Completed: Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention

This is the Vita port for the PS3 game.
It's been a long time since i've played a disgaea game, mostly cause i don't own the system that has 3, 4 and d2
so yeah.... yay for ports.

I'm pretty sure i've already told the story oh how i was introduced to the story so... short version

I was playing D&D for the first time at a friends place, one of the players was a bit late and his reasoning was that he had finally found a copy of Disgaea and promptly showed it off to everyone.
I, having never heard of Disgaea, asked what it was about and was promptly berated for mt lack of knowledge... then i was explained that it was a very limited released game but it's awesome and i should pick it up if i ever find it... and that i'd have an easier time finding la Pucelle Tactics since it was more widely available.

so i don't find the game for a while but eventualyl i do... problem was i didn't have enough money on me... so i rush home, get more money and get back and i nthe span of 30 mins it's gone.
fast forward a year and i find it again, this time i have enough money... the damn game is STILL full price cause it's a re-release but i didn't care...

brought it home, played it, loved it....i'm probably one of the only people who prefers the normal end to the actual canon end but hey... what can you do.

eventually disgaea 2 came out and i bought it right away.
it was okay, not as good as the first but the story was still pretty cute and funny and i love that the main character was pretty much a ninja (Ninja is my favorite class in the game cause it's broken... more so in 1 then in 2 but still... ninja's dodge everything... even healing spells) but yeah... overall it did a good job of expanding upon the lore but it wasn't what i wanted... i wanted to go on more adventures with laharl.

so that would have been around... 2006 according to wikipedia... thats a long time to go between games...

so forgive me if i misremember stuff.

SO....
Disgaea 3 is about Evil academy for demons, honor students are the worst demons imaginable and delinquents are demons who do good deeds.
Mao, the overlord/deans son, is the number 1 honor student and really only cares abotu defeating his father and becoming the overlord himself.
his Butler informs him that only hero's can defeat overlords and that he should get a hero's title soon.
Enter Almaz, a hero (?) who has come to save the princess.. too bad he gets kidnapped by moa and his title gets stolen and now he's turning into a demon.
he has a very short amount of time (666 hours) to rescue the princess and open mao's heart in order to stop the transformation.
but of course, nothing ever goes as planned and everything is more involved then it first appears.

it's been a long time (well okay not that long cause i did play persona 4) since i've played a game with english dubbing. theres a lot of voices that i got to recognize.
like Mao being played by Vic Mi... mi....uh... (if i can't pronounce something i can't spell it either.) Vic Mignogna
or saphire being played by nanako's voice actor Jessica Straus (though in a bit of a parallel world it didn't sound like her... so... maybe i'm wrong? she does have two voice actors apparently)
or Almaz being played by Mr. In everything as the main character (aka Jhonny Yong Bosch)
Or Raspberyl being played by Marta (TOS2) voice actress Laura bailey
but those where the only ones i recognized... look at a list of voice actors i should have heard Michelle Ruff as Salvatore as well but nope... didn't catch that one at all.
anyways my point is i really enjoyed the dub it was well acted with a lot of talented voice actors.

Okay.... onto... that thing i do.

The good:
Mao and Almaz... i love these two, there personality is fun and even though i felt their story could have been a lot strong it was still really nice to have these be the protagonist and see Almaz slow transformation into thinking like a demon while still keeping his humanity.
it has a lot of named characters but not so many that i felt like i couldn't use my own creations (read as my Ninja and my Scout who both were imperative to me beating the game)
the game play is still as fun as it ever was and it's quite funny... i laughed many times.

The not so good:
The story.... yeah i love the characters but the story in this was kinda.... weak.
maybe i'm unfairly compairing it but Laharls game had lots of stories in it. Etna wanted to get away from her own personal demons and was willing to do anything to accomplish it. Flonne was sent on a mission but ends up befriending her target, laharl has to deal with proving that even after his crazy nap he still is the overlord... and theres betrayal and twists and the normal end actually brought me to tears.
but this is just "go here cause the plot says so, the sophomore class is attacking, go fight them, oh look obvious twist we saw from the start.... oh noes....
i will say the normal ending (aka the one i got) made me laugh pretty hard... Mao is a pretty big troll.
so yeah.... out of the three disgaea games this one is probably the weakest story-wise BUT i stil lreally enjoyed the story.... it's just not as good as 1.

The Bad:
I kinda sorta really HATE the maps in the game.
when the game told me i could have a directly overhead view of the map i said "ha, that's silly, i will never use that"
yeah... guess how i played 90% of this damn game.
the maps in the game feel way more vertical then they have in the past and the problem with verticle maps in an isometric view means it's not easy to see whats happening.
i'm sure that attack looked super cool... too bad it was behind a stupid wall!
it was just frustrating to have to constantly go into that top down view cause you do it with the rear touch pad... which i constantly accidentally hit...  which made me turn off the feature... but as far as i could tell i needed the feature to be able to go into that view... so i'd have to turn it back on and then the camera would be constantly going in and out cause i would keep accidently touching it and ARGH.... NO
i do not like this.... nope... not one bit.
oh and the other thing i felt was this game seems really short... i got it on the 29 so... just under a week ago and i've been playing a match here and there but it's already done...
*just checked* yeah there are 14 main chapter stories in 1, 13 in 2 and 8 in 3.
granted with the parallel world stuff maybe that amount of content makes up for the less chapters... i'm not high enough level to do them just yet so i may go back to it and update this but what i did play didn't seem all that interesting since it's not really part of the main story.

SO yeah.... overall i really did enjoy this game but it is not as good as the first one... it's probably not really fair to compare the two but i don't care...

i have heard from many sources that Disgaea 4 is really good, potentially better then Disgaea 1 so when the vita port of that makes it here i will look forward to it... for now though i really need to draw something i'm happy with... and luckily i've run out of new games.... so no more excuses!

oh the winter season of anime has started.. oh... ok... so i still have some excuses not to be productive.