Almost every time I’ve read a review of a game from the Disgaea series on one of the mainstream game review sites, I think the reviewer felt obligated to mention how crazy and over the top the story/characters/humor in the game are, either at or near the beginning of the review. As if to say “yeah, I know these ultra-powerful demons and angels look cartoonish and silly and all, I know” and almost apologizing for that before going on to mainly praise the game. This doesn’t seem too different from the “guilty pleasure” disclaimers you’ll see people post at the beginning of reviews for works that are traditionally considered embarrassing to like too much. I know I’ve seen people attach similar disclaimers to reviews of otherwise critically acclaimed movies, stuff put out by Marvel and the like. Hell, I know for a fact I’ve done this myself with a few games right here on this site.
So you’d be justified in calling me a hypocrite if I say that I don’t like seeing these disclaimers, simply upon the principle that if you like something, you should like it without shame (that’s a belief it took me a while to finally reach, but I have.)1 That’s especially true of the Disgaea series for me. Because under all the slapstick antics, the the over-the-top expressions, and the planet-destroying sword and magic attacks, the Disgaea games have substance and a real heart to them. And while the series would make a lot of mechanical upgrades throughout its decade-plus run, the best example of this heart is still in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, the PS2 original, and its several ports and remasters. (Actual disclaimer: All the screenshots here are from Disgaea 1 Complete, the PS4 remaster, but it’s essentially the same game for story/character purposes at least. Also, I don’t feel like digging my PS2 out of the box it’s in. I’m moving again soon, you know how it is.)
Also: massive spoilers ahead. I spoil the whole damn plot to this game below, so fair warning as usual.
Fighting a dragon in the tundra, just another day in the Netherworld
In my first post in this series, I covered how ridiculous and wacky the characters and stories in Disgaea can feel, at least at first. That tradition started with Disgaea 1. The game opens with a text crawl and narration explaining that the Overlord of the Netherworld, King Krichevskoy, has died, leaving his only child Laharl the heir to his throne. Laharl, however, went for a nap two years ago and hasn’t woken up since. In the course of his sleep, the Netherworld has gone to hell, with petty demon lords rising up and taking control of their own pieces of it. This is where Disgaea 1 begins: with Etna, one of Laharl’s few remaining loyal vassals, trying to wake him up by hitting him in the face with various weapons and power tools. Finally, when she’s about to try shooting him, Laharl wakes up and wonders what the hell all the noise is about and why Etna is pointing a gun at his head. Maybe we should call Etna questionably loyal.
Not trying to kill you, I promise
Once Laharl learns that his father is dead, he immediately declares himself the new overlord by right of birth and sets off to rule over his realm. Except it’s been without a ruler for two years, and vassals who were formerly loyal to Laharl’s dad because of his strength and influence don’t have any regard for his kid. So Laharl decides that he’ll need to beat some sense into his subjects to get them back into line. The only help he’ll have with that at first is Etna and her squad of Prinnies, a set of penguin-esque monster characters that contain the souls of sinful humans put to work in the Netherworld until they can pay off their moral debt balance and reincarnate.
One of Laharl’s vassals giving him valuable advice. I wish I could tell you we get to take this talking dragon with us to battle, but these lazy NPCs just hang around the castle all day while we do the fighting.
Unfortunately, the Prinnies aren’t terribly useful at first. Being monster characters, they can’t equip regular weapons like swords and spears, and they’re not especially impressive in any one stat. As Laharl starts to plunder the estates of nearby petty demon lords, however, he makes money that he can use to recruit new demons into his army, including a growing set of specialized character types like Mages, Archers, Thieves, Ninjas, and Healers, each with their own special sets of skills and weapon proficiencies.
Just as there’s a Netherworld populated by demons, there’s a heaven-like land called Celestia populated by angels. And at around the same time Laharl begins his quest to consolidate power, the head of the angels, Seraph Lamington, decides to send one of his trainee angels down to the Netherworld to assassinate King Krichevskoy.
Pictured: probably not your ideal candidate for the open assassin position.
