I’m a bit late on this one, but here goes.

Disgaea was an incredible game on the PS2.  Sporting cool 2D graphics, a great story, incredible characters, and really fun gameplay, it was a must-have on the PS2… Too bad it was basically ignored by the general populace.

This is the second incarnation of the game on handheld consoles. It was on the PSP last year, and now it’s released on the technologically inferior Nintendo DS.
Can the DS handle the awesomeness? Or does the DS’ limitations make the game lame?

Just a note here, I’ll be reviewing the game itself AS WELL as it’s quality as a port.

Story
The story is awesome. Starts out simple enough. You take control of Laharl, son of the late Overlord King Krichevskoy, who wakes up after a 2 year nap to learn that his father is dead(he choked on a black pretzel). Learning that, Laharl sets out to secure his spot as Overlord. After a while, an angel, Flonne, is sent to assassinate King Krichevskoy. Of course she finds out he’s dead, butshe decides to stay around Laharl to find if demons have love in them. Then the humans attack the Netherworld to “Save the Earth”. Lots of crazy things going on, but overall it’s a really enjoyable story.
But what really makes it amazing is the characters and the interactions between them. The dialogues are genius, the characters’ personalities are just great, and… on the PS2 and PSP versions the voice acting really helped the story segments. I’ll get to that later though. Overall the story is really good, it has some nice twists and the characters are awesome. Can’t really ask for more.

Graphics
The DS is showing a bit of its limitations here. The screen is smaller and lower resolution, so that alone is a downgrade from the PS2 and PSP versions. The battle sprites aren’t bad, but their quality is obviously lower than their PSP/PS2 counterparts. The special attack effects and overall animations aren’t different, but again they look a bit less good. Good thing though, the bigger sprites during dialogues still look great. Overall it doesn’t look exactly as good as on the PS2 and PSP, but it doesn’t look BAD either. If you like 2D anime-style sprites, you’ll like this.

Sound
What…the…hell? Okay, there’s a major screw up here.
1. Where is the voice acting? The “Next Episode” sections have voice acting, and the opening scene has voice acting… But where’s the rest of it?  It’s not there. It’s silence almost all around. This sucks ass. One of the things that were great in the PS2 and PSP versions is that the characters had incredible voice acting, even in English. Now it’s gone.
2. What happened to the music. The music in Disgaea is awesome. But in Disgaea DS… Well let’s just say that the sound quality is dropped to really low settings or something, because some of the songs just don’t sound good at all. Overall a few of the tunes do sound as good as before, but quite a few really suffer from the quality loss.
Still, the game sounds good, the music is nice (disregarding the low quality of the compression) and the sound effects are nice. 

Gameplay
There’s a lot to say about the gameplay, but I’ll keep it as simple as I can.

Battle
The battle system is relatively simple. Comparable to most grid-based Strategy RPGs. On your turn you move up to 10 of your units and make them attack. For attacks, you can execute them whenever you want. By pressing X and choosing “Execute”, all the attacks you ordered will be done. By pressing X and choosing “End Turn”, all the attacks you ordered will be done and the enemies will do their turn. Instead of normal attacks you also have special attacks that use up SP.
Another fun feature here is lifting and throwing. You can pick up units, may it be friend or foe, and throw them out of your way, throw an enemy on another to fuse them (adding their levels up) or give a bit more distance to make your own units reach a certain destination. Really useful in Item World.
Finally there’s Geo Panels and Geo Blocks. You’ll sometimes come across panels in stages that glow a certain color. If a Geo Block is on another panel of that color in the stage, it will give different attributes to that panel; Invincibility, attack boost, attack number boost, defense boost, EXP boost and various other things. You can also do something called a Geo Chain. If a block is on a panel of a different color, destroying that block will change all panels to the color of the destroyed block. If another block was on that color it gets destroyed and does a Chain, changing the color of this color of panel, that until no more blocks are destroyed. There’s something called a Null Block, which, when destroyed, will just remove the Geo Panel altogether. IF a Null Block removes all panels on a map, all enemies will lose a bit of HP(and if any unit is on a block changing color or being removed they also get damaged).
Normal attacks and Geo Chains fill the Bonus gauge, which can go up to 9 levels. How high your Bonus Gauge is determines how much money you win in the level, and you get extra money/EXP/items (1 of either for each bonus gauge level), which is a great way to get lots of Experience and equipment.

Item World
Each item has a world inside it. A world filled with randomly generated stages. Depending on your item’s rarity, the number of floors changes. Normal items have 30, i forgot how many rare  items had, and legendary items have 100 floor. This is essential to leveling in Disgaea. For each floor you complete, your item gets a boost depending on what citizens you have in your weapon.
Citizens are monsters that boost certain aspect of the weapon. There’s a citizen for each stat, and extra citizens that have special effects. Arguably the most important are Statisticians, who give 1% extra EXP for each level they have, up to 300. The citizens level up with the weapon too. Each citizen has a level cap and an efficiency cap. For example, having a statistician higher than level 300(or multiple statisticians that reach that level) on one character will be useless, since they’re inefficient above that. For other citizens it’s different, like Gladiators are efficient up to 19998 (their max level).
On every 10th floor there’s a “guardian” kind of enemy, who has stats higher than other monsters on that level. Killing them gives the item extra stat boosts. 

Dark Assembly 
Another interesting element in the game is the Dark Assembly. This Assembly gives you the right to ask for certain stuff in the game at the cost of mