Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention

While the original Disgaea on the PlayStation 2 was generally very well received by the press it didn’t work for me. The game was too daunting a prospect and I never felt comfortable playing it. Further iterations kept me at bay by promising deeper and more complex play mechanics, the last things I needed from a game I already feared. I always felt it a shame because the genre is one I enjoy. I adored Final Fantasy Tactics.

The re-release of Disgaea 3 on the Vita sparked up my interested, having never played this third game I was curious. A small amount of research led me to phrases like ‘the most accessible title in the series’ and ‘a great entry point for new players’. Surely not, I thought.

Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a repackaging of the PlayStation 3 title Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice to include all the DLC and tells the story of Mao, a star pupil at the Evil Academy and his quest to destroy his father, the Evil Overlord. While this sounds like this could be a traditional JRPG story you can rest assured it is not. Mao is considered a star pupil because he misbehaves, doesn’t follow school rules and doesn’t go to class. Moa’s nemesis Raspberyl is the school delinquent, a model pupil and he wants to destroy his father because he stepped on his games console and lost his game save. It is very finely crafted self aware nonsense.

At first the story will seem rudimentary and disjointed with the pre-battle dialogue getting in the way of you actually learning how to play the game. However, there is some method to the madness. On my initial playthrough I lost a fight somewhere in chapter two that simply ended the game. I was treated to a quick wrap up of how the character I lost to went onto great things and was presented with a game over. Now just a few missions prior to this the game dropped a sneaky ‘Game Over?’ on me at the end of an unwinnable battle so I assumed this was more of the same.  It wasn’t. The game was finished. I had lost. Now sure I could have reloaded my save but I didn’t; I tried again from the start. I was happy to see that I’d kept all the items, levels and skills I’d earned during my first attempt. It was like a New Game + for losers. I found I could skip all the tutorials and story and get my teeth into ten or so major battles uninterrupted. That was the point that the game hooked me. By the time I’d worked my way back to where I had failed I has a firm grasp on the game mechanics and several serviceable strategies under my belt. I’d even renamed my tertiary party members after my wife, son and cats.

While standard combat plays just like every other turn based strategy RPG there are a few elements worth mentioning that set the Disgaea series and Disgaea 3 apart from the norm. Every humanoid character can pick up and throw their enemies and team mates across the playing field, while this may not seem overly ground breaking it adds a huge amount of options to your plan of attack and also allows the play areas to feature otherwise inaccessible areas that allow for, and often require, some very creative strategies in later levels. Somewhat related to throwing are the Geo blocks and tiles. Coloured blocks and tiles are arranged in such a way that bonuses and penalties are applied to any player character or monster that occupies any coloured tile. As the Geo blocks can be attacked or lifted and thrown a smart player can control these effects to stack them in his favor or, should the correct situation arise, destroy the coloured tiles to deal damage to their occupants. While this system can be hugely confusing and frustrating at times, having a well thought out plan come together is massively rewarding.

What Disgaea 3 does very well is offer the player more than they might want without penalising them for politely declining to sample it all. You may, if you wish, spend your time fighting through the 100 level item world that lives within your favorite weapon in order to power it up. Or you could just not bother. You could use your items to bribe the school council into getting better items in the shop or you could hang about in the homeroom rearranging how your party sit in class. Besides the story and the standard turn-based combat there are a seemingly unlimited number of things you can do to tune and boost your performance, but again it’s almost entirely optional.

As a portable title Disgaea 3 really shines. The anime world comes alive on the Vita’s beautiful screen and the blocky sprites, aged as they may be, give off a retro charm as they mingle with the high definition bombastic beauty of the battle effects. I found myself pulling the ‘just one more battle’ line so many times that nearly every quick play session ended with me retiring to play in bed.