Wait, what? Yes. At first, it might seem that Celestia has some bad intel, but we eventually come to learn that Lamington has some ulterior motives and is sending Flonne down to this hellish land for another purpose entirely that he isn’t telling her about. Because 1) he already knows Krichevskoy is dead, and 2) from the one scene we’ve seen her in at this point, Flonne comes off as the exact opposite type you’d want to carry out an assassination: cheerful, kind, and a little naive. This is made clear shortly afterward when Flonne somehow makes it down to the Netherworld, arrives at Laharl’s castle, accidentally runs into him while doing her best ninja impression… and politely introduces herself as an assassin.
Flonne then remembers she’s on a secret mission and runs away, but not before deliberately bowing and saying goodbye, seemingly not realizing who she’d been talking to. Laharl is so flustered by what the hell just happened that she gets the start on him; however, despite her ninja skills and serious magic abilities, an angel like her can’t get far in the Netherworld. Laharl and Etna fight through a bunch of angelic monster summons, finally manage to corner and capture Flonne, and find out what she’s up to. But when Laharl tells Flonne that the old Overlord, his father, is already dead, Flonne bursts into tears.
This understandably weirds Laharl the fuck out considering the fact that he’s talking to his dad’s intended assassin. Flonne asks Laharl why he doesn’t seem sad about his father’s death, and he replies that it’s only natural, because love isn’t something demons feel. She can’t bring herself to believe this, however, and decides to join Laharl and Etna for a while to discover whether the Netherworld’s demons truly can’t feel love. Laharl lets her tag along, reasoning that he’ll have fun shocking her with the kinds of horrors she’d never witness in Celestia. Meanwhile, Etna wonders out loud what the hell Laharl is thinking by letting an angel into his court.
The mid-game follows this trio as they work to claim the overlordship of the Netherworld for Laharl. Along the way, they run into a lot of other strange characters, including a money-loving pig demon, a Dracula-esque vampire lord, a team of ineffective, understaffed Power Ranger/Super Sentai ripoffs, and a Buck Rogers 50’s serial-style dashing hero from Earth. The crew must defeat all these characters and more in battle, and in many cases these defeated enemies are converted into allies and join Laharl’s party, often completely without his consent.
Laharl’s vassals gather to take him down. Thankfully, these ones are just a bunch of basic grunts.
By the game’s final act, Laharl has defeated his demonic foes and claimed his throne, but he and his crew then have to ward off a joint human/angel invasion of the Netherworld led by General Turner, the military ruler of Earth, and Seraph Lamington’s hotheaded lieutenant Archangel Vulcanus. At the end of this war, assuming the player achieves the best ending, Laharl establishes himself as the new overlord, and everyone is happy except for the assholes who instigated the Netherworld invasion in the first place.
Assholes like Vulcanus, here trying out for the role of YHVH in the next Shin Megami Tensei game.
So maybe you’re thinking sure, that sounds kind of silly. And it is in parts. Disgaea 1 features plenty of buffoonish characters, slapstick antics, and dirty jokes. However, buried under the surface is a story about coming of age and coping with loss — about a kid who rejects the concept of love not because he’s a demon, but because it’s the only way he thinks he can deal with losing the person closest to him.
The first hint of this seriousness comes when Laharl has to decide how to handle one of his father’s old vassals, the money-grubbing Hoggmeiser, a pig demon who “says” dollar signs at the end of his sentences in the same way some characters end theirs with hearts. Laharl is all set to kill this disloyal vassal, but when Hoggmeiser’s young son stands between them and refuses to move, the prince decides to let his enemy off the hook. He even leaves the family enough money to get by without starving. Laharl still loots most of Hoggmeiser’s stuff, but this act of mercy is enough to give Flonne hope that Laharl does have some love in him.
I know I’ve used this screenshot before, but it sums up Etna so well
A few chapters later, Etna intentionally leads Laharl into a trap set by another one of his dad’s former vassals, the above-mentioned Dracula-esque demon lord Maderas.2 Not for no reason, either: Maderas is blackmailing Etna in exchange for the return of her memories that he somehow stole from her, straight out of her brain. In true villain fashion, Maderas decides to have the whole lot of them killed once has has them surrounded, including Etna. But Etna has already outsmarted him by paying off the Prinnies he sent to spy on her, and the team wipes the floor with him and his demons (assuming you beat them in a boss fight, of course — these parts are entirely up to the player’s skill.)
