Where Grinding Is A Pleasure

Why, spambots, why is this crap so much fun?  Tell me!

I've poured over 70 hours into Disgaea:  Hour of Darkness now.  That's more than enough to make pretty much any non-Nippon Ichi SRPG cry and give you its lunch money.  And I'm not even close to done with the main storyline yet, much less the grindfest insanity of the bonus content.

Maybe I'm just not grinding efficiently enough.  It took me a while to realize I need to be using grind-focused specialists to get going (Armsmasters, Statisticians, and to a lesser extent Managers), and got a bit too hung up on grabbing and taming them in low-level loot to realize that I was leaving the higher-level stuff alone.  This resulted in me wasting time farming really crappy mooks.  While this can be entertaining, my agri-combine of death just really wasn't getting any better at harvesting the unworthy.  All of this was a bit exacerbated by my horrible little habit of playing stuff late at night, after a full shift at work; I simply wasn't registering that things weren't being done just right.

But, hopefully, I've corrected the flaw in my plan, and now the Harvest has gotten a good jump-start.  Soon, the foolish enemy hordes will be laid waste, and their shinies will serve to fuel further conquests.

Final Fantasy Legend 2 is also proceeding fairly well.  There are some hiccups, but nothing that I didn't anticipate, really.  The biggest problem is that stat growth can be influenced by character actions, but still has a large degree of randomness.  You can sit there and grind for a good while, but never get much of anywhere (except HP boosts, usually) if the game's RNG decides it doesn't like you.  Some luminous soul at Square tried to punish grinding techniques by including breakable equipment, but cash is Final Fanasy-level plentiful, so its merely annoying without the controller-breaking rage later SaGa games could induce in the unprepared.  But things are going well all things considered.  I managed to get through the first real boss fight without getting flattened, which is a big deal for a my pack of nooblets.

In any case, things are going fairly well overall.  We shall see how much they progress, and hopefully I can put Disgaea to bed soon.  Then the Reckoning begins!

Death By Penguin

Well, penguin-like suits that have souls stuffed in them.  Wonder if somebody at NIS decided to take fursuiting to its explosive conclusion.  Damn things are still really funny, though.

In any case, the Harvest continues!  Thanks to the wonders of Disgaea's Transmigration mechanic, my party grows ever closer to becoming the ideal meat-mulching agri-combine of death.  And thanks to the item world (now affectionately called Lootception), the doom train is being fueled by the constant influx of wonderful, wonderful shinies.  The game is still fairly challenging, and the quirkiness of the games setting and characters are still very much entertaining.  NIS really did a wonderful thing, and this is probably the closest thing we'll ever have to Munchkin: The Video Game.  You tear about murderizing various idiots and freaks and steal their stuff, then run back to home base to bribe the government into giving you better abilities, more powerful classes, and extra glittery shinies to plunder.  And everybody thinks that its totally awesome!

In slightly related news, all sorts of new goodies have managed to find their way here, and hopefully the Harvest will continue in all new places and forms.

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!

Plundering The Countryside

Ha, you're still not rid of me yet!

I've been making strides in Disgaea:  Hour of Darkness.  It's still pretty fun so far.  The most fun part so far is still very much the Item World.  I still get a kick out what really comes across as what happens when you stick Diablo-style random loot dungeon crawling into a grid-based SRPG.  What really pulls it over the top is that you take the goodies you earn in the item world and jump into their item world and get even more loot and jump into their item worlds.  Screw Candy Crush, this is the proper way to waste time!  It gets even better since you also level up the stats of the item you're working through, and hunt down "specialists" that act much like, say, Diablo III's gems.

All of this is a wonderful sideshow to some of the best SRPG goodness I've ever been exposed to.  The mechanics are pretty solid.  I'm honestly none-too-pleased with not getting an in-battle revival mechanic, but that is very much small potatoes to just being able to mass heal and rez your dudes after battle.  I'm something of a softie when it comes to my mooks, so throwing out permadeath is always a plus for me.  I also love how Disgaea is happy to throw big swarms of baddies at me.  Twenty-plus enemy groups?  The Harvest Cometh for thee!

Another plus is that in addition to the fun main characters, the generic units are also very characterful and enjoyable.  Thanks to the joys of random name generators, I wound up with a ninja named Konga, and promptly gave him an axe (as opposed to the recommended fist).  So has begun the grand saga of Konga The Axe Ninja!  When he's not part of my agri-combine of death, cleaving the unworthy in twain, he's in charge of turning trees into those logs that other, lesser, ninja use for those substitution-dodge stunts they like.  Another fun head-canon is the duo of Jaccard and Oscar, my thief and ranger that tear about filling the air with lead and plundering the place, while yelling like maniacs.  Now you see while I hate permadeath in video games?

In any case, you people will have the displeasure of hearing me natter on at length about this game again soon enough.  You will also hear me bewail the fact that someone was foolish enough to give me a PS3 for my birthday, and even more countrysides will learn what it is to meet The Harvest!

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...