First: a little bit of background. Tactical RPG's have always interested me, and I've dabbled with the genre here and there, but haven't ever become truly invested in any particular game. Most of the time, I find an abundance of dialogue to be extremely off-putting in these types of games. I prefer gameplay over story, which I've devoted entire blogs to in the past, and I also tend to prefer gameplay experiences where I have free reign to do what I want. Disgaea then, seemed like a great choice, what with it's intricate systems and dizzying amount of content: the series always seemed straight up my alley. I wanted to wait however, until I had a portable system to play the game on, as this seemed the best option for me. So yesterday, I bought Disgaea 4, and have spent a good amount of time today trying to wrap my head around it's many gameplay systems. There are a few aspects I can say for sure that I love, but with every few battles a multitude of questions pop in to my head. It was probably a bad idea to jump into one of the most feature-heavy entries in the series, but there you have it. I'll go over my experience in as much detail as possible, while touching on a few of the most prominent questions I have about the game.

Right off the bat, I LOVE the open-ended nature of Disgaea 4. While there are a set order of story missions that need to be progressed through, revisiting certain ones to try out new strategies was greatly appreciated. Most of the time, my first run of a map was fairly rusty, and successive tries offered up opportunities to try new tactics. I love the hub world structure as well, which reminds me of something like Demon's Souls, with an easy way to buy and sell items and abilities between battles. But even though I'm enjoying the core combat and gameplay loop, new concepts were heaped on at such a rate that I quickly became confused. Lifting and throwing units, while fairly self-explanatory, is very difficult to get a hang of, at least for me. There have been a few situations where I've used the system successfully, but many times I felt like I was using it for the sake of using it. Of course, this will likely be solved with more practice, and as such isn't really a big problem right now.

I'm not entirely clear however, on whether I should be making new characters. The ones I started with are well-rounded enough that I don't really feel the need, but neglecting the option seems dangerous. Should I wait until I have enough Mana to make very powerful characters, or simply spam lower level ones? Right now I'm content with leveling up my existing team, but I can't imagine this will be effective for the majority of the game. I've also been wondering where the best maps are for grinding, and if I even need to grind at all (I'm currently at the second episode). Also, what happens once the story missions are over? I'm assuming there is some kind of MMO-esque endgame that involves leveling characters, and that is when the majority of grinding will take place, but I'm not entirely sure.

But perhaps the biggest puzzle to face right now is the Cam-pain HQ. The tutorial for this aspect of gameplay was very short, and didn't really give much insight to the benefits of it. How does populating tiles on the map help me, and should I be prioritizing making characters to fill said tiles? I'm starting to understand the benefits of senate requests, but since they cost Mana, should I be prioritizing them or learning new abilities and Evilities? I've held one senate hearing so far which was successful and allowed me to buy higher level items from the shop, a big help. Maybe all I really need is more time to get a hang of all of the systems, but right now the entertainment and confusion levels are about equal for me. Aside from the questions I've already asked, do you have any tips for a newcomer? How important is fusing monsters and making them into weapons (another system which confused me to no end)? In any case, I'm going to keep on trucking and hopefully post about my progress in the future, so stay tuned.