After the fight, Laharl naturally asks Etna what the hell she’s about. Etna admits that she betrayed Laharl at first, but says she really intended to use Laharl as bait to get back at and defeat Maderas, which is supposed to make her original betrayal okay somehow. Anyone would expect this self-proclaimed Overlord of the Netherworld to show no mercy in a case like this. However, after freaking out at Etna a bit, Laharl laughs it off, saying he would expect no less of such a devious demon. Flonne is surprised to see this mercy on Laharl’s part and decides that demons might have love for each other they show in ways other beings don’t. Laharl clearly feels some kind of bond with Etna — not one of love in the way we’d normally understand it, but there’s some kind of affection there even if Laharl would never admit to or even recognize it.
This is where things start to get a bit heavy
Even the sarcastic, cynical Etna seems to genuinely care for Laharl in her own way. Despite being his vassal, she treats him like a kid, albeit one she cares about, a bit like an older sister might a younger brother. This semi-sibling relationship is strengthened by the fact that Laharl’s father took Etna in as an orphan. She has a lot of reverence for Krichevskoy, going so far as to ask Laharl if she can steal a portrait of his father from the wall of one of his other vassals to keep for herself. While she does go hard on Laharl most of the time, she also says she’d like him to become the kind of ruler his father was — powerful but fair-minded. She also says she’ll kill him and take his place as Overlord if he fails to do so, and the game gives us no reason not to believe her. But there’s still a kind of caring there.
This brings us to Vyers. This guy is initially presented as a joke character, an extremely vain upstart demon lord who has nicknamed himself the “Dark Adonis.” Vyers is the very first enemy that Laharl pursues, mostly for the purpose of getting some loot to build his army up. He puts on a lot of airs when they meet face to face, but Laharl and Etna aren’t impressed and give Vyers a different name that they think suits his character better. Since he’s not even important enough to be a final boss, they call him “Mid-Boss”, and in the first of many, many meta-jokes in the series, Vyers’ name in the game’s dialogue box (and his profile, stats page, and everywhere else) immediately changes to “Mid-Boss.”
Mid-Boss after taking yet another beating from Laharl and company
Mid-Boss refuses to leave the party alone, showing up a few more times throughout the game to challenge Laharl and his vassals to a fight. However, despite appearances, he isn’t just some buffoonish fop who keeps annoying Laharl for no reason. Now and then, the game cuts away from the Netherworld to see how things are playing out in Celestia between the serene Lamington and his eternally pissed-off and aggressive subordinate Vulcanus. When Vulcanus isn’t around, Lamington has private conversations with a hidden figure who happens to sound a lot like Mid-Boss. Players who are paying attention the few times Krichevskoy’s portrait comes up on screen might also notice a resemblance between him and Mid-Boss. The game doesn’t spell it out until the late game, but it’s heavily implied by the end that Mid-Boss is Laharl’s father in disguise, revived for a short time by Lamington so he can watch over his son long enough to ensure he’ll be all right on his own.
Laharl’s long-deceased mother is also present and watching over him, though again, the game doesn’t hint at this fact for a while. There’s one Prinny in Etna’s squad of servants that’s different from the rest in almost every way: demeanor, voice, style of speech, and even color. All the other Prinnies we meet are lazy and prone to partying and getting drunk when they’re not on the job, and they use that now-iconic “dood” interjection at the ends of almost all their sentences. By contrast, this “Big Sis Prinny” is diligent and responsible, and she seems to have to consciously remind herself to add in that “dood” interjection.3 She even helps Flonne out early on during her stay in the Netherworld by giving her a potion to help her survive the hellish environment. As Etna points out, the Prinnies in the Netherworld generally house the souls of the worse sort of sinners and so aren’t usually inclined to be too helpful to others, but we already know Big Sis Prinny is different from her colleagues.
Just as planned?
