I first encountered Disgaea shortly after the first one was released and my first impression was that it looked extremely complex and difficult to both learn and play. While it might appear that way on the surface, it’s not very difficult to get the hang of, and once you do, you find that the Disgaea series is quite entertaining. Now we’ve got Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance to play. So far, I think it’s my favorite to date for a number of reasons.

Let’s start with the graphics. Everything about Disgaea 5 is absolutely beautiful. While it is cartoon-style rather than ultra-realistic, everything is still amazingly detailed. The colors are all bright and crisp, but with a bit of an underworld feel to them, which you would expect given that we are in the nether realms. The characters are all demons and underworld denizens. Apparently everyone, human at least, in the nether realms has perfectly sculpted bodies. The non-human characters range from creepy to cute and they’re all fascinating creatures.

One of my favorite things in Disgaea 5 is the dialogue and interactions between the characters. They have given these demons such a distinct personality that you feel like you know them very quickly. The voicework is simply amazing. You can hear the frustration in Killia’s voice when he’s trying to deal with Seraphina’s silly advances. You can feel the sassiness of Seraphina every time she talks to anyone. All the characters are perfectly done. Plus, you’ve still got the prinnies! If you’ve ever played Disgaea, then you are quite familiar with prinnies, dood. They have their own way of speaking and their amusing phrases, like adding dood onto almost every sentence.

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!

There is no way to change the difficulty setting in Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, but it’s not very hard at the beginning. Like I mentioned, the first few levels are tutorials and you will earn experience from those, which will level you up. If you ever have trouble getting past a level because your strategy skills just aren’t perfect, just replay the previous levels and get your characters more powerful. The more powerful you are, the weaker your strategy can be. While I realize the point of the game is to get the best strategy you can, well sometimes you just have to muscle your way through.

Another aspect of the game that you should consider is your weapons and armor. Each character has built-in affinities for certain weapons, so you might want to use those. The more you use a weapon, the stronger the affinity becomes so you can get them used to other weapons as well. You can buy weapons in the shop and you can win them in battle. You can also use Item World to strengthen your weapons. Personally, I really like Item World. You’ll have to get to a certain point in the game before it’s unlocked, but I found that I got a lot of loot in there. It’s a great place to get weapons and armor and money to buy more. The proper equipment can make your game so much more fun!

Since Disgaea 5 is a turn-based strategy, you can take as much time as you need to get used to the controls. The major things you are going to use are (LS) to walk around, (X) to talk or select, (O) to cancel selections, and (L1) and (R1) to rotate the camera. As for the gameplay, you need to remember to do things in the order that you want. Order is very important for racking up bonuses and such. Basically, you string together whatever actions on the characters that you want and then you will choose Execute to run those. If, for example, you have two characters attacking an enemy and the first one kills it, the second one’s action is just cancelled so you can have them do something else. Each character can move a certain number of squares and then do one action per turn. When you’ve moved everyone and used up the actions that you want to, you choose End Turn and the enemy will do their actions. When they’ve used up their actions, you’ll get a turn again. You keep going until you either kill all the enemies or all of your characters get killed.

While I play a lot of RPGs, I usually don’t play strategy games. However, I absolutely love Disgaea 5! The characters continually amuse me and the storyline is excellent. Plus, there are prinnies, dood! If you are a fan of RPGs or strategy games, you cannot miss Disgaea 5. Seraphina commands you to play Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance NOW!