Grinding Has Never Been So Much Fun

Well, since somebody is staring at my stuff...

Yes, I'm still tearing through Disgaea like it's going out of style (not that it was ever in style to begin with.)
  Yes, I'm still having an inexplicable blast doing so.  It's actually fairy disconcerting.  I very literally spent three days worth of gaming time grinding up some items so I can steal a damn horse wiener.

Outside of Disgaea and certain fetish groups, I doubt that's much of a goal that people set.

It's become a cliche, how JRPGs (short for Just Repeated Power Grinding or Japan Roves Proronged Grinding) have gotten us accustomed to the chore of power-leveling and farming drops and such like for decades now.  Semi-hardcore types like myself have been developing techniques to handle the chore just as long.  It's become a joke.  Sometimes its fairly painless, sometimes its pointlessly laborious, sometimes you get a game in the genre that will punish you for ever trying (I'm looking at you Romancing SaGa).  But here's a game that took the idea of stubbornly slogging through levels in the name of the inner muchkin and...

...Made it fun!  It takes all the wild (and vicious) randomness of procedurally generated levels of loot from rougelikes, tossed in a liberal helping of brainiac grid-based tactic gameplay, and then brought in some epic-level wackiness to spice things up.  Why I didn't latch onto this series will be a mystery for the ages.

Well, that's enough gushing for now.  Under the circumstances, expect more rampant fanboyism about this game for good few weeks.  Hopefully I will some have slightly more coherent stuff as well.  Until then, The Harvest will continue!

Lootception

So...

I started on Disgaea, and holy crap is that a new ride.  I've played my share of grid-y, gritty tactical RPGs over the years, and while there was plenty of pixellated badass to be enjoyed, there was also a great deal of darkness.  They weren't the darkest overall genre by any means, but sometimes it really just felt like they were trying to borrow Warhammer Fantasy's grimness without the over-the-top qualities that made things great.  Nobody remember that Warhammer (and Warhammer 40,000) deliberately took things to absurb amounts of grim to where it was actually funny; kinda like if the Monty Python bunch went through a goth phase.  I didn't quite burn out on them, but it did kinda get samey and boring after a while.

But damn, here's a game that I wished I picked up a lot sooner.  Disgaea just takes that grimdarkness is grim, and converts it to utter whackiness!  There's plenty of dark themes floating about, but what it really comes down too is that you're running an army of slapstick anime demons and other ridiculous freaks as they tear about and pillage the weak and learn about love and smash evil(er) and stuff.

There's all sorts of craziness to be had; so much so that I don't have time to delve into it for now.  But one of my favorite new addictions is the Item World.  If you're like me and live under a rock, here's the lowdown:  Every item in the game has a pocket dimension called an Item World.  In gameplay terms, this translates into a series of ten or more randomly generated floors.  And we're really talking random, here.  You can have small little cakewalk maps with a few mooks, to scary maps with tons of nasty effects that wind up being as close to 3-d Space Hulk as you can get with cutest sprites.  Complete ten floors, and you power up the item considerably.  There's a good few more details than this, but the thing I really want to cover is that while you're down there, the game's standard approach to loot still applies.  While you're upgrading your loot, you can (and often will) come away with even more loot, which will have it's own Item Worlds to explore and pillage.

Seriously, you wind up with an infinite fractal of looting and upgrading going on, and it can suck you in if you're not careful.  Forget Candy Crush or Tetris, this is a serious brain-sucking fruitopia of gaming goodness!  How the in-game economy functions at all it beyond me...