Story	7/10	Characters	7/10
	Graphics	7/10	Music	7/10
	Gameplay	10/10	Extras	10/10
Reviewer: Chi Phan Final Score: 8/10

Every single gaming publisher has a title or series that is consider a key marquee title or series that the consumers can identify with when they hear the name of said company. For example when you look at SquareEnix, you immediately recognize SquareEnix as the company that puts out the Final Fantasy series. For NamcoBandia, they are known for the Tales rpg series. And the list can go on for each gaming company. When you look at NIS America, you think of one game and that game is Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Sure NIS America has release quite a few rpg games in the past 3 years but at the end of it all, the game that really put them on the map was Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. In essence, Disgaea has become NIS America Final Fantasy game. Sure NIS America is still consider a small gaming company when compare to SquareEnix or NamcoBandia but to the rpg fans out there, NIS America is their answer to gaming heaven with rpg game being release one after the other. In the last 2 years alone, NIS America has release more rpg games than even SquareEnix. That in itself is a telling tale of how much of an impact NIS America has become to the rpg genre. The release of Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories mark a turning point for NIS America and to the title itself. Disgaea has now become a series with the release of this sequel. Not only that, but Disgaea has now become "the series" from NIS America. Their marquee series that all NIS America fans and rpg fans alike need to pick up. With a cult following that developed during the release of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories have a lot to live up to from the sheer hype alone as the biggest title from NIS America in 2006 but also being the sequel to the game that put NIS America on the map. Will this game to meet such expectations or will it just fall flat like most sequels are to the original first title? The answer to that question is an astounding yes to being as good as Disgaea: Hour of Darkness if not better than it. We break things down for you in this review as to what's good and what's new in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories.

I am Overlord Zenon. I curse you all. Hahahahaha!! I'm back!!      15 years ago Overlord Zenon came to the world of Veldime to place a curse on the humans that lived on Veldime. Under this cursed, the humans slowly started to transform into demons. The transformation from humans to demons is a slow process but one that slowly over takes Veldime where almost all the humans had become demons. Overlord Zenon himself went into hiding after placing this cursed. Our story begins 15 years later in present time where the only remaining human left that hasn't been transformed into a demon is a 17 year old boy name Adell. For unknown reasons, Adell seem to be uninfected by the curse of Overlord Zenon. Making a promise that he would always protect his family, Adell trained himself as a martial artist with the goal of challenging Overlord Zenon into a battle in hopes of lifting the curse so his family will once again be humans. Using a summoning ritual with the help of his mother, Adell hopes that he can summon Overlord Zenon out from hiding so he can do battle with him. However the summoning ritual went wrong and instead of summoning Overlord Zenon, Adell manages to summon Zenon daughter, Rozalin by mistake. Realizing the errors of his way and feeling bad for the mistake, Adell made a promise to Rozalin that he will take her back to her father. By doing so, this will also open up an opportunity to meet Overlord Zenon face to face and a chance to defeat him and lift the curse. But the journey to return Rozalin to her father isn't as easy as it seem as Rozalin herself doesn't know where her father live as she's been shelter in a fancy house all her life away from the outside world. Still this will be a journey where the two will each learn from one another and question each other in their beliefs and faith in their roles and promises they made in life. They will face demons and monsters that will hinder them during their journey as well as a Demon Lord name Etna who's looking to challenge Overlord Zenon herself so she can take his title and be the new Overlord of Veldime. Get ready for some comedic fun as all hell breaks loose as demons and human alike tries to be the one to defeat Overlord Zenon. The thing about this story is that it's short and idiotic in a non-serious way. The way the story is told and the way the characters talk to each other about getting their level back or getting a higher level to defeat an opponent like they know they are in a video game pretty much tells you that the story wasn't meant to be taken seriously. So if you looking for a serious rpg story than you be highly disappointed. Heck even if you don't have a high standard and just looking for a decent story you still be disappointed. But than again it's not a lie when I say the story has its own charm in a way. There are definitely moments in the story where it has you smiling and laughing in delight. The thing that helps give this story some heart and soul is the characters in this game from the main regular characters to the cameo characters. They make you smile when they interact with one another. And that's the thing, even though you know the story is dumb and doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you just can't help but enjoy the ride that the story takes you on. It's a light hearted fun comedy story and I'm sure most gamers would end up having fun with it.

