Disgaeadventures

I’ve had some interest in Disgaea for a while.  It’s a Tactics-style Strategy RPG, and I’ve never met one of those I didn’t like.  I’ve heard tales of the grind involved in this game, the levels going into the thousands, the massive amount of time required, and well, that’s kind of a turn-off for me.  A while back, though, AK did a series of his Deep Read posts on the Disgaea series, and certainly made them sound quite appealing.  So, that, coupled with the promise that the grind wasn’t really that bad unless you’re going after the side content, convinced me to give it a try.  So I picked up the first Disgaea.  And added it to my copious PC game backlog.  And there it sat.  Because that is the fate of anything added to my backlog.  Until, eventually, it gets pulled out, dusted off, and played with joy.  And it was Disgaea’s turn for that recently!

I’m about 5 hours into the game now.  I approached it with trepidation, but what I found there really wasn’t what I expected.   And I found things interesting enough that I felt like sharing my experiences.  So, we’re going to have this, half first impressions post, half after action report.  Something similar to that first post of my Dark Souls Let’s Play.  Except this one, I don’t really plan on turning into a series, but hey, we’ll see.

I played a bit extra to grab screenshots after typing this up, so yes, these don’t always line up with my narrative here. Don’t @ me.

So, a bit of story to start us off.  Our main guy is Laharl, son of King Hardtospelllongname, who ruled over the demon world.  While Laharl was taking a two year long nap, his dad died, passing his rule down to him, except he kept sleeping, so his kingdom all split up into arguing warlords fighting for the scraps of it.  Eventually, Etna, who super obviously has ulterior motives for it, wakes him up and sets him to go beat up all the other demons and put his rightful kingdom back together.  Got it?  Ok.

My Adventures in XCom 2

I got myself a new computer. I didn’t want to. I was perfectly happy with my old one. But you can’t always get what you want, so here I am, new computer in hand. Lap. There you go.

One of the important things to do with any new computer, of course, is to find out just how much it can handle. After all, if you’re going to be investing into any games for it, you need to know just how leet it is, else you could buy something above your system. And also, you get the hackerz casting hardz as to the spex of your system. You can’t have people hardzing your spex. Sure, you can just look at the system requirements, but that doesn’t give you anywhere near the knowledge on frame rates and specific graphic quality that a practical test does.

That drew me to XCom 2. A current gen game I actually wanted that I could get for cheap with a bunch of mystery gems on top through the recent Humble Monthly Bundle. If it worked on my system, and actually played well, I could comfortably get other modern games. If not, well, at least I got some other games I could play.

So when I started XCom 2 up, I really wasn’t planning on playing for long. My gaming schedule is rather full. Like, I need games to make reservations to get themselves in my immediate playlist. I played it for an hour, was satisfied with my system’s performance, and shut it down. But I couldn’t get the game off my mind. So I figured, you know what, Time? You can’t tell me what to do. I still have this super packed gaming schedule, so I wasn’t going to commit to a full runthrough, but given the nature of the game, I thought I’d give it an ironman run until it wasn’t possible for me to continue anymore.