If you’re used to these kinds of twists, you might have predicted that this unusual Prinny carries the soul of Laharl’s mother. Laharl only discovers this Prinny’s true identity in his efforts to stop some of the Prinnies working in his castle from reincarnating and leaving his service without his permission. Laharl and his crew pursue them and even fight a group of death-god demons to prevent them from being sent to their next lives. After beating them, however, Laharl is persuaded to let them go by Big Sis Prinny, who’s also in line for reincarnation. This particular Prinny, it turns out, was sent to the Netherworld as a punishment for suicide.
At this point, it becomes clear that she’s Laharl’s mother, though she doesn’t come out and say it directly. A few chapters earlier, Etna related to Flonne the story of how Laharl suffered from a terminal disease when he was a child. No doctor could cure him, but the Queen knew of a sure way to save him: by sacrificing the life of someone who loved him, he could recover. She therefore took her own life to save his. The cure worked, but at an obviously great price, both to Laharl and his father. It’s implied, then, that this is why Laharl is so down on love — he blames love for his mother’s death. Of course, there’s a massive irony here: in saying that he doesn’t believe in love because it took her from him, Laharl is admitting that he loved his mother. Otherwise, he naturally would not have cared about her dying to save him.
To the game’s credit, it doesn’t take this chance to write in a tearful, heart-string-pulling reunion. Laharl’s mother says she has no right to face her son after everything that’s happened. She only asks Flonne and Etna to take care of Laharl before her soul is transported, leaving the empty shell of her Prinny form crumpled on the ground. Laharl, meanwhile, seems to have quietly absorbed all this and tells his crew that they’re headed back to his castle, leaving the rest of the Prinnies to reincarnate in peace.
Laharl’s arc comes to an end in the final chapter, when he and his vassals are about to face up against that allied human/angel invasion force. In the course of helping to defeat both the massive spacecraft fleet of General Turner and the angelic forces of the archangel Vulcanus, Flonne ends up injuring humans and fellow angels — two of the most serious sins an angel can commit. And when Flonne decides to go back to Celestia to seek out Lamington and ask him about the invasion, Laharl, Etna, and their crew of newly conquered human allies come along, resulting in her leading a sort of informal counter-invasion. Not that Flonne intended for it to be taken that way, but she’s not given the warmest welcome when she returns home.
I could write a separate post about how angels are usually arrogant assholes in JRPGs and how that contrasts with the view we have of them in the West.
So our heroes are required to fight a bunch of battles once again on their way to meet the Seraph. When they finally reach Lamington and find Vulcanus at his side, Flonne explains herself to him and delivers her account of the Netherworld’s invasion. Lamington realizes Vulcanus has been conniving behind his back all this time trying to purposely start a war between their two worlds, and he fucks his disloyal lieutenant up by turning him into a flower. However, Lamington also tells Flonne that she must be punished for her own sins and turns her into a flower as well — if not exactly killing her, then putting an end to her existence as a sentient being.
Despite his insistence throughout almost the entire game that he doesn’t care about Flonne and finds her completely irritating, Laharl completely loses it at this point and proclaims that he will kill the Seraph for what he’s done.
Yeah, the fun’s over now
What happens next depends upon the ending you’re locked into. In the course of the final fight with Lamington (PROTIP: you should have a thief in your party to steal his equipped item Testament; it’s good) Laharl gets the upper hand and defeats the Seraph. However, despite his anger, Laharl concludes that killing Lamington won’t help bring back Flonne. He instead prepares to give his own life to revive her, repeating the sacrifice his own mother performed to save his life when he was a child.
If you’ve achieved the best ending, Mid-Boss shows up at this point to stop Laharl. He explains that he and Lamington had been secretly working together to make peace between Celestia and the Netherworld by sending Flonne down as a sort of envoy in disguise. Apparently direct negotiations would not have worked, so this backdoor approach had to be taken instead. Even Flonne had no idea that this was her true role — her natural kindness more or less acted on its own, something that Lamington had been counting on.
Mid-Boss then tells Laharl his self-sacrifice isn’t necessary and revives Flonne himself, but not as an angel. Flonne instead returns as a fallen angel, a special class of demon. He says this was Flonne’s true punishment for fighting against humans and angels. Not that it seems like much of a punishment. Flonne ends up looking a little demonic, with a pair of bat wings, a tail, those pointy demon ears, and red eyes instead of blue. Otherwise, she’s exactly the same old Flonne as she was before. Mainly because she still doesn’t shut up about love and kindness, much to Laharl’s current and future annoyance.
