A September in gaming: Disgaea 2, Xenosaga 3
Whoo. Lots of time dumped into video games. Since getting them, I’ve dumped a bit over 110 hours into Disgaea 2 and about 40 into Xenosaga 3. I haven’t really mentioned anything about either of them yet… so here goes.
(long-ish reviews of 2 games follow)
Disgaea 2 is … well, it’s definitely Disgaea 2. It’s got the same sort of strange, slightly twisted humor as the first one has. The storyline is somewhat mediocre, but also somewhat unpredictable (ie: there’s a couple character development points that you don’t really expect), and it’s got a really nice, cute and slightly romantic “normal/good” ending, which I like, because I’m a sucker for happy endings.
But really, you don’t play a Disgaea for the story. You play it for the story and the humor and the system, and especially for the system. Fighting in the main line of the story was a lot more tactical than I felt like D1 was. Lots of interesting story maps, mostly punctuated by somewhat tricky geopuzzles. There’s a couple maps that you get to that you just sort of look at, and unless you’ve powerleveled more than you should in the main storyline, you just stare at them and say “huh … what am I gonna do about that?”. Like the one you’d normally show up at about level 40-50 on, that has a level 70ish wood golem (20% regeneration every turn) on an Ally Damage 20%, Enemy Boost X3 block of territory. And then you notice the little protected path that snakes ALLLLLL the way around the map, and by taking the long way around you can deactivate the nastiness and generally stand a chance against the golem. It’s neat.
Boss fights were also somewhat neat, since they also generally revolved around interesting geopuzzles, instead of just bumrushing the boss and some cronies.
Powerleveling to ridiculous heights is there too. There’s a pretty extensive postgame, which I still haven’t even unlocked all of. First of all, the “felony” system replaces statisticians, and generally makes for slower, slightly less whoreable growth. But it still spools out to ridiculous levels. Similarly, Armsmasters are still there, but are harder to find (and again, still peak out at about 1200% bonus weapon proficiency). The other specialists are there too, and there’s new “hybrid specialists” that you can get that do the jobs of two basic stat-booster specialists (but you generally have to make them, and they’re pretty unusual to make). The item world is the same as it ever was, except for the “absurdities” dynamic, and the fact that the felony system is inextricably tied to the item world (ie: you get felonies, and cash them in for ranking by going to a certain level in the item world and entering a “courtroom” instead of the next level gate). There’s also random bonus gates, that can have either random battles, black-market shops, fortune tellers, treasures, stuff like that, and Pirates. Yes, Pirates. There’s apparently 16 types of pirates in the game, ranging from “prinny pirates” to “ambling pirates” (a lone guy drifts in on a log) to dragons and beyond. They show up randomly in the item world, and apparently beating one of every type opens up a place called the “land of carnage” which is supposed to be the insanely high-level powerlevel-place. Then there’s also the Dark World, a mirror image of the normal world with its own game mechanics, conditions, etc. Besides that, there’s the other random stuff … the Cave of Ordeals is still there, there’s a lot of random cameos from other Nippon Ichi games (Laharl, Etna, Flonne, even Midboss from Disgaea 1, Priere, Marjoly, a couple of other random heroes, they’ve even got the Prism Rangers!!). Baal is in there too, and uber-powerful as ever (my twice-transmigrated, level 1900 Adell with a level 30 regular God Hand can’t make much of a dent in him yet).
Downsides: Thief steals are nerfed, they no longer get the 2x bonus, so a level 1900 thief can’t really steal legendaries from a level 3500 guy anymore. They get a bonus with “lover” specialists, but that only goes to 25%, so not much love there. The majin-equivalent (chaos soldiers) are also sort of nerfed — they’ve got all the power you’d expect of a Majin, but they’ve only got 3 move and 1 throw, making them among the slowest movers and the absolute worst throwers in the game. Still have insane weapon and stat affinities, though… so I guess later on in the postgame (when uber-leveled accelerators and/or hyperdrives are common, armsmasters are a dime a dozen, and legendary tier-39 weapons aren’t in short supply) they’d be worthwhile, but … tbh, they’re so limited-use it’s not really worth it in the “early” postgame where I am.
On the whole, Disgaea 2 is everything I expected and wanted from a new Disgaea-family game. It’s got a more extensive postgame, it’s got battles that can be won with strategy, the level pacing of the main plot is fair, a lot of the gripes about disgaea 1 mechanics have been fixed in sane ways. If you were a fan of the first one (or Final Fantasy Tactics, or other SRPGs) you’d definitely enjoy this one too.
Xenosaga 3 is next on the list. To be honest, my reaction is a lot more mixed than Disgaea 2′s.
Xenosaga 1 had no mobility in the main storyline, and slim to no postgame. It really railroaded you around a lot, because of where it started and ended and where it was set … you couldn’t move freely between places, except via the EVS. I didn’t feel like it had a lot of depth to it, and really I knocked Xeno 1 out in about 30 hours and never cared to go back.
Xenosaga 2 remedied the feeling of no mobility, by letting you run around Second Miltia, the Durandal, the Kukai Foundation all pretty freely. You could also do EVS dives into fight locations, but there was a lot of stuff you could do that wasn’t centered on combat, and it was stuff you could do at any time.
