Disgaea 5 Complete Demo

[DF]

I know, another demo, in a row even! But when you get 30 hours in it and the potential for a soul-crushingly higher number, there's a need to say something! For what it's worth, I've not played a Disgaea since the first two games and their remakes on PSP, so I'm kind of rusty on my series knowledge.

What is Disgaea 5 Complete Demo?

Disgaea 5 is the sixth title in the Disgaea strategy RPG series, Complete refers to it having all of the DLC available, and Demo restricts you to the first six episodes of the full game (the demo kicks you out after you finish the last stage of Dragon Fang without counting your victory). There are sixteen episodes in the full game, so you get a pretty decent chunk, plus full access to the features that unlock during the early game.

Demon Emperor Void Dark is conquering all of the Netherworlds! Join forces with other displaced Overlords and form a rebellion army to to a stop to his schemes! But it sure is hopeless when your enemy's forces number ten billion or more... Obey or die...or fight back?

What comes with the demo?

Everything but:
* the maps/features introduced past Episode Six
* Netherworld Edit
* Generic Nine-Tails monster class
* Bear monster class
* Innocent Aid Squad/Innocent Farm
* Skill Training Squad
* Succubus monster class
* Felynn monster class
* Celestial Host humanoid class
* Twin Dragon monster class
* Horseman monster class
* Dragon King monster class
* Fake Asagi humanoid class
* Anything post-game related (characters, Unique Evility slots, etc)

Item World? Chara World? DLC? All of those are here. I haven't dived far enough to see if you can get R40 items, but you shouldn't be able to get Land of Carnage items without hacking...maybe.

Gameplay

Combat happens in phases like in Fire Emblem. After you've moved your units and executed your actions, you pass the turn over to the enemy team and they move and act, and then it's your turn again. The battle maps all take place in areas with variances in elevation and some features like gaps or Geo Panels which provide different effects to units standing on them, and you start with just the Base Panel in a fixed location. You deploy your forces one at a time from here to a max of ten, and should someone on your team make it back to this starting panel, they can hop in and someone else can come out. Every unit has their own movement range, and you can get some extra range by Lifting and Throwing your team members around, at the cost of someone's action. Actions enter a queue and they all trigger in sequence when you Execute and this comes into play with the Combo feature, where the more attacks are landed in a single sequence, the higher the damage output is. Positions are important too as some weapons can't hit diagonals, and you can execute Team Attacks by positioning your allies to your side and back when you use a melee attack. Or you can make use of how you can cancel Move orders to do things like give Christo's accuracy boost to one character by standing next to them and then move him next to another who attacks, and so on before he finally does an action.

In terms of items and gear, every character has a set of stat aptitudes that determines how effective gear raising that category is. So for example, a character with an HP aptitude of 70% would only get 70% of the value of any gear that raises HP, while 125% would instead boost it by 25%. There's also gear affinity that determines how quickly they gain weapon mastery levels, but you're otherwise given plenty of freedom to give anyone anything. A Witch with an axe? Why not! She'll be awful with it since she doesn't have good stats and low axe affinity, but it's something you can do. You can have two weapons equipped and can swap between them when you go to attack, and three slots that armor and accessories go into.

Every character also has Evilities, mostly passive abilities that influence their performance or the enemy's or does something else. For example, Killia's unique Evility raises his ATK whenever he's damaged, while Seraphina's causes her to deal 50% more damage to male units. You can find or be rewarded scrolls that teach 'common' Evilities like aptitude-boosters or allowing you to earn money when you clear a map. You only have so many slots to fit Evilities, but there are a few ways to earn more through leveling up or playing Chara World later on.

And then tying to the game's theme of vengeance, the Revenge gauge builds as you deal/take damage and as your allies die. When it caps, your character gets three turns of 100% critical hits, their SP costs are reduced to 1, and named characters get to use their unique Overload skill. And of course, each one of those is different, such as Seraphina's charming all male enemies in a radius for one turn, or Red Magnus' giving him Giant status for a few turns, boosting his stats and changing his attacks. Enemies can enter Revenge too, but you can get rewards for letting them get pissed off and then killing them.

