Coming straight out of the gate, Disgaea 4 is much more like a regular strategy RPG. Your characters all have easily-defined roles, and those roles are basically "beat face" or "cast heal". It's important to surround individual enemies and attack in sequence to take advantage of the combo bonus. You have very little ability to move enemies around the map, and while you can stack up three or four people to throw a character a long way, you'll likely lose most of the participants as they get mobbed by enemies on their turn.

Once you've got twenty levels or so under your belt, you'll start adding other features. You'll be tough enough that ten levels in an item world is something you can make it through - and a level 10 Imperial Seal can be a big boon to a starting character. You'll have enough mana (not magic points, but the currency you get by beating enemies - widely useful and perennially in short supply) to buy your first special attacks, and to unlock some of the basic Evil Symbols on the map. Generally you're better off focusing on a small number of characters - it's more effective to level up Valvatorez and Fuka, or some of the other hard-hitters, as they'll let you move further into the game, where you can get much nicer items for everyone.

On the down side, mana only goes to characters who get kills, which means that characters which are significantly under-leveled will be very hard to upgrade. Fortunately the use of Evil Symbols can help here - one shares out experience earned, another shares out mana, and so you can throw one of your "good" characters into a group with some of your back-benchers and let them leech EXP and mana. (The shape of the Evil Symbols means you probably can't do both at the same time, and it'll be a while before you get to expand your symbols...)

Eventually you'll get to the point where you're ready to experiment with transmigration - you can reincarnate a character, who will become a level 1 character of whatever class you choose (excepting your story characters, who just come back as better versions of themselves). Fortunately it's not too hard to make up your lost levels, and you get a bonus to your level-up stat boosts based on how many levels you sacrifice (and how much mana you spend). On top of that, there are a lot of opportunities to reincarnate into a more advanced version of your current class, which will have better "aptitudes" - basically a bonus to the stats which you get from your equipment.



Desco is wearing a lot of hats in the story, figuratively speaking. Fuka versus Valvatorez could get old quickly, but Fuka and Desco with two different outside perspectives is a different matter. Fuka plus Desco can act girly in opposition to the testosterone-laden demons, but on the flip side, Tyrant Valvatorez and the ultimate final weapon Desco (look, that's not a spoiler, it calls her that in the manual!) see eye to eye when it comes to slaughter as a solution for life's little problems. The use of "minnagoroshi" in her Japanese lines is quite common...

The fact that she has two giant tentacle cannons with the stopping power of a crazed rhinoceros on bad acid doesn't hurt either. Early on, your characters will be doing heavy single-square attacks, or rather weak wide-range ones; Desco comes in at a time where she's more or less your only "wreck that whole group, please" option.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 09:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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