Disgaea is like an old oak: its sturdy trunk and roots persist even as its leaves change color, fall off, and sprout anew. Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance

see deal Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - PlayStation 4 $29.99 on Gamestop

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“ It’s still the addictive time sink of an RPG it’s always been.

New Bells and Whistles

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“ There’s practically no limit to what you can do if you have the patience and conceptual understanding to do it.

Darkness...My Old Friend

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If you haven’t played a Disgaea game in a while, don’t worry: it’s still the addictive time sink of an RPG it’s always been. As ever, you can tweak your many party members and their gear in an overwhelming number of ways, and pretty much all those ways involve a time and/or resource investment. Just when I’d thought I was happy with where a given character was, I’d decide to re-roll them in order to boost their leveling progress (called reincarnating), level some new gear, and slap some new passive abilities on them to squeeze out just a few extra drops of power. This what I’ve always loved most about Disgaea - there’s practically no limit to what you can do if you have the patience and conceptual understanding to do it.New classes aside, Disgaea 5 supplements its familiar core with even more extra layers than just about any entry in the series, though not all of it necessarily succeeds. Some of the winners include a map editor that allows you to create and share your own custom maps, the ability to assign your characters a subclass, and the new Squad system, which allows you to group party members together in order to gain unique bonuses and abilities.For example, characters thrown into the Giant Killer Squad will be giant-sized for their first three turns in battle, and members of the Foot Soldier Squad get stat bonuses based on how many people have been enlisted to their ranks. Though that’s a lot to manage, it provides a welcome incentive to hire and level as many characters as you can to to take full advantage of what squads have to offer.It’s okay that Disgaea 5 doesn’t take any huge risks with its tried-and-true formula, but I do wish the series would hold on to ideas that work and iterate on them rather than always toss them for something new. For instance, Disgaea D2’s monster mount system added an excellent new layer to the relationship between human and monster units, but it’s been scrapped for the older Magichange system, which while novel, doesn’t provide the same functionality and feels like a step sideways. Magichange isn’t bad or anything, but it’s effects are temporary, and require you to redeploy the monster unit afterwards, making it less flexible.