After spending nearly the weekend with Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, I can honestly say that it is one of the most addictive RPGs I have every played.
I think it's mainly due to a combination of things, one of them being that the game is never overly hard. This is helped by the fact that it's so easy to level up characters. You can either choose to go back and replay a mission that you have already done, which is a great help as some levels contain areas that allow for bonus EXP. Or you can choose to enter the item world. Each item in the game can has it's stats increased by travelling into the item it's self and completing 10 lvs at a time. The levels for each item are randomly generated but the best thing about it are the bonus items acquired.
The game has a bonus meter, when this is filled to the next level you receive a bonus be it an item, HL (money) or bonus EXP. The great thing is you can obtain items in the item world that would cost a fortune from the shop, or ones that are marked rare or legend items and cannon be bought.
It's not hard to pull of giant combos to gain bonuses on many of the levels in the item world, thanks to special geo markers around the levels. These markers add certain attributes to a square that you or an enemy are standing on. However if you destroy a blue marker on a yellow square, and the blue has the "change to" attribute, then all the yellow markers become blue. If another geo marker it hit during the combo, another colour combo is set off. So you can see where this is going, and believe me there is nothing like pulling off a 1000+ combo and filling that bonus meter all the way to 9!
One of the other great things about the game is the sheer amount of characters to unlock, as well as enemies that can then be created and added to your party.
At the end of it all you have a game that is just a joy to play and with it's great anime styling there is never a dull moment.
Oh and one of the best things, that is so minor but I just really love it, is that when you equip a human character with a weapon, it is actually different on screen. It's just great to see a character brandishing a new sword on the battle field.