"Hey I want to join the cool group."      The game has a cast of 7 main characters who of course will be your main storyline party members. About 4 more supporting characters will round out the rest of the overall cast of characters in Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories. The story itself pretty much only focus on the main hero, Adell, and the female lead, Rozalin in terms of any particular character development and story scenes. But even then their character developments are pretty weak to mostly minor references on how they grew up and where they came from. In fact the entire casts of characters are development with mostly a few lines of references on where they came from as part of their initial introduction into the story. After that the story just moves on as before once the characters are introduced. But again you really can't expect too much of any character development from a story that is mostly a comedy story in an idiotic kind of way. But even with a lack of any real defining character in this game, it doesn't necessary mean the characters are bad or boring in this game. What makes the cast of characters work in this game is the voice acting and some very funny moments in this story that just make you want to laugh at these characters. That's the thing here. These characters in this light hearted story will make you laugh at them with a smile on your face. It's also very nice to see some great cameo appearances from characters in the first Disgaea game and other NIS America rpg. You can't truly be a NIS America rpg fan until you get excited just seeing Laharl drop in with his stupid trademark, "Hahahahaha" laugh. That has to put a smile in any Disgaea fan seeing their favorite NIS rpg characters dropping by in this game for a quick rumble. So while the characters aren't in-depth to be taken seriously, they are fun to have around. And as long as you are having fun with the characters and not being bored of them, then somewhere along the line, the game is a good job.

"Do we look good on TV?"      By now most rpg gamers should be familiar with NIS America rpgs to know that rpgs published from them will have that old school 2-D look to them. So strong graphical presentation aren't going to be the biggest selling point for this game. Like with the first Disgaea, Disgaea 2 is build around small animated 2-D sprite characters in a semi 2-D environment. The rendering of the story scenes and background are nicely done although the lack of a full 3-D rotating camera angle really hurt this game at times. Especially during battles where if a fighter is at an odd angle, you can't rotate the camera fully in a 3-D fashion that it hurt the maneuverability of your fighters making battle maps hard to navigate in. However animated spells and weapon skills are still impressive to look at even in an old school style presentation. Dialogue story scenes are done with anime artwork of each character with thought bubbles depicting what the characters are saying. Simple old fashion stuff. In truth the game pretty much look exactly like its predecessor with minor improvements here and there.

Axel, the rock star is back!      The best word to describe the music is fun. There's an upbeat tempo to the game overall with a mix of different variety of musical scores in the soundtrack. There are new musical scores mixed in with old musical scores from the first Disgaea game which gives the overall game an abundance of tracks. In terms of lasting impression well that will sadly disappoint because lets face it, you don't really notice some of the newer scores that much. It's the old musical scores from the first Disgaea gamee that have a more lasting impression as it brings out the nostalgic feeling as each character from the first Disgaea drops in to make a cameo appearance. That's where the music makes its best impact as nothing beats the appearance of say Flonne dropping into the game and than you hear Flonne character musical score playing in the background. It brings a warm smile to you, giving you lots of fun just seeing some of these cameo appearance and their music. So the game disappoints in terms of newer tunes but the old tunes still are great classical ones. Luckily overall the game doesn't rely on the music to carry it and to be truthful, you probably won't think too much on the music while playing the game outside of it being just background music while you having fun playing the game. And you can't really fault the music for not having a stronger impact in the game because the story itself in this game is short and not very serious. Musical scores always go hand in hand with the story as it's the music that set the mood of each story scenes and battle. So when the story is only a fun short comedy story, you won't get anything from the music outside of some fun tunes to listen to. And that's what you have here.

