Disgaea 2 (a.k.a. The End of My Life 2)
The official homepage of The End of My Life 2: http://www.nisamerica.com/games/d2/
Mike’s post earlier regarding embedded difficulty adjustment reminded me of Disgaea 2, the game currently doing the most to undo the tattered shreds of my existence.
In essence, the game is basically a turn-based tactical RPG, along the lines of Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSX, except that:
- The story is hilarious, and told in anime-style cutscenes (complete with Japanese voice-overs!).
- The graphics look like they could be from a game for the original PlayStation, but somehow I’m okay with that. It works for what they’re trying to do, and when you see anime-esque sprites doing Dragon Ball Z style moves to a cute dragon, it’s hard not to smile.
- The original Disgaea is about 1,000x more complex than Final Fantasy Tactics, which was already a lot for people. Disgaea 2 only adds more options…
- It’s replayable as all hell. The original Disgaea had I think 11 different endings, and the all-important New Game+ option to explore them all. The maximum level for your characters, unlike normal RPGs (with their trifling ninety-nines), is nine-thousand nine hundred ninety nine.
It’s that last point that really got me thinking about Disgaea and EDA. For most RPGs I’ve played, there comes a point where you want/need to level your characters up, at which point the game becomes a grind (i.e. You do the same thing over and over again for increasingly diminishing returns, in terms of both numerical and entertainment value). In Disgaea, you can avoid that completely if you so choose. Yes, you do have a lot more levels to get (in addition to the 9999 level cap, characters receive benefits for “reincarnating” back to level 1 after leveling up, meaning that to truly “max out” a character, you need something on the order of 165,000 total levels). But the game doesn’t have to be repetitive in the way most RPGs are.
There’s the main storyline that you can follow exclusively if you wish. At some point you can unlock a portal to the “Dark World,” a twisted (and much harder version) of each of the maps in the main storyline. Then, there’s the Dark Assembly, basically the Senate of the underworld. You can propose bills to buff your characters, unlock new character classes, or open portals to new optional worlds. Then, if THAT’s not enough gameplay for you, you have the ability to enter each and every item in the game, which at that point become random dungeons. The difficulty of the enemies on each floor scale with the power of the item, and each “floor” conquered in the item level it up once – and Legendary items have 100 floors.
My point? Like the EDA article describes, if you get bored with one part of the game, you are not forced to “grind” through it to get to somewhere interesting. At just about any point in the game you have the option to explore other places and do other things. But what really makes it EDA is that it’s not just a bunch of different mini-games tied together for your amusement; when you do something in one part, you still gain experience/items/money that make the other parts of the game easier. In essence, no matter what you do, you’re still pretty much “accomplishing” something, which for me is always a big thing for RPGs.
All that was written to justify why I will forget to eat for the next month and die of starvation in front of my TV.
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These games are hilariously over the top. I avoid them simply because I’m usually pretty obsessed about getting 100% completion in a game if I think I can do it.
Of course, when you have a game that has infinity, there’s a problem with the goal of attaining 100% completion.
I feel ya on the getting 100% completion. Hell, I even got 100% on GTA: Vice City (no small feat, it took longer than 100% in most RPGs I’ve played) for a shirt in-game that says “I finished Vice City and all I got was this stupid shirt.”
Getting real 100% completion (by traditional RPG standards) on a Nippon Ichi Software game seems relatively impossible, though. I can roughly imagine a point where I would call a saved game 100% complete, but to get there would require an amount of gameplay time longer than the lifetime of our sun.
However, there IS a point that is for all intents and purposes, “the end.” In the original Disgaea, I have a guy who’s about level 5,000+, and he has an ATK stat of about 2.5 MILLION. Level 9999 monsters hit him for 0 damage, and when he hits guys on the map, the number that pops up is usually around 800K (complete with the “K”). Oh, and he has a sword with a blade made of energy that has an attack range larger than the visible screen.
Is there more to do? Technically, yes. I could get that guy up to 9,999. I could build an army of them. But when it boils down to continuing to climb a hyperbolic ladder of strength when nothing exists that can touch me as it is, I’d say that gets the 100% certificate.
Besides, it’s time to play Disgaea 2. =D