I was going to wait til Friday (day off) to get a copy of Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice from EB Games, I couldn’t wait and got it yesterday 
I have been waiting for an RPG game for my PlayStation 3 since I got it last November. Until Final Fantasy 13 comes out, which is hopefully end of this year, I would need some RPG to satisfy my RPG hunger til then. And what can suit me better than a Japanese anime style, level grinding RPG game? None except this game. Obviously I have not finished the game, and most likely I won’t in the foreseeable future. Here are my thoughts so far.
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As mentioned, this is a RPG game and turn-based with 2D sprites with 3 camera modes (bird’s-eye view, zoomed in view and really zoomed in view). First thing I noticed about this game is the graphics, which is pretty outdated in my opinion. They remind me of an online RPG gamed called Ragnarok Online, which has been out since 2001 and still remains popular even after it started charging monthly fees instead of being free like in the beta period. This shows that a game can still be a considered a good game even without fancy graphics, a game with fancy graphics but with no game play value is still a bad game, well most of the time. Disgaea 3 is exactly the case, even though its graphics are outdated. Its game play more than made up for the short coming.
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The game starts you off with your main character, a netherworld student from Maritsu Evil Academy called Mao, a son of the overlord in the Netherworld. You actually play on the evil side for once as oppose to other games where most of the time you are on the “good” side fighting off evil. Here’s the fun part, in the netherworld school, an honor student is a person who skips class and not doing homework as much as possible, whereas a delinquent is a person who acts the exact opposite. And as you can guess, Mao is an honor student. The story is ok, its more suited for teens since most of the conversations are pretty childish, which is ok because the characters are after all, kids. There are also humor here and there as well and some are pretty funny. There is also an option to skip any story telling and conversation between characters by pressing triangle button which is a huge plus since I don’t find the majority of the story interesting, at least not yet. You can also change the voice over from English back to Japanese, which is yet another big plus since it just feels different having English voice over.
Game play of this game is what made me want to buy this game right away as oppose to wait for a couple of months and let the price drop. The play value as well as replay value is amazing. For those of you that are into leveling up your characters, you can level them to level 1000 and each stage can be played repeatedly or you can just play through the game by clearing each level once. Since it is a turn-based game, you get to move and attack/use item and end the turn, then your enemies will do the same. A very noticable difference, or I should say improvement over any other turn-based games is that the enemies move all at once as oppose to one at a time which can be annoying. The game pace is fast even under normal speed setting. Your characters can counter attacks and enemies can do the same randomly, so you can see counter-counter-counter attacks for example. Characters, again enemies as well, can combine attacks and form combos and which also happen randomly. There are also monsters in the game and they can “magichange” which pretty much means morph into weapons and allow human/demon characters to wield them, another fun feature. I’m pretty sure there are other fun features as I play more, but as you can see, this game is packed with so many features. Oh and by the way, I look forward to my first million point damage!
Control is pretty standard and straight forward like any other similar games. You can rotate the map 360 degrees so you don’t miss anything and 3 different views mentioned above.
While I like this game a lot, there is one thing that really bothers me, the music. While the music is very upbeat, it gets boring and down to annoying if you remain in the same area or in the same battle for too long.
That’s all I got to tell you guys for now, I’m sure I have missed something but there are just too much to talk about and I need more time to digest. So if you are an anime fan and are into level grinding, you should really check this game out.
You might save some money by buying on ebay link. I saw some good deals there, even the limited addition version. I would buy games off ebay if there were more Canadian sellers, sending from the US is not worth it and is often more expensive than buying in local stores.
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