This is also the series where numbers go up to a ridiculous degree, with stats other than HP capping out at 40 million. Level caps at 9999, but when you Reincarnate, your old levels go into a hidden 'stored levels' count that in past games went as high as 186,000 and I'm not sure how high it goes here. So you'd start over at level 1, but you'd get a bunch of bonus stats and this keeps building through each character's lifetime. Reincarnation also allows you to transfer skills to another class, such as raising a Healer and then swapping her over to a Mage so she can use healing and offensive magic, but that only works with generics.

Controls

I used an X360 controller for this, but it does have keyboard and mouse support. Left stick/Dpad moves, A to confirm, B cancel, X does different things based on context, Y skips scenes and sorts lists, Right Stick click changes sorting parameters when you're looking at items. Shoulder buttons rotate the map and you can jump in town with A, or with Right Trigger when you fulfill certain conditions. Holding down Right Trigger during battle animations speeds them up, and there are options to skip them entirely once you've seen them once, or just speed up enemy movement, or auto-fast-forward the animations. You can even change the button prompts for the controller between Xbox and Playstation.

Gameplay Modes

There aren't really many different modes here, so I guess I can talk about the features found in town. The Pocket Netherworld is where you can buy items, heal your allies, or just talk with the people in your army when you're not on the battlefield. From here, you access everything else in the game, such as:

The Dimension Guide is where you go for accessing the story stages plus the DLC scenarios after you've claimed them. Story stages will usually change their inhabitants after you clear them the first time, and some quests will change them again while active. You're able to skip the story scenes before even loading up the map, and you get a prompt for the post-battle scenes afterwards too.

The Special Content shop holds all of the DLC. You can look at what each one gives you before you accept, though some unlock stages where you can beat up prior protagonists to add them to your team, while others outright give you the character or items. Getting a million HL to start off is a pretty nice bonus at least!

The Hospital heals your team after you return from battle. You're given prizes at certain thresholds for HP and SP healed, as well as revivals from death. It costs money to patch everyone up, but it can be enticing to get hurt/burn SP/let some people die to rack up the rewards faster.

The Quest Shop has...quests. Kill X enemy, give Y item, get Z stat, etc and get a reward. Some quests are one-time only, while others are repeatable. The selection of repeatable quests refreshes after every fight, so stop in often to see what's new. The only way to unlock classes is by doing the one-time quests, and these need either one or more classes at a specific tier for humanoids, or you turn in items for the monsters.

The Equipment and Item shops sell gear and consumable items, and you can sell your old junk to them too. Buying items slowly raises your Customer Rank, and this can be used to expand their selection of items as well as give you an increasing discount on purchases.

The Ability shop allows you to spend Mana (personal currency earned from kills) to power up your skills, and you can learn Evilities from Subclasses here or sell ones you don't want for Mana.

The Recruiter is where you create generics. Instead of a mentor/pupil system like in the older games, you just outright make characters using HL. Generics can be given one of three different personality types that impact their quotes when talked to in town as well as what they say during combat, and there are coloring options too.

The Strategy Assembly is where you propose bills that NPCs then can vote on. You're given the opportunity to bribe the present senators with items to help swing their vote to Aye, but it's not guaranteed they'll say yes even they like you! You can see how much Mana it'll cost that character to address the senate, as well as the general success rate of the bill before you head to the floor. You can unlock the ability to recolor the unique characters here too, as well as expand the shop's offerings if your Customer Rank is high enough.

The Interrogation Chamber is where your captured/surrendered enemies go. You can make them Netherworld Citizens from the get-go, or Interrogate them to wear their SP down to zero, opening up further options. You can Solicit to make them a usable unit, though you're only able to do this with characters you can make already (so no getting around the demo restrictions or get a class early), Extract to turn them into a stat-boosting item, or use them at the Squad Shop to power up your squads.

The Squad Shop opens up groups you assign members of your army to, with a leader and other members. Each squad does something different, such as "leader's stats are increased based on number of members" or "all members are Giant when deployed for X turns" or "units in this squad get a Capture Skill that snags weakened enemies". Captured enemies can be 'spent' here, with fully-interrogated ones providing triple their level in contribution. New squads unlock either with story progress, or as you complete certain feats.