I like the new look better myself
Lamington, despite being passed out for most of this final scene, is all right, and when he gets up he makes a peace deal with Laharl, just the thing that he and Laharl’s father had been planning for behind the scenes. Laharl’s father, meanwhile, uses up the rest of his borrowed reincarnation power and finally disappears, joining his wife in the afterlife. And Laharl and Etna return to the Netherworld along with Flonne, who’s now a permanent resident at Laharl’s castle. Laharl establishes himself as Overlord, Flonne continues to try to teach demons about love with probably very mixed results, and Etna does… whatever it is Etna does.
Part of it probably involves her making fun of Laharl for acting like he doesn’t care about Flonne, as in this scene where she’s doing a mocking imitation of him (it works better if you’re listening to the voice-over.)
So despite how it looks on the surface, Disgaea 1 does have some pretty heavy emotional moments, with Laharl coming to terms with the death of his mother and nearly sacrificing himself for Flonne’s sake. It’s easy to imagine how a different game might play up the melodrama, but Disgaea does a good job at keeping it measured, even when Laharl is going berserk near the very end of the game. It’s only when Flonne is turned into a flower that Laharl loses control in that dramatic scene, but by this point the drama is earned because their relationship has been pretty well established. Even if Laharl still won’t admit it, it’s pretty obvious well before this point that he cares about Flonne, even with all her irritating talk about love.
And when Captain Gordon, Jennifer, and their retro-sci-fi robot Thursday are thrown into the mix and fight/make friends with/join Laharl’s party, they don’t take away at all from this aspect of the story even though they’re coming in straight from a 50s sci-fi serial, a style that you wouldn’t think would mesh at all with the game up until that point. Gordon is a buffoon of a space captain sent by General Turner to the Netherworld as an unwitting tool to open the way for an invasion from Earth — he’s sort of a Zap Brannigan from Futurama, only a lot more noble and less of a selfish jerk, standing against Turner when his true intentions are revealed. In fact, his far smarter and more competent assistant Jennifer has her own drama dealing with the fact that General Turner, her adoptive father, is an asshole who only cares about using her for her genius mind. (The fact that Jennifer always wears a bikini and nothing else isn’t even a distraction from this dramatic character development. Okay, maybe just slightly, but not too much.)
I think Jennifer is probably a reference to an old sci-fi serial character too, but I have no idea. Maybe Nippon Ichi just wanted a busty blonde somewhere in their game.
Disgaea 1 also tries to incorporate its gameplay mechanics into the plot. As you play through the regular missions and move the story along, you may very well accidentally kill an ally. This is surprisingly easy to do, especially once you start to unlock attacks with wide areas of effect, and it’s all the more likely to occur if you take breaks from the main game to dive into the Item World. At first, this doesn’t seem like such a big deal. A unit that gets knocked down to 0 HP during a battle isn’t killed forever, after all — all it takes to bring it back is the right price paid to the Netherworld Hospital.
However, killing even one ally means that you lock yourself out of the best ending, in which both Laharl and Flonne survive unscathed. The ally kill count can be tracked by checking the game stats with the male healer standing in one of the corners of Laharl’s castle, but it can only be reset by starting a new game cycle. There are thankfully ways to do this without playing through and completing the game’s final chapter, but most players will likely do exactly that and be left with a bittersweet ending on their first playthrough in which Laharl goes through with his sacrifice and revives Flonne, ending his own life in the process (well sort of — as we’ve seen, death isn’t a totally permanent state in the world of Disgaea, and this ending concludes with Flonne and Etna talking about a new Prinny at the castle who has antennae sticking out of his head that look just like Laharl’s.) Other, significantly harsher endings can be achieved by really going nuts and killing loads of your allies early on in the game.
