Affectionate Diary

Go for a proposal and only bribe one guy. Make him an obscenely powerful guy. Then when it fails, approve by force and then chuck all the nays into the yay. If the yay is the highest level, they’ll combine into one yay. Which is easier than killing a level 1000 Skull On A Stick when you’re only level 32. Sick.

Class world - easiest exp and mana you can get previous to the Cave Of Ordeal maps, surely? All the monsters will be in a few levels of whoever you enter, and the character you enter will earn mana for each geocube you clear. So after you transmigrate, level that character to, say, 75 per cent of the power of your most powerful guys and then head into the class world and don’t level that character anymore. Rape the bad guys for reasonable EXP and if your character is below level 50, you should come out of the 10 level killing spree with about 5000 mana. More if you’re a higher level.

Make one of each monster type. It fills up your classroom and, more importantly, let’s you see what each Evility does. Which is important info to know. Also investigate the magichange options for each creature. The Prinny skills are sick for the level you get them at, and you should be rocking both gunman types as well as equipping your thief with a gun.

Shop. Don’t fuck about trying to buy something for all your guys. Just buy one of the most expensive thing you can afford whenever you can afford to, and level that shop up. It’s about having one or two obscene characters (or six or seven. Or 29) and then handing down stuff to everyone else. And unlock shoes as soon as you can.

The clubs! It’s all about the clubs and having your best guys at the front of the class and having all the clubs unlocked.

That’ll do for now.

Someone asked me if this was Fuck Yeah or Fuck Up. That’s pretty much how it goes with Nippon Ichi these days. So let’s just get to it.

FUCK YEAH!

Score - 999 out of 1

I mean, it’s fucking Disgaea! The story is amazing, the amount of shit going on is off the fucking hook and the doublejump guide is almost all you need to play the game. They didn’t redraw the sprites in 1080p to make it look like Guilty Gear but you can see that from the back of the box, so if you bought this and had hoped for more, you’re a fucking IDIOT. Also, who gives a fuck about that shit? It’s number sex. Real genuine number sex.

Evilities - OH MY FUCKING GOD. Too much shit to think about in battle. My head hurts from trying to optimise which character goes where to do what. Which is how it should be.

Stat aptitudes - YES! Now my second hundred hours in the game won’t just be with an army of Majin, all looking fucking disgusting. Everyone’s going to be either a girl in knickers or a mewing cat. Or maybe a chicken or a plant made out of sausages. Ain’t NOBODY be looking like a goth warrior from an 80s metal video.

It’s like all the good bits from Disgaea 2 ripped out and placed bang on Disgaea 1’s system.

In fact, who cares about how amazing the game is? We know this shit is way ahead of every other bullshit levelling game on the planet. Who needs just grind? I need OPTIMISATION and grind. Optimisation OF grind. I need 100 prinnies, all turning into guns so my thief can throw frying pans onto the heads of my enemies.

Things I didn’t know until now, and possibly didn’t exist for previous Disgaea games -

The Defend command cuts down damage by 50% and reduces your counter attacks by 2.
The Attack and Special commands will reduce your counter attacks by 1 (so THAT’S why they don’t hit the limits!)
The Attack command does damage at roughly 35% of the stat the weapon draws power from. Which means it’s easier to build single-stat power (swords, axes) than it is shit like guns and bows. Though they’re made up for in other ways.
If your ATK stat is roughly the same as your victim’s DEF stat then they’ll reduce damage by half. If their DEF stat is double your ATK, it pretty much removes all damage.
Chance to hit is your HIT divided by their SPD.
The higher you are the more damage you do, but it’s not much so don’t let your positioning be influenced by it too much.
You get a bonus for hitting from the side and a huge bonus for hitting from behind. Which I *swear* never existed before.
If you stand in one spot and keep attacking without moving, you get more powerful each hit. So build a HUGE freaking tower of all your guys and then just lash out over and over. Make the bottom guy a tank class and you’re rolling. And all the weakasses in the tower will share the mana and exp.

You know you need this shit. I just hope the DLC I’m missing out on import isn’t that important.

Let’s get one thing straight right from the fucking start: this game is SERIOUSLY FUCKING INCREDIBLE. I’ve only played the Dreamcast version before and even though outright wankers will INSIST that the N64 version is the definitive one, the number of proponents who’ve actually played it is easily around 5%. If you’re an absolute cunt, then you’ll claim to have 1cced Hover Attack on a crumbly Sharp home computer, but very few people are that fucking up themselves to try and blag it. Everyone knows the DC version was the one that most people played. It also had the best manual you’ve ever fucking read, but that’s another story entirely.