The Innocent Shop lets you move the stat-boosting Innocents on your items around, lets you combine subdued ones of the same type together, or lets you throw them into the Warehouse for use later.

The Research Shop lets you send members of your army to other Netherworlds to fight their inhabitants, take their items, and uncover their Overlord. Everything happens automatically as you clear stages, but you can read the progress report of your research teams and decide to call them back early if they're not doing well.

The Cheat Shop lets you change the ratio of earning EXP/money/Mana/Skill EXP/Weapon Affinity EXP, though you're constrained on how far you can take the meters in either direction and in total too. There are also options to increase the enemy strength up to 20 stars, as well as others options like being unable to skip boss floors in Item World, or making all of your allies explode when thrown, or just zero out EXP/etc without messing with the bars.

Item World is probably 90% of why I'm writing this review in the first place. Unlocked in Episode 3, it lets you dive into any unequipped item and go beat up the people living inside of it, and you power up the item you're inside by getting level-up bonuses on the Bonus Gauge or by destroying Level Spheres or by lifting Level Fish (???). The enemies here are pretty weak for their level, so they make great grinding or capturing fodder! Maps are entirely random as are the inhabitants, and there are random events such as Netherworld invaders, Mr. Egg dropping something on the field, or Mystery Rooms that have a wide variety of denizens/features/etc. Innocents you kill here become subdued, get a level boost, and can be combined with other matching subdued Innocents. Every ten floors, you face off against a boss and can visit Innocent Town afterwards, giving you an opportunity to escape for free, heal up, buy randomized items, or change the route and type of encounters you'll get more often on the next set of floors. Unlike prior games, there's no end to this mode. You can dive past floor 10,000 if you really wanted.

Chara World is unlocked in Episode 6, and it's a kind of board game that has a ton of spaces with a variety of positive, negative, and random effects when you land on them. It's not Mario Party and it's not Monopoly, but you roll a slot with 1-6 on it to move, and can encounter enemies to attack. You only have a set number of turns to get to the goal or forfeit every boost you acquired, but you get your pick of some nice rewards should you get there, like getting extra movement range, opening up a new Evility slot, or making an Evility you know into a scroll so someone else can learn it. There's some risk and reward play here, since you might have several turns yet be right by the goal, so do you turn around to pick up more panels and hope you can make it back in time? It costs an ever-increasing amount of Mana to play, and there are different difficulty levels with better rewards and dangers within.

Difficulty

I didn't have too much trouble, though I did scrape by a couple of fights with only a few survivors. I had more trouble with the DLC maps, honestly. The difficulty varies, though you're not penalized for being defeated other than having to start over from town again (but you don't get to take your dead team to the hospital for free rewards padding). If you lose on specific story maps, you instead trigger an ending and are booted you back to before the battle. You can even instantly restart a fight or quit out too if you need. Since the story enemies don't scale with your army level, you can always just go grind to get a stats advantage. You can only add difficulty stars across the board and can't go below zero to make things even easier for you. For it being called the 'Cheat' Shop, it doesn't give you god mode or anything that'd make the game too easy...at least, directly.

I faced down an Item God 2 recently, and despite him being level 150 versus my characters in the 60-70s, he wasn't too tough...but he took forever to kill because he had well over 100K health and I could only knock off 5000 of it at best on my turns. Good thing he spawned as a Clergy else I probably would've been wiped hard.

Graphics

The game still uses a mix of 3D terrain and effects and 2D character sprites, but the sprites are all rendered in high quality compared to the first two in the series I've played. Each of the episodes takes place in a different Netherworld with its own landscape and features, such as Poisondise having lots of gray cement and white beaches, umbrellas, palm trees...and nasty purple water, so all of the maps there follow that theme. Maps in Item World pull from I assume the entire game's themes and it may even have some original ones, I dunno. You're able to recolor your troops based on either their class' tier or a selection of three extra preset colors once you pass a specific bill, and you can later pass another bill that allows you to customize to a greater degree, where you are given regions to alter color with hue values, saturation, and brightness. Killia with bright pink hair, black scleras, and a white outfit? Why not!