I do like the fact that there are multiple endings to Disgaea 1. It fits well with the game’s central themes of love and sacrifice that Laharl is made to actually carry his sacrifice out in one of the more common endings. The one-ally-death mechanic is a little harsh, though. Even when you’re actively trying to avoid causing ally kills, one or two always seem to occur in the course of a typical game. It’s easy to remedy the situation by saving often, cycling those saves, and checking the ally kill count with that male healer NPC on a regular basis, but this does add some extra work to the game that some players might get frustrated with.
No, I’m not mistaken, this is indeed the male healer
And I wouldn’t really be able to blame them. Later games in the series eased up on this criterion for getting the best ending, requiring an ally kill count that would take serious negligence or total callousness towards ally units on the player’s part to achieve. This works better in a thematic sense as well — if the idea was that Laharl could only achieve the best ending for himself by proving himself a good ruler and not harming any of his allies, it seems unreasonable to punish him for screwing up a single time. It doesn’t even have to be Laharl who screws up, in fact. Even if he’s is killed by one of his allies, the player is locked out of the best ending.
Still, this effort to link the player’s in-game conduct to the ending is admirable. It’s not exactly innovative; plot-driven RPGs and visual novels had been doing it for a long time by this point, but usually by way of more straightforward player choice through branching dialogue options or decisions to be made at key points. The bad endings of Disgaea 1, by contrast, are generally unexpected and really hit you in the face as a consequence when they happen. The game is essentially set up to lock you out of the best ending your first play through, since killing allied characters seems so consequence-free at first. So unless you’re using a guide to play, it’s more than likely you’ll rub out a few of your allies by accident and think nothing of it.
Linking this game mechanic to the ending you get also might serve to show that the love Flonne keeps going on about isn’t strictly familial love, the kind that Laharl claims he never felt for his father. The love she talks about is a broader kind, including the bonds between friends, and even the bonds that should exist (but rarely do) between a boss and his subordinates. Even the extremely unromantic Etna pushes Laharl to show this kind of love to his subjects so that, rather than ruling over them through brute force, he can gain their respect the way his father did. Realizing this kind of love exists within him is part of Laharl’s arc throughout the game, to the point that by the end of the game he manages to show mercy even to a mortal enemy.
And of course there’s an element of romantic love in Disgaea 1 as well, namely between Laharl’s parents. Because both these characters are technically sort of dead at this point, all of this romance occurs before the events of the game, but there are some hints dropped throughout that suggest Laharl’s father and mother were very much in love. You might even read an implied future relationship into whatever it is Laharl and Flonne have going, since they pretty much shack up together at the end of the game. Well, so does Etna, but I can’t see Etna settling down with anyone. Anyone who tried getting with her would most likely end up on the wrong end of her spear.
If you’re looking for a game that places the main characters into a straightforward romance, check out Disgaea 2. No, not involving the talking frog, but rather the human warrior Adell here and the demon princess Rozalin on the right. There’s a bit of that commoner/nobility romance novel appeal in this game too. An old angle, but it still works.
While this emphasis on the power of love works as a theme, I think the storytelling in Disgaea 1 ultimately succeeds because it implements that theme in an interesting and effective way. In a typical JRPG, you’d play as the hero, probably a human, entering a Netherworld to fight its demon overlord, and you’d probably end up drawing from your friendships and the power of love in that sense to gain the strength to defeat him. In Disgaea 1, by contrast, you’re playing as the demon overlord and fighting/recruiting the heroes sent to vanquish you. This in itself is turning the usual RPG setup on its head, but it does so still again by depicting the demon overlord and his minions as not typically evil. They think they’re supposed to be uncaring and unloving and try their best to act that way, but the game slowly reveals that these demons are a lot more complicated than even they realize. Meanwhile, while Lamington and Flonne talk about love and peace and all that good stuff, most of the angels we meet in Disgaea 1 are almost robotic in their obedience to Vulcanus, who even the top demons of the Netherworld think is an evil bastard.
By the end of the game, both demons and angels come off as a mixed bunch — driven by the same emotions of love, caring, greed, and ambition. They really just come off as overpowered, more extreme versions of humans. Maybe that’s the main gist of the game: that despite our preconceived notions about what we’re “supposed” to be, we’re not all that different from each other.
