Disgaea is a 2-D tactical turn-based RPG game, originally made for the Playstation 2, has been ported to the Nintendo DS and Playstation Portable. In the game, the player can have an expansive army at their command to help them fight through hordes of enemy demons, angels, and humans with the addition of a comical story line to spice things up.

 The story is very humorous, well-written and contains various satires. The game starts out with the main character, Laharl, being awakened from a two year slumber from his coffin by his royal guard, Etna. Laharl is the prince of the Netherworld and his goal is to take over as, “Overlord of the Netherworld,” just like his deceased father, King Krichevskoy.

Laharl later meets an angel trainee from the Land of Angels known as Flonne, and her mission is to assassinate the king. When she finds out the king is dead, Flonne makes her new mission to teach Laharl the meaning of love and kindness, which Laharl does not experience at all.

The gameplay is similar to that of Final Fantasy Tactics, Shining Force and Fire Emblem. The player can customize an army of over 150 characters at their command, but they can only use 10 in battle. The player can level up their members of their army to level 9999, which is unheard of in almost any kind of RPG game.

In order for this to happen, the player would have to replay the game’s story from the beginning, but your characters retain all their stats from the previous file. This is a good way to get all of the multiple endings for the game, so this gives the player of the game multiple hours of game play; the game almost never gets old.

The game’s story is very comical and funny, as it contains various satires on American heroes, angels, and such. The music of the game is well-composed, as well.

The songs are addicting and they may get stuck in the player’s head for a long period of time. One of the songs in the game was performed by a disbanded band, known as Tsunami Bomb, played only for the English translation portion.

The difficulty of the game can get overwhelming at times, because on each level the enemies can be easy or hard; The player will never know because they would not expect some of the battles to be as unbalanced as they are.

This can prove to be tedious for some, yet exciting for others who enjoy a challenge and training to overcome obstacles.

Some of the English voices can get annoying, but the English version does come with the Japanese audio track; this allows you to avoid the annoying voices and switch to something less annoying, while still retaining all of the English translations. 

If anyone enjoys a game that is comical, fun and never gets old, then Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, is a game worthy of praise that deserves to be played whether it be on a home or a portable console.