Let us assume, for the sake of making a conversation, that we can both agree the original Disgaea was a brilliant piece of game design. No, not perfect by any means; but what it lacked in refinement it more than made up for with sheer audacity. Even if you’re not a fan of its over-the-top sensibilities, you have to admit that Disgaea’s unconventional combination of on-the-nose, metatextual skewering of anime game clichés and ludicrous obsession with stats and grinding was precisely the slap to the face the overly serious strategy RPG genre desperately needed a decade ago.
The problem with a game so fresh, so irreverent, is that it paints its creators into a corner. A larger, more diverse developer probably could have simply followed up with something totally different. Nippon Ichi, on the other hand, was a tiny studio whose only modest pre-Disgaea successes had come with lighthearted but ultimately more conventional takes on the genre — the precise sort of games Disgaea was mocking. By their standards, Disgaea was a blockbuster, but it also broke that old rule of (pardon my French) not shitting where you eat. Having ruthlessly ripped their previous work a new one, Nippon Ichi certainly couldn’t go backward. Forward was the only choice, and that meant more Disgaea.
