I guess this shouldn’t be much of a shock given that there was one in Disgaea 3, but they seem to be a bit more common on the field this time around.

Hey, has it really been almost a month since I last updated? Whoops, must try harder, though I’m sure many of you are caught in the middle of the end-of-year Gameagedeon right now as well – personally, I jumped straight from the main story of Disgaea 4 (well, I got as far as Etna post-game, but don’t really have time to devote to power levelling right now) into Zelda Skyward Sword, have the new Assassins Creed queued up already, and I want to crack through another couple of cycles of PS3 iDOLM@STER at some point as well…

So, I’m kind of behind on my anime watching at the moment, aside from my weekly Sunday double-bill of Fate/Zero and WorkNaria’!!?@£%&@!, and the later of those has really just been carried along by it’s airing proximity to former. I kind of feel the second series of W! is really uneven – at times it’s a lot better than the first season, and at times it’s a lot worse.

As for Disgaea 4, it was alright. I love the new higher definition sprite art, but the characters are a little too one-note. Not that Disgaea has ever exactly been the pinnacle of quality character writing, but this one seems way more aggressive in it’s repeated pushing of the same jokes over and over again.

I’m also rather missing the PS2 days, where the mainline N1 SRPGs always brought something new to the table in terms of the way they played – La Pucelle, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom (not to mention Soul Nomad), whilst all being SRPGs, had mechanics which gave them all a very different flavour to each other. I know that the Disgaea team made ZHP between Disgaea 3 and 4 (and I’ve played a fair deal of that game), but there really isn’t enough difference between D3 and D4 for my liking. Just as well I’ve only bought this the once this time, then.