you believe in, fighting the corrupt-government, and never breaking a promise made. Food for thought.
The Most Important Catching Apparatus Is An Encircling Net
Controlling and figuring out this game; this is where the game, for me, becomes that earlier mentioned word: perplexing.
This game suffers from the curse of a thousand menus. There are so many menus, and all different. If you’re in battle – different menu, if you are at your base, different menu. There’s a different menu in each shop, and in the senate, and all of those menus connect to other menus to create the many menus to rule them all! AHH! Take off the ring, Sauron can see you!!
*Pant pant-takes deep breaths* But in all seriousness, the navigation through all the menus came very close to me just turning the game off.
Perhaps, after transitioning from young child/teen gamer into a full grown adult gamer, I find myself with much less patience when it comes to my games. I don’t want to have to play 6 tutorial battle stages for several hours before I can actually start getting into the game and story itself.
Even now that I am past the tutorial stages, I am still confused by the menus and am probably missing out on a lot of great battle tactics.
For example, I went through a whole tutorial about how your humanoid characters can lift each other up in battles and throw each other around. The obvious, no-brainer benefit to this is that you could toss characters farther than they could move, and then get more things done on the map faster. But there was supposedly some kind of battle benefit to it as well, and I’m still a bit confused as to why I’d want to do this.
Seems to me if I toss someone farther into enemy territory, all of the enemies will go for them, and likely wipe their face off of the map before I have a chance to make them useful.
The cool thing is that if you toss prinnies they will explode, and do a bunch of damage. The downside is that now you no longer have that prinny in battle.
I consider myself a pretty intelligent person, and a fast learner, but I found myself particularly confunded by all of these special battle and menu situations. To the point of just basically ignoring all of that and playing it like a game of chess: where I move all of my pieces individually, and none can stack on top of each other.
I am still getting much enjoyment out of the game this way, but my little gamer-pride-voice is always like “Pff, I bet there is a cooler and easier way to kill these dudes and win this battle.”
SARDINES!
The artwork and visuals, story, and sound are all excellent. As a big old weeb who loves anime, I find particular joy in games with Japanese-style animation.
The opening animated theme of the game is long and amazing, and I honestly just let it play every time I boot up the game because it’s so visually appealing, and the song is catchy.
The music is splendid on ye olde eardrums, and really add to the game’s atmosphere and feel.
As I hinted at before, the prinnies are my favourite part of the game. The way they always say “dood”, and are super cute, and they almost seem like little innocent victims, but then I remember that these are the souls of humans who sinned and have to be punished; so there’s this fun juxtaposition of mixed feelings in my head when I squee over the prinnies.
Final Verdict: I like it!
As an adult who thinks about politics and how things are run, I absolutely love the satire used in this game to poke fun at the government and politics of our own world.
If you have never played a Disgaea game before, I would recommend this one. Especially if you blasted through Fire Emblem and are looking for something with a similar tactical battle feel in terms of gameplay.
It’s cute and fun and full of jokes and tropes, and if you feel like you can handle a lot of menu navigation then I would recommend this game to you in an instant.
“However, if you wish to grow even stronger then, you must eat sardines!”