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Bangai-o spirits is, essentially, some mad tribute to hombrew games taking place in actual gaming heaven. It’s as if Treasure is paying huge fan service to one of its own titles in the cheapest way possible and, as you can probably imagine, this makes Bangai-O Spirits a monumentally awesome affair. It’s one thing to have a game that’s a nicely expanded update to an underrated classic, but it’s another thing entirely to discover it’s not only 50 times more badass, but 50 times more spastic as well.

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First off, it’s got hundreds of levels, most of which are so brutally hard you will cry, and a fucking sweet level editor for infinite replayability. It’s also got a bunch of new weapons. Now, diehards get fucking upset about this, mostly because it upsets the purity and balance of the original’s weapon set, but this isn’t Halo, motherfuckers. It’s Japanese robot death and purabalance of weapon sets isn’t even on the agenda. Treasure’s climbed right to the fucking top of that pinnacle with the inter-related delights of Radiant Silvergun’s armoury and then taken it to a whole new level of mad purity with Ikaruga. They don’t need to show restraint. They need to add baseball bats and napalm. Which is exactly what they did. Crowning off the new sexiness  that SERIOUSLY TRIPLE AWESOME trick with the mic and speaker for transferring levels (they sound more like a C64 than a Spectrum).

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As a footnote to the package, you know that features like that are beyond special. They push the game into a whole new realm of superlative-redundant incrediblocity, where words are replaced with intense feelings and hazy images and this one is FULL OF LOVE. The kind of love you get when you just meet someone through work and some mad shit goes down in that first handshake, fucking your mind up to the point where you’re too scared to ask them out because they’re so scared about you not asking them out that they can barely talk to you, and you end up being the same way because they’re barely talking to you and wtf does that mean when there’s so much on the line so fucking quickly. Except Bangai-O Spirits doesn’t do that when you meet it. It punches you in the face, but you fucking love it for doing that and then it calls you when you want it to, flirts constantly and buys you gifts from its own intuition that are exactly what you fucking want, but didn’t know it. Then it pays for the best dinner you ever had and turns out to have exactly the same sexual quirks as you and the most perfect primary and secondary sexual characteristics you’ve ever fucking seen.

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That might be a bit of a complex analogy to grasp, so let’s just say an average level is supposed to go something like this:

* Start, lots of bullets arrive, homing in on you

* You instinctively press R to charge an EX attack

* Just before the bullets hit you, you let the EX attack rip

* Screen fills with fucking madness

* EVERYBODY DIES APART FROM YOU

* Repeat

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Now if you’re lucky, some motherfuckers will rebound your EX attack. Those cunts might think they’re being pretty clever, but really they’re even more fucked than they were before. Why? Because you can launch another EX attack and re-rebound their evil trickery back at them. They might send them back again, but fuck that shit because you and EX it back forever, provided you have the charge. The technical term for this is “FUCK YEAH BANGAI-O!” and if you manage to get three in, you will be shitting bricks. Mostly because your bullets are now fucking gigantic pixelated deathsprites, but also because everything will die at such a rate that time itself slows to a standstill. That’s one of the most beautiful things about this solid-gold joyfest; that it has absolutely no shame about bringing the DS to its knees. Got 200 bullets and 50 enemies on screen? NO PROBLEM. LET’S DOUBLE EVERYTHING AND MAKE IT BIGGER. Fuck the framerate, Bangai-o’s got killing to do. 1.5 FPS is a goal to strive for in this game, not a technical issue. It’s you, the player, forcing the hardware to buckle under your power because you’ve just EXed a rebound from a huge robot for the fourth time, and on this one you know the distance/reaction equation is going to work out with that motherfucker DEAD and you reaping all the fruit that remains behind. Aside the game’s central Ex Attack spamfest, there’s also the incredible awesomeness of the baseball bat - a new addition to Bangai-o’s arsenal and the definitive weapon for mashing up any cunt who fucks you off. If there’s one thing Bangai-o needed, it was the ability to knock soccerballs into the fray and then chase after them to knock any survivors against walls for rebound bat-thwack kills. That shit is pure poetry, yo.

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But hey - make no mistake. Bangai-o Spirits is serious business and it will totally rape you, but then you’ll realise that’s because you’re WEAK and the game is STRONG. Mostly it’s because you’ve not mastered the EX/dash-for-fruit mechanic that allows you near-infinite EX attacks, provided there are enemies to milk, so you’ll pick this up pretty quickly and soon be screaming MOAR! MOAR! At the DS as each level falls. This is unbridled gaming joy in its purest, finest form. Gleefully delirious mayhem as it fucking should be.
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<3 / 10