So, yeah, NIS hasn’t been too vocal about it, but yes, they are doing basically “Disgaea Musou/Warriors”, just in-house, and it comes out on the 23th, in a couple of weeks, i’ve actually preordered the Limited Edition this time, but i’ve seen the demo pop up, might as well give it a whirl.
And let’s just say i wasn’t impressed… actually i was baffled, but for different reasons that you might think.
The reasons being that this is an AWFUL demo.
Like, it’s become clear NIS has no faith in this game, but a demo like this feels just short of self-sabotage, like they actually want this to fail? What the fuck is the point of even throwing this together?
The demo already befuddles on the first impact because there is no story or cutscenes at all, you’re thrown into an empty little hub with a single Prinny to talk to in order to access the three levels/stages on offer; so already if you wanted Disgaea’s style of comedy you’ll have to check the inventory for the “demo weapons, not for sale” bit in the info boxes.
What the demo does have is three special demo stages, but they sure don’t feel special, they are of slightly rising difficulty, but barely so, and they are so short that i was able to see all the content in the demo in about 15 minutes.
Some demos give away too much, but the one for Disgaea Mayhem is exactly the opposite.
This is not to say the game itself it’s impressive, it is indeed what the first trailer made it look like…. pretty dang rough, not just in technical terms, but gameplay wise too.
It’s not even bad, the combat is fine, you have basic combos with light attacks that you can chain a strong attack into, it’s not a copy of DW charge system, it’s a bit more simple, but you can jump, dash, guard, and have the expected ARPG special skills on cooldown that are often repurposed from the classic Disgaea games, with some giving you a brief time window so to adjust the special move range and hit more enemies.
The maps shown here also show a lot of closed off parts and in terms of objectives and flow are keeping it overly simple, just kill enough peons here, more in another part of the map, then face a boss.
There is more, actually, but i had to manually change the protag loadout to try the various weapon types, otherwise you wouldn’t know some are actually quite fun to use, and different types of weapons do feel and act different, like the gun and bow having no guard ability but letting you do backdash to get distance mid-combo, for instance.
Again, the combat is actually alright and can be enjoyable, even if there aren’t too many peons on screen, which i doubt it’s an issue specific to demo, to be honest (the demo has been played on the Quality performance option on a regular PS5, for the record, at least it didn’t have issue of that kind, not that it should), as it the admittely not high difficulty, but there was no difficulty select, this is a musou, all stages have LV.1 enemies so asides from the bigger enemies and bosses being tanky, there’s too little here to do a proper analysis on.
Same goes for the jumping, in the second and third map i had issues with it, in the second i fall down some flattened surface and had to find pile of bricks nearby to get enough elevation in order to get back to the combat arena, like, why not just giving me a double jump? To say nothing of how in third map/stage i happened to fall into the lava and almost died in it because the collision detection didn’t let me jump back into the non-lava part of the map, until it finally decided to let me live.
I do hope these stages that literally stated to be “exclusive/made just for the demo” aren’t THAT indicative of the actual game.
These overly short and overly simple stages also don’t work as tutorial because they don’t explain you shit, you have to dig into the help section to find out there is actually more than it first seem, heck, a lot of Disgaea features that they touted would be there in this musou spin-off, like Magichange, Dark Assembly, the Item World and other systems like having a Battle Buddy that they talked about before… just aren’t here or exist just as systems explained in the Help menu.
If there’s more depth to it via these features in the full game, you would never know because the demo just doesn’t have any of that, nor it even bothers explaining the basic controls. Not that you can’t figure them out, but again, the issue remains because most of these features just aren’t present here regardless.
The demo lack of content is extra weird because they did release demos for the mainline games which actually did have a decent chunk of stuff to see, try and get accostumed with, even if you couldn’t carry over the save data.
To be quite honest, i have no idea why NIS didn’t ask Omega Force to collaborate and do a classic “all stars scenario”, if nothing else because this is so obviously a type of game the company never ever did, quite the opposite, and obviously could use the help of the only company that made their fortune on just that kind of game.
Or at least hire Tamsoft, or after doing Captain Tsubasa games for Namco Bandai they feel like they’re above that now?
It’s such a fuckin monkey paw situation, like, i wanted this to happen in some fashion, but this feels like they went about it on a very small scale and budget, or like they slapped the Disgaea license on another generic project to ensure it would sell a bit.
I wouldn’t preorder it, if i were you, but also i don’t recommend trying the demo because i feel it’s also a terrible demo that seems to exist like a sick joke to help ensure nobody that tries it buys the full game.
Wise Cafe (International) 