In the end, maybe Disgaea is just another JRPG about how the power of friendship defeats evil. But it does so in a unique and interesting way, and that’s why I like it. 𒀭
***
If you were wondering why it took so long for me to post this, I guess it’s pretty obvious by now. I try not to make these too long, but the show/game-specific deep dives that get into plot specifics are hard to edit down too much. And I’ve still got one more to go. Next time, we’ll finish out the series with a look at Disgaea 5, seeing how the series evolved over twelve years and examining some of the weird quirks that make that game unique in its own right. Until then.
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1 Here’s a meta question for you: was this opening itself the kind of disclaimer I was just saying I didn’t like? Am I still a hypocrite? Think about it.
2 I don’t know the English-language voice actor who plays Maderas, but he does a good Bela Lugosi impression.
3 After all this time playing Disgaea games, I still don’t know where “dood” came from. I think it was the localization team’s best attempt at translating the Japanese sentence-ender the Prinnies use, which is something like -ssu. It might be related to “ossu”, which is a very casual greeting that fits with the Prinnies’ kind of sloppy, lazy attitudes.
10 thoughts on “Deep reads #2.3: The power of love (Disgaea 1)”
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Everything is bad for you 
Great post 😁
Thanks!
100% agreed on the “like without shame” part. It’s such a lazy cop-out to start a supposed exploration of something with disclaimers about how embarrassing it is or whatever. If you must provide some sort of disclaimer, inform people matter-of-factly up-front that there may be content involved that some people might dislike, and leave it at that.
I did that with my recent Prison Princess review on Nintendo Life, and people really appreciated that — no judgement, just a simple statement: “if you violently dislike [x], then [y] probably isn’t for you because it’s full of [x]”.
I tend not to bother with that sort of thing on MoeGamer as people visiting usually already know what they’re in for. Nintendo Life is a more “general audience” site, though, so such things are worthwhile in those contexts. But, as I say, you can do so without looking like you’re ashamed of what you’re about to write about.
Yeah, you certainly have to tailor your articles a bit for a more general audience, but as you say, it’s not right to act like the game you’re writing about is so beneath you. I only regret that it took me so long to stop caring about what other people thought of my taste in games. Most of my “real-life friends” aren’t in that same weeb gamer circle, so it’s not like they know what games I’d be talking about 90% of the time anyway.
Man, how do I get called the ‘Dark Adonis’? That’s a life goal I need to set.
I have to agree with Pete about the problems with the ‘Guilty Pleasure’ label, although likewise, I’m sure I’ve used it myself somewhere. Probably some Godzilla thing. We get so up in the ‘high art, low art, non-art’ things where there’s certain values to liking certain things and if you like the wrong things you’re worse as a person and meh. Reminds me a lot of school, when sometimes liking Pokemon got you all the girls and other times it would drive them away from other people but not me because I was a Dark Adonis. But really, any sort of metric for this stuff is all imaginary. It’s media, and what you like matters more to you than what other people like but you don’t.
Also, it seems Disgaia is a lot deeper than I ever gave it credit for. I love these things that have these little touches that really go deep into rounding out the characters and the worlds. And honestly, it seems like a lot of times the less-than-serious works pull them off a lot better than the all-deep-all-the-time ones. So really, a point in Disgaia 1’s favor that it was able to pull it off.
According to Disgaea, I think you’re supposed to just name yourself the Dark Adonis. Takes a lot of self-confidence, but I’m sure you can pull it off!
I agree that the high art/low art/not art divisions are largely meaningless. Either something is good or it isn’t; either you like it or you don’t. People who say something like “it’s not Shakespeare” to describe a work that’s not considered high-brow isn’t considering that even a lot of Shakespeare’s stuff wasn’t exactly high-brow — he was even writing dirty wordplay into plays as serious as Hamlet. So why worry about distinctions like this? I guess it makes certain people feel better about themselves that they have more refined tastes than the masses.
I think the fact that Disgaea 1 and its sequels are less than serious most of the time make the serious parts hit that much harder. Maybe some people feel like these games have problems with wild tone shifts, but I don’t see it that way, As you say, the all-deep-all-the-time works can screw this up; if you’re just beating the player over the head constantly with how serious and heavy and deep it all is they might end up not caring.