Xenosaga 3 really went back to Xeno 1′s approach on that. The story goes in such a way that you basically start free (but not as free as the end of 2), and end up on a railroad to the final location. There’s no peace, no running around solving random problems for people. There’s not even many people to talk to… after chapter 5 or so you’re pretty much just stuck on the Elsa, or you’re in a long strung-out dungeon-type map, or you’re in the EVS revisiting an old dungeon. I miss that freedom … there’s times when you really want to just run around and do random things that aren’t fighting.
Combat’s also been somewhat nerfed. The boost system is still there, but the attack types of 1 and the zones of 2 have given way to simply “attack” or techniques. It’s made character combat a lot less engaging. ES-combat is entertaining, but only because at any given point in the plot, if you’ve bought the latest ES gear, your Eses are substantially more powerful than any normal enemy throws at you, and the boss fights are just battles of attrition in which you happen to have the ability to heal while guarding, and your opponent generally doesn’t. Some of the later ES boss fights are more engaging, but for the most part they’re monotonous.
Speaking of that, character combat is also a bit discouraging. In 2 in particular, you really got a sense of being more or less powerful, having more or less affinity to killing a particular type of monster, etc. Shion’s attacks were lightning-elemental and worked great on most machines and so-so on Gnosis, Momo’s were non-elemental ether attacks that worked really well on gnosis, so-so on machines and bio-types, KOS-MOS had physical attacks that kicked ass on bio, but were only so-so on machines, etc. The break dynamics were engaging, because they made you approach different enemies in different ways. The elemental combos were also engaging and powerful, giving you tons of possible bonus on longer fights (like the Patriarch fight for one … it was loads of fun getting a 10-12x elemental bonus on an aired patriarch, pummeling him viciously with aura-tinged momoshots and kosmos-assaults). Xeno 3 has “breaks” as well, but they’re horrible. You have a break gauge for every character and every enemy, and pummeling them with different attacks gives them different amounts of break points. Eventually, the gauge fills up, and they “break” for two turns … during which they can do nothing and suffer extra damage and higher critical rates. The problem with the system is that most of your characters have between 150-200 natural break limit for most of the game, and most bosses have 999, and heavy resistance to break damage. So generally, a boss can put your entire party in break status in two or three attack-all type attacks, and in the process of putting them in the same with heavy-break attacks, you’d whittle 2/3 of their life bar down. And even then, only get 2 turns of break out of them, hardly enough to do anything worthwhile.
Then there’s the experience issue. Fighting in the ESes gives you shloads of experience, both regular exp and SP (to buy new techs). Fighting on foot gives you … probably about half as much. Even worse, fighting on foot, you’re always struggling, fighting in the ESes is always a cakewalk. After you get Anima level 2, you can clear any normal ES fight in one level-2 awakening/special attack. Later in the game, that’s ~1200 exp and 30-40 SP. A normal fight, cleared with the same “finish strike” bonus, will take 3-4 times longer or more, wear down your EP (aka mp), and net you maybe 800 exp and 16 SP. In the later parts of the game, even leveled-up special attacks won’t kill most normal enemies outright, and really it just makes fighting on foot a chore compared to the easy-riding bonuses and higher base experience of ES combat.
There’s one point that Xenosaga 3 is good on, though: story. If you like exposition, especially LONG exposition (which xenosaga games are known for), or if you’ve gone through the first two games, this one is definitely worth your time. If you don’t have 60-80 hours of your life (or more) invested in the story already, or if you do but you couldn’t care less about finding out the ending of it, I’d say at this point don’t bother with it.
It does manage to tie up most of the threads in the other games, but … I have to say, I really don’t care for the way the last 2 or 3 chapters went, and just how they ended up wrapping things up. There’s one particularly cheap way of dealing with loose ends that I really don’t like, and Xeno 3 WAY overuses it… but I won’t get into that for risk of spoilers.
Even worse, as the game progresses, Shion becomes a whiny bitch. I could stand to do without another “Will you save my life?” or “Will you save me” or “… Kevin …”. Her whole role in the last chapter in particular just pissed me off.
I can’t say I didn’t enjoy playing the game, though. It certainly had me going for the 40-odd hours I put into it, and I’m considering playing through it again to do some stuff I missed and see if I can make the postgame more appealing (another nice feature: the ability to skip story scenes if they’re not your cup of tea). I definitely couldn’t deal with watching the story exposition bits again though, they’re just too damned long. You end up spending so much time watching movies, and so few of them are good CG, it’s mostly just game-engine movies. If “game-engine” movies were the MGS3 game engine, that’d be great, but they’re not. They’re just ordinary xenosaga mediocre graphics, usually without even moving mouthparts or facial expressions… only voice acting to convey a character’s emotions.
On the whole, Xenosaga 3 isn’t a bad game, but it’s also nowhere near as good as Xenosaga 2 was, and really, as a series finale it’s a bit disappointing and abrupt. Not to mention the whole Xenosaga universe twists Judaeochristian mythology and concepts from Nietzsche and Jung into and out of each other so much that they all lose track of their own essences… but that’s really a problem of the series as a whole, not just of this game.