Disgaea 4 – I Just Shot A Dead Girl With A Cat

Gaming is stale. The stereotype that the industry is dominated by bland, copycat shooters exists for a very good reason: for the most part, it’s true. Over the last few years I’ve shot more ambiguously ethnic bad guys than John Rambo and the LAPD combined.

Honestly, I’m tired of it. I want something new. I want something weird. I want something colorful and giddy and bursting with equal parts action and silly giggles.

Something like Disgaea 4.

As you’ve likely guessed, Disgaea 4 isn’t an odd anomaly flying in out of left-field. Actually, it’s the latest edition of a relatively long-running series of strategy roleplaying games set within a hyper-stylized, ultra-Japanese vision of the Judeo-Christian underworld. The important part though, is that Disgaea 4 is the easily the best, most accessible, most genuinely enjoyable iteration of the line to date.

If you dig strategy, roleplaying, or borderline-surreal pop culture deconstruction, Disgaea 4 is a must-own PlayStation 3 exclusive.

As with previous Disgaea games, Disgaea 4 is based heavily on anime tropes. Whether you watch Dragonball religiously or just saw Akira that one time in college, you know these things. Big eyes, histrionic emotionality, exaggerated action; at the very least, cultural osmosis has given you a passing familiarity with this stuff.

At least enough to grasp why the game is subversively hilarious.

See, Disgaea 4, even moreso than its predecessors, is designed to satirize the whole of Japanese pop culture. Instead of bizarrely sexualized cat girls, Disgaea 4 features sarcastic, cynical, blobby cat people (that can also turn into guns somehow). Instead of noble Power Rangers-style tokusatsu superheroes, the game features blundering idiots dressed to resemble the series’ mainstay undead penguin mascots. Instead of a dramatic tale of revenge and loss, the game’s plot features a vampire’s love for sardines, and a pre-pubescent boy who occasionally quotes Ice Cube circa 1991.

As far as the Disgaea series goes, this is de rigueur and long-time fans should be pleased that the latest title is exactly as witty in its deconstruction of other Japanese games as they might expect. For these fans in particular, the game also includes more subtle improvements.

First, the graphics have finally been brought in line with true, high-definition gaming. Technically, Disgaea 3 was in HD, but it used legacy sprites that did not age well in the transition from the PlayStation 2 to the PS3. For Disgaea 4 however, developer Nippon Ichi Software, upsampled all the sprites to the correct resolution, so while the art is familiar (and as attractive as ever) it looks smooth and gorgeous on whatever brand of fancy HDTV you might have sitting in your living room.

Second, Disgaea 4 is the first game in the series to really put the PS3’s online connectivity to good use. It doesn’t offer multiplayer lobbies like you’d find in a Call of Duty game, but instead is more subtle with its functionality. A certain character in the game can tell you how many hours of Disgaea 4 have been played worldwide for instance, and your character can travel across the PlayStation Network to make a cameo appearance within certain areas of other people’s games.

That was a rather vague description wasn’t it? Unfortunately, Disgaea is an incredibly deep strategy game with so many layers of nuance that it would take thousands of words to describe the whole thing. Neither of us have that kind of time. Let’s just say that one of the key elements of Disgaea is meeting with and influencing senators, and that your character might just appear as a senate member elsewhere on the planet.

While the initial draw of the game might be its roleplaying elements or its colorful aesthetics, it is this intense depth that will keep players coming back for literally thousands of hours. Normally that would be a hyperbolic statement, but Disgaea 4 is a game that is capable of offering up new challenges for months on end. The level cap is set at 9,999 and unlike most other titles that promise massive replayability, Disgaea 4 will continually offer you new challenges over the years that it will take the average person to hit that insanely high number.

I’m not claiming you should shoot for the level cap. Straight up, none of you will ever make it that far, and for the most part it only exists in the theoretical. Still, it’s nice knowing that for your $60, NIS has crafted a game that you can play almost indefinitely.

The most impressive bit of this whole package however, is how inherently player-friendly Disgaea 4 turned out to be. Previous entries in the series have been more or less aimed directly at the hardcore strategy gamer, but through a series of minor tweaks and difficulty adjustments, NIS has created a game that is as difficult or as easy as a player might want it to be. If you simply want to enjoy the story, you can blaze through the game relatively quickly and with little difficulty. If you want to tear your hair out in frustration however, there are a number of optional areas to explore and enemies to battle — and I already mentioned that crazy level cap.

Granted, I can’t recommend this game to everyone. If you’re completely turned off by big-eyed anime-style characters, or deep, thoughtful strategy, this is not the game for you. If your desire to play games begins and ends with a chainsaw mounted on an assault rifle, you should likely seek entertainment elsewhere. That said, for those who crave a game that will challenge them to learn and adapt while keeping things entertaining with witty, bizarre situations and characters that are lovable in their insanity, there’s not better option than Disgaea 4.