Presentation

The story unfolds through a series of lushly illustrated character art pieces, with voice-overs supplied in either English or Japanese. Both tracks are high-quality. Though an argument could be made for some voices being miscast in the English dub, it’s still very well done. These can be entirely skipped if you just want to hit things, but you’ll be missing out on some genuinely funny moments and the aforementioned excellent artwork.

Visuals

The quality of the art continues into the actual game scenes. The character sprites look great from any angle or zoom level, though sometimes you might wish they had more frames of animation. Perhaps more importantly, it’s easy to tell one class from another by just scanning over the screen, so you know where everyone is even in fairly complex scenes. Perhaps the only real failing of Disgaea’s graphics is that the scenes are occasionally a bit too complex. It can be hard to get a good camera angle in some spots and the sprite-based characters mean you can’t put the camera wherever you wish. The fantastically over-the-top special attacks and highly varied fields make up for some of this.

Music and sound

Music is one area where Disgaea didn’t really impress me. The music can’t be characterized as bad, some of it is actually quite good, but hearing the music loop over and over can get tiring quickly. The sound effects are good, however. Things pop, smack and go boom in a convincing manner. Unfortunately, the choice of language doesn’t affect battle voices. The main characters are in English, everyone else is Japanese. This doesn’t really amount to much difference as most voices in the battles are generic and repeated battle cries.