Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness

I suppose this game has some obvious flaws, but I had a lot of fun with it so let's try to talk about it.

First let me mention why I think the PSP version is superior. First, there's a variety of "nice" things that are cool to have but aren't really a huge deal. Mainly these are the item library thing (tracks all items you've found and some other stats, for autists such as myself who like that kind of thing), the option to play any song you want in the item world (this game has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time but the default item world song is one of the lesser ones), and some extra areas/levels. The one thing, however, that makes the PSP version a thousand times more playable than the original is the option to disable combat animations. The main storyline is bearable enough with animations enabled, but if you want to do the post game areas it becomes an absolute nightmare. A turn that takes a few seconds with animations off can take minutes with animations on. For me, that's enough to make the post game not even worth playing on PS2. The only problem in the PSP version is some items being strangely glitched. This glitch can be exploited to become drastically overpowered, but one can of course simply choose not to use those items at minimal inconvenience.

As for the game itself, it presents as a tactical RPG but in actuality is more a game of character building (think like pokemon or something). The battles are pretty simple and decided more by your character's stats than any strategy on your part. As you might expect grinding is a big part of the game. Some people like that kind of thing of course, and the game is actually very well done when you look at it from this perspective. There's a lot of freedom and depth in the ways you can build your characters and a massive post game in which to take them to ridiculous levels. Play if you like that kind of thing.