Some fun in the Item World. Ready for a fight. Game Information     Genre: Strategy RPG    Publisher: NIS America    Disc: 1 DVD Disc    Memory: 523 KB    Players: 1 Player Mode    Analog Control: Yes    Rating: Teen    Release: August 2006      Disgaea 2 gameplay is a mix of the old and the new altogether. Everything that was introduced in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness is back, so returning fans of the first Disgaea will be please with that fact. Of course to simply bring back old features that were introduced in the first Disgaea would be too plain so they introduce some new features and expanded the old features making them bigger and better. As a returning Disgaea fan, you should be very familiar with how this game is set up and played so all you need to do is get yourself familiar with the new features introduced in this game. The key element of this gameplays is still a basic strategy rpg game. Whether or not you want to make your gameplay more complex depends on you. The basic concept of the gameplay is very simple and exactly the same as the first Disgaea. You start off at your base of operation, in this case it's Holt Village. In Holt Village you will be able to access all the key features of the game through various character npcs. Shops, the Hospital, the Dark Assembly, the Item World, and the Dimension Gate can all be access here. Your main objective once you heal up and stock up on supply is to head toward the Dimension Gate npc and head out to a stage map. In most cases you get story scenes before the opening of a stage map battle. Each stage map is set up like a grid map in a turn base strategy rpg element that most old school strategy rpg fans will be quite familiar with. You are able to call up to 10 fighters maximum to fight. This is good and bad in different ways. The good part is you get 10 fighters, the bad part is that with so many different story characters and job classes to choose from, 10 fighters doesn't seem to be enough. You move your fighters out into the grid map and take turns using an action command whether it's to attack or use a skill. Once you finish implementing all your fighters' actions, you end your turn and it's the enemy turn. You rinse and repeat this process until the stage is clear. Clearing a stage pretty much just requires you to kill off all the enemies on the stage map. As stated that's pretty much the main concept of the gameplay. But if you want to get more into the advance techniques of playing this game, you probably want to really start digging into some of the new and returning features of this game. Here we'll overview all the returning features and their improvements as well as some new features introduced in the game. Dimension Guide: To access each stage map and get the story moving or to revisit a stage map, you just need to talk to the Dimension Guide npc. She will list all stages available for you to do and complete. Dark Hospital: The Dark Hospital npc will revive, re-heal, and restore SP of a party member or of the entire party for a price. The more times you use the Hospital, the Hospital will reward you with prizes in return. Job Classes: The game offers over 30 different job classes and monsters to choose from. At the beginning of the game you start off with a small set of classes and monsters but as you play further into the game, you will be able to unlock more job classes and monsters. Each job class and monster starts off with the basic first rank class but as you level them up, you will be able to unlock higher rank classes. Each job class has a total of 6 ranks within each class. Reincarnation: One way of upgrading your fighters from a low rank to a high rank job class is by deleting them and reincarnation them to a higher rank. They will start over at level 1 of the higher rank but they will be able to inherit skills, basic stats, and growth stats of the previous rank class making the new rank a better quality fighter than creating a new rank job class from scratch without reincarnation. How much of an inheritance of stats a reincarnated fighter brings over from its previous rank depends on how much Mana you are willing to spend on the quality of the reincarnation. Reincarnation comes in 6 qualities from Good for Nothing to Genius quality. In order to build the best fighters you will definitely need to reincarnate your fighters several times. Dark Assembly: The Dark Assembly returns in this game. Nothing has changed much in terms of the Dark Assembly. In the Dark Assembly you can pass bills to create new job classes, open up bonus stages, open up new and more expensive items in shops, raise or lower enemies' levels, and other minor miscellaneous things. Like with the first Disgaea, you can bribe senators in your favor by giving them various items and if you aren't able to pass a bill, you can use force and fight the senators that are oppose to your bill. This is all familiar territory for any Disgaea fan. Post Office: A new feature introduce in this game is the Dark Court and Felonies. Once a fighter meets a criteria due to reaching a certain stat requirement, they can be subpoena into getting felonies attach to their character for being bad. Being bad and having felonies attach to your character is a good thing overall in this game. You talk to the post officer npc to get a subpoena for your character. Once you have a subpoena that has a bailiff specialty attach to it, you then enter the Item World of the subpoena to the floor where the Dark Court is. Once you enter the Dark Court inside the Item World, your character or characters will be given felonies to their status. Having felonies attach to a character will give off great benefits such as extra exp bonuses for the rest of the game, item prices in shops will be reduce, and sale prices of items that you are selling will be higher. But really the main reason why you want all your fighters to have a large amount of felonies is getting that extra exp bonus for them. It's a great way in leveling up faster. Shops: In Disgaea 2, the game added some new shop options. You still have your basic weapons, armors, and item shops at your base in Holt Village but you can now find specialty shops in the Item World. Some of these specialty shops only sell rare things that you can't buy outside of the Item World. You have your Bribes shop, Cell Phone shops, and Rarity Shops. These specialty shops will randomly appear inside a Mystery Gate in the Item World. Lifting & Throwing: A returning feature in this game where you can lift and throw allies and foes across the battle map. This is a great way to reach the other side of the map quickly or getting to the out of bound areas by lifting and stacking your allies in a tower and throwing them over there. You can also fuse enemies together by throwing them into one another. This will raise their level up as they begin to fuse together but it's a great way of leveling up on a higher level enemy but having to deal with only one foe once all the foes are fused together. Geo Effects: Geo effects and geo panels are back in this game. Most stage maps in this game will have at least one geo panel that gives off a geo effect to certain grids on the map. An example of a geo effect is Attack 50% where anyone that is standing on a grid that has this geo effect will get a boost in 50% to their attack. A new thing to note is that some geo panel are now geo monster where they are exactly like geo panels but are harmless monsters that move randomly around at each turn of a battle. What this mean is that geo effect from these geo monsters won't be stationary like with regular geo panels. So a grid that doesn't have a geo effect may end up having a geo effect on the next turn due to the geo monster moving to a different grid or a grid with a geo effect may lose the geo effect on the next turn because