When you start up a new game in
Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, you’ll get a brief summary of what’s been going on in the nether realms, which is basically that Lord Emperor Void Dark has started taking over every realm with his Lost Army. As you can imagine, there will be other demons, especially Overlords, who are not going to want to blindly submit to Void Dark. One of those is Seraphina. She’s the Princess Overlord of Gorgeous. Seraphina is actually upset with Void Dark because her father arraigned her marriage to Void Dark and she didn’t want to marry him. She ran away to avoid the marriage, which means she left her comfy life, so she wants to defeat Void Dark because he ruined her cushy life. To do so, she forces a whole bunch of prinnies (bribed with sardines) to fight for her. On their first encounter with the Lost Army, she meets Killia. We don’t know much (really anything) about Killia except that he wants to kill Void Dark. The way he defeats the entire Lost Army is enough to convince Seraphina that she wants to keep him for herself. She convinces him to stay with her for a while and use her pocket dimension as a home base. From there, they can track down Void Dark and defeat him.
The first few boards give you the option to run through a tutorial on how to play and use different elements of the game. Personally, I recommend that you play them as they won’t take long and they’re a great refresher on what to do. Plus, they have added some new elements to the game. Revenge Mode is one of those new elements. As your characters take damage or damage enemies who are in Revenge Mode, their revenge meter will fill up. Obviously, it’s better for you to fill up that meter damaging enemies who are in Revenge Mode, but they will be harder to hit. Revenge Mode can be very helpful! Once you enter it, your SP cost for skills is reduced to 1, your critical rate will be 100%, and you take 25% less damage. As you can imagine, using Revenge Mode correctly can win a board for you very quickly.
Team Attacks are nothing new to Disgaea. When characters are next to each other (diagonally doesn’t count), they can perform a Team Attack. These are much more powerful and are fun to watch. They won’t necessarily team up though. The more they work with each other, the more likely they are to do Team Attacks. Something new to Disgaea 5 is the Alliance Attack. Back in the pocket dimension, you can put your characters into various squads. These squads will give the characters different bonuses in battle, plus they’ll let you do things like interrogate prisoners. They’ll also let the squad leader call for an Alliance Attack when the leader is in Revenge Mode. Once they call for an Alliance Attack, every member of the squad will join in on a massive attack. Obviously the more people in the squad, the more powerful the attack will be. You can hire a lot of characters (108 not including the ones you start with). It’s fun to go in and play with customizing the characters you want. You will unlock more character classes to hire after you complete their quests and convince them to trust you. There are differences in the male and female versions of each class, which is nice. It gives you more variations that way. You get to give your recruits names too. I find the randomly-generated names funny to look through.
While you are exploring, don’t forget to check out places like Item World and Quests. They’re my favorite of the many different things that you can do in the pocket dimension. Item World lets you level up your items. Quests will gain you money, items, and even recruitable characters. As Killia continues on the journey to defeat Void Dark, more people will join his group, like Red Magnus and Cristo. Eventually as you work your way through the realms, you’ll learn more about Killia’s past and why he’s so dead set on destroying Void Dark. Good luck on your journey!