Audio

I don't really have much to say about the music. I found the default song for Pocket Netherworld, "Moving On", pretty catchy. There are options to randomize the Pocket Netherworld and Item World themes with songs you've unlocked, but I didn't find anything for applying that across the board. All of the story scenes are voiced, though none of the DLC scenarios have anything other than the voice grunts that'd play during battle normally. And every character has a variety of quotes for when they're brought out of the Base Panel, when they attack, when they take damage, and when they die, and so on. Some sounds like hitting Orcs or Eryngi were really grating, and at some point, you'll have heard every line everyone uses and there's no way to reduce the frequency of their lines other than lowering the voice volume to zero.

Replay Value

I don't think there's anything stopping you from hitting the stat cap in the demo outside of time and willpower, so you can just run story stages over and over or just do repeated Item World dives to get your fill on SRPG combat. You have a lot of customization options for the members of your army, from the gear you use to the spells you can learn, to Evilities you equip, though the demo won't let you learn new Unique Evilities since that feature only opens after you finish the full game. Still, there's a lot here for a free demo.

What Worked For Me

Pretty much echoing what I said in the Replay Value section, there's a lot and more to do in just the first six episodes. The story does end on a cliffhanger, but if you're just here for the combat, then you can get burnt out on playing just what's here. I haven't done enough to see how deep this rabbit hole is, but as long as you keep getting higher and higher tier items, you can keep challenging tougher enemies and then make them even stronger with the Cheat Shop. It won't ever be to the extent of the Land of Carnage in the full game, but this is a demo!

I like that the generics actually are kind of unique here. In the older games, generics really only stood apart from each other because of their stat aptitudes and weapon affinities. Non-mages only learned weapon skills through use of their weapons, but anyone could learn those, and unique characters got their own skills on top of those. Here, not only do they have Unique Evilities of their own, they even learn a few unique skills based on their classes! Unique characters are still pretty good, but there didn't feel like as big a gap between them and the generics as before. I made an Archer and she's my highest-leveled unit because her Evility makes her attack any enemy in range that another ally attacks, and she's stolen a serious amount of kills.

In the games I've played before, you could unlock the higher tier of each humanoid/monster class but you'd have to reincarnate that character to make use of their better aptitudes and so on. Here, you instantly get upgraded when you hit that level threshold, so you no longer have to decide between keeping your higher-leveled but less-powerful unit or rebirthing them and leveling them back up from 1 with better stats all around.

What I Didn't Like

I didn't really get into the story much. Something just seemed off about the dialog in a way that I couldn't put my finger on. There were some instances where it seemed like characters were just reiterating on something someone else said. There wasn't really much humor either, but then the premise of an unstoppable army and everyone having a grudge against the big bad doesn't allow much for it. Even what portion of the game that's here gets pretty dark.

Some of the voice acting fell flat for me too, Killia's in particular. It just sounded like he was really quiet/dull, and I assume that changes later in the game since the silly episode previews have him show a bit more of a vocal range. Christo kind of was the same way, too.

The demo crashed every time I quit out from the game without fail, but I'm willing to let that slide since I figure it's probably tied to me not having a good enough system. I had the game crash during gameplay all of one time, but I had it running for hours at that point. There's an autosave feature with its own dedicated save slot that updates every time you return to the Pocket Netherworld, so you won't lose much progress if you come back every so often.

Verdict - 4/5

Well, it's free, so provided you know how to install it, you have little to lose. There's a good bit of content and a terrifyingly high potential for losing time to even what's here. I used to not really like the series, which I'll admit is weird given I've beaten three versions of the first game and the PSP version of the second. There's a lot of improvements over the years that I get to experience in full here, so that's making the experience better as a whole. If you like strategy RPGs and don't mind heavy anime influence, then this is a no-brainer suggestion. And, again, it's free! You can do all of the story maps, tackle all of the DLC, make one of each type of character (that you can), make up some crazy team combos, and that's still not all what you can do in this overly generous demo. It's like getting a quarter slice of a triple-layer cake and then realizing you're not going to be hungry for what's left anytime soon.

And then you download the Requiem mod and can push the difficulty stars past 20 and stack item Innocents to an even higher ridiculous degree...