of the geo monster moving to a different spot. Depending on the situation, this can be annoying or helpful to you. Specialists: Another returning feature where all items and equipment in this game will come with at least one specialist. A specialist is an item resident that gives off a certain stat boost to the item that the specialist is living inside off. Like in previous game you can subdue a specialist by finding them in the Item World and killing them. This will allow you to move a specialist from one item to another item, thus creating the ultimate equipment. The only thing to note here that is new is that you are now able to marry two specialists in order to create a new specialist that has the combine abilities of the two specialists that you used to marry. Item World: The Item World is back and bigger than before but yet at the same time it still retain all the same features as before. Your main purpose of going into the Item World is leveling up your weapon or gear for better usage. Like before each item or equipment will have different set of number of floors for you to climb depending on the rank and rarity of the item or equipment. Each 10th floor will be an Item Boss that you need to defeat. Once the boss is defeated you can leave the Item World to save your progress and the item or gear will level up a bit in stats when an Item Boss is defeated. A few new things were added into the Item World that you will randomly encounter during your climb in the Item World. You will randomly find and encounter Mystery Gate, Dark Court, Specialist Towns, and Pirates. You can read about Specialist Towns right below. As for encountering Pirates, there are about 16 different types of Pirates each with different levels. Each type of Pirate will carry a treasure map. Once you defeat a Pirate you will be able to obtain that treasure map. Collecting all the treasure maps will allow you to gain access to the Land of Carnage. You can learn more about the Land of Carnage down below. We've already discuss the Dark Court in the Post Office section. The most important new feature is the Mystery Gate which will randomly appear on certain floors. Going inside a Mystery Gate will take you to a Mystery Room where the room will provide you with various random services. You might find a Specialty shop in the room, free treasure chest with rare items, specialty npcs that will provide you with a free bonus boost to the item that you are in, and extra monster fights that as a reward you, the item you are in will gain an extra free level up. The Item World although a very big feature isn't a super important feature as it's possible to complete the game without touching the Item World at all. Specialist Town: After you defeat the Item boss on each 10th floor, there's a random chance that you can enter a Specialist Town. This is a new feature in this game. A Specialist Town will offer a few random things. You can find an Item Hospital which pretty much works the same as the Dark Hospital except it's in the Item Word, you may see a scene where you can marry your two Specialists to create a new Specialist, and finally you maybe able to access the Item Assembly. The Items Assembly works in the same way as the Dark Assembly only the bills you are passing or wanting to pass will only affect the stats of the item you are in. Dark World: Although the Dark World is consider to be an extra feature in the game, it's actually too big of a feature to not include it as part of the main key feature in this game. And really you need to fully experience and play through the Dark World to appreciate a full game experience of Disgaea 2. The Dark World is pretty much the exact alternate version of the regular story gameplay in terms of each chapter and stage maps within each chapter. The difference here is that you don't get any storyline in the Dark World. What you get is a harder version of each regular story stage maps for you to do. The enemies are in a much higher level and there are certain conditions set at the end of each turn that may hinder you in completing the stage map. In other worlds you can look at the Dark World as a hard mode version of Disgaea 2 but without the story scenes. Since the enemies and level of each stage map is in a much higher level than the regular story stage maps, it's recommended that you play the Dark World on your second play through even though you can access the Dark World on your first play through. Land of Carnage: The Land of Carnage much like the Dark World is an extra feature but it's one that is pretty important in the game. Getting access to the Land of Carnage itself is hard as you need to obtain and find all the treasure maps that each of the 16 pirates that randomly appear in the Item World. Bad enough that the pirates are hard to defeat but it gets worst as once you get down to only needing 2 or 1 treasure map left, trying to get the last 2 or 1 pirate to appear that you need treasure maps from is extremely annoying and hard. But once you get the Land of Carnage to open up, you are inside the Holy Land. Hahaha. The Land of Carnage will than replace your Holt Village as base of operations and will serve you just as the Holt Village did. The difference here is that you are now able to access and play with some extra story characters that you normally can't have in the regular story game. Story stage maps are also harder with increase in level and difficulty although not as hard as the Dark World stage maps. But most importantly, you can now access the Item World for rank 39 items thus allowing you to get the ultimate weapons in this game. The Land of Carnage becomes a whole new game for you to play with replacing the regular story game stages. There are two ways in which you can approach this game in terms of how you want to play it. You can take the simplistic route which basically doesn't require you to touch much of the game key features. You just go through each stage map and kill the enemies and proceed on with the story and thus the game. This is the basic story mode gameplay. Very simple to get into but the end result isn't too satisfying. The other route is where you want to dig yourself deep into the gameplay to unlock bonus stages and bonus boss fights at an extreme high level that goes above level 1000+. When you go through this route, you'll need to play the game over a few times to start a new game+ cycle and you need to pretty much use all of the game key features to help powerlevel all your fighters to reach a maximum boost in stats and level. This involve reincarnating your fighters a few times, unlocking higher job classes, going through the Item World of various equipments, putting Felonies on your fighters, unlocking some bonus stages to use as a leveling map to further unlock the harder bonus stages, and unlocking the Dark World and Land of Carnage. Going through all this process just to make sure your fighters is at a maximum level with best stats is a very grinding task but at the same time can be very addictive. You are looking at over 200+ hours of gameplay when doing all this. Time does fly by that you don't even know how long you spent on the game. What makes the gameplay work is that it truly offers strategy rpg fans exactly what they want for in a game, a complete strategy rpg experience to an extreme level where there is no limit in the game. The game balance itself in a way that it offers both kind of experience for both kind of gamers, the casual gamers that don't like to spend a lot of time on a game and the hardcore gamers that want to spend a lot of time unlocking and completing everything. Disgaea 2 is all about gameplay and if you not a strategy rpg fan than you not going to be please with it. But as a strategy rpg fan and a Disgaea fan, you will love this game as it offers you everything you would want in terms of gameplay.

