So I bought Disgaea 5 the other day and have been slowly piddling with it but Metal Gear Online was still dominating my play time. Last night I finally gave the majority of my attention to Disgaea 5 and oh man.....I'm scared and excited.

Scared because I finally started to be able to frame the actual breadth of this game. And its massive. And that exites me. What also exites me is the fact that this game is in many ways the antithesis of a lot of modern game design.

It has all these extraneous systems that are given a short explanation and then your just given the keys and thrown into the deep end of the pool. And having a game that actually assumes its players have a functioning brain for once is actually quite nice. I'm also really digging the characters. Seraphina might be my favorite new character this year. The temptress Princess Overlord of Gorgeous goes parading around assuming all men should bow before her. Her personality clashes wonderfully with Red Magnus Overlord of Scorching Flame. Who is a giant meat head who likes to smash things and use catch phrases from the rock.

The music is equally fantastic. The main hub world theme "Moving On" is a really slow grooving jazz song that is just simply delightful. And let's not forget that the game looks incredibly crisp.

I might have more to say once I dive further in but this thing wasn't on my radar at all but it sure did impress me. And so slight note there is a demo up which allows you to carry over progress to the main game. I highly recommend this game if you are looking for a meaty RPG to keep you warm this winter.

Moving on is such a disaster of a song haha, it sounds like she's messing up the song on purpose and adds some random words in to it. Iiiiii have a button!

Its my first time playing a Disgaea game to and I'm beginning to see how some players are able to spend 100+ hours and more on each game. I'm still trying to figure out a lot of the systems but I appreciate that even when it feels like you might have made a mistake developing a character, there's almost always a way to fix it and that there's never really a wrong way to develop characters in the game. I recently unlocked the Chara World which got me onto Evilities (which I hadn't been taking advantage of) but the mana price to enter the Chara World is getting to high now and I don't want to reincarnate a character because he/she will be stuck at lvl 1 until I've finished the story. That all said without the cheat shop I think I'd go mad having to level up characters without that EXP bonus. Biggest issue with the game is the quest system, having to go to the quest dude again and again to see what quests I have is a little bit of a pain. I doubt I'm using squads correctly either, there's just so much going on its overwhelming.

One of my best characters I have is a magic user and he can get instant kills using the fire spell, he's pretty badass. I also made Usalia my main in the Pocketworld and rolling around in that environment is pretty great to. Its a massive game, but one that isn't without a few annoyances.

@ravelle: The actual line is "Day after day I go searching for what I have forgotten"

Gameplay-wise this is pretty easily the best Disgaea I've played, and I'm not even at the postgame yet. The change to Chara World alone has really been paying off as on the first difficulty level it's incredibly easy to just rush to the end. With the Cheat Shop, it's pretty easy to grind mana, so I've been taking my main characters through there once or twice just to get some extra move range on them.

Moving On seems like it's the most divisive Disgaea base theme ever. I personally love it, and no matter what the official lyrics say, it'll always be "I have a button~" to me.

You finally can set a characters level after creating them instead of trying to power level your newbies with a change of them being one shotted.

@ravelle: Yeah, even though it eventually becomes trivial to power level a character from scratch with the right set-up, that's just a nice convenient change to have. Not only that, but having character creation tied to HL instead of Mana makes that experience much less of a grind.

I've been wanting to pick it up after seeing the positive reception, but I'm committed to playing Disgaea: D2 first. I only just finished Disgaea 4 earlier in the year and I'm still cooling down from that.

Man, don't make me want this game before all the deep discounts happen. Especially because I never get into any of the post-game stuff but that's always the part everyone loves the most. I guess the biggest question I have is... how much of this game is geo-puzzles? I really don't like geo-puzzles (by puzzles I don't mean the existance of those panels in a level, I mean specifically when you are forced to move the blocks around to make enemies vulnerable etc).

Also is Moving On really... jazzy? Either way I'm not really sure what I'd call it when the vocals kick in.

I'm really enjoying it so far. There a bunch of small system changes that I really dig. It feels way more friendly than the other games and more importantly ,less grindy. Its one of the only games where I feel like I can either take it super seriously or pretty casually and still have fun and get good progress. I have a couple of minor gripes, the characters don't make great first impressions and some of the english voices sound off sometimes, but its still one of my favorite games this year.

Now Moving On has grown on me as the game progresses. Leaving my base BGM on random helped. There's a note she tries to hit that kills me. But really I just don't like looping lyrics in this place I'm spending hours in. Also it kinda doesn't fit with the vast majority of the shenanigans that happen in the game(that I've seen anyway).

@iamterics: Oh shit what. You can change your base BGM? I did not know this. :o

Yes you can in the settings I believe, you can also change the character you move around as in the Pocketworld (via the Assembly) and the save icon (for some reason).

As for that song, I enjoyed it a little at first because it sounded like she was constantly misses the notes of the song. Now its become irritating so I have to change it.

Sadly the Disgaea 5 theme also as that song playing in the background. :D

@machofantastico: I did figure out that you can change your pocket world char. Didn't see the BGM change option. Changed to Seraphina. Dunno guessing I might have to unlock the BGM thing?

I havent played any since Disgaea 2, but this one is easily my favorite. It's a bit easier than I remember, but somehow that works in its favor.

@demoskinos: You can change the BGM from the Data Shop. Talk to the moth dude across from the Dark Assembly and then go to Music Records.

I dont know, I find the base BGM kinda endearing. Just like how a lot of the Persona songs have broken english.

I'm using the Seraphina theme on my ps4. It plays one of the battle bgm.

Yeah, I'm so not a fan. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world, but the series has had much better themes. 3's was so godlike.

@m1k3: Yeah that's where I fall on it. On a technical level the songstress is kinda bad but I dunno it just has the heart to make me really love it.

I wish this came out in the summer. School is keeping me from playing too much of it, but this game is great. I always have a lot of fun with disgaea games that I've played. The only thing for me is that some of the character's dubs are a bit irritating. Red Magnus's voice acting just really irritates me and even though Seraphina is mostly fine her "ohohohohoho" is like nails on a chalkboard. Everyone else is fine. I liked that Moving on song at first, but it got a bit irritating after a while. I guess it doesn't help that I sometimes leave it sitting in the base while I read or mess around on the internet, because I'm too lazy to turn the ps4 off and then back on later.