Score: 10/10

This isn't Makia Kingdom, you know.      In most cases the extras and replay value in a game is just that, extras and replay incentive that give extra value for gamers outside of the story gameplay. However it's a bit different for Disgaea 2 because for a gamer to fully experience and appreciate Disgaea 2 at its greatest, you really need to tackle on the extra features of this game. You won't be satisfy with just playing the story gameplay as it would be too easy and too short that you would end up disappointed. Which is why we listed a couple of key extra features in the game under the Gameplay section as a must feature to play and experience, The Land of Carnage and the Dark World. Both the Dark World and Land of Carnage are extras that you don't need to do in order to complete the game but the game doesn't feel complete without doing them. But that's not all. See the game also provides 20 extra bonus map stages for players to unlock and tackle. However the condition to unlocking some of these extra bonus stages varies. You need to be able to pass the Dark Assembly bills to each bonus stage to unlock these stages, you need to be at a very high level to the point where your characters would need to be at level 1000+, and with some you need to be on your second play through or more on the game to unlock them. This of course set you up for having a reason to replay the game numerous times. In fact it's recommended that you tackle these bonus stages on your second play through or more just to get the regular gameplay out of the way so you can start powerleveling your characters to tackle on the Bonus Stages since completing some of the Bonus Stages would result in a quick, different ending. This of course brings up the replay value of having multiple endings. But to be truthful, the endings to these multiple endings are very disappointing. Still you're not replaying the game for the multiple endings but to get a chance to fight against these super hard bosses that are key trademark characters from other NIS America rpg games. One can say that the extra bonus stages and the cameo appearances are what made the gameplay so fun that you need to spend your time powerleveling all your fighters. This is probably the best feature in the game and the reason why you would spend 200+ hours of leveling your characters well past level 1000. Look at it this way, if you take out the extras and replay value of this game, you pretty much got a 20 hour rpg game that is weak in story, characters, with little challenge in gameplay. This is why the extras and replay is so important to this game that it's more than just extras and replay. It's a must for all gamers to experience when playing this game.

When it comes to pure strategy rpg games on the Playstation 2, one would have to say that Disgaea 2 is the best or one of the best out there for the console. Its only competition for the top spot for best strategy rpg game on the Playstation 2 is from its predecessor, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. What makes Disgaea 2 so impressive is that the game is base on its sheer gameplay value, key elements and hours involved in playing the game to fully appreciate how deep this game is. If you were to just skim through the game by just playing through the story mode than you be a bit disappointed since it's fairly short from that outlook. To fully appreciate the massiveness of this game, you really need to dig into all the extras in this game from the Dark World to the Item World to fully see how big this game is. It's not a far stretch to say that you can spend over 200+ hours in this game and still won't be able to fully complete this game from bottom to top. That's how big and massive this game is. If you love the first Disgaea and a huge fan of strategy rpg games than you would love Disgaea 2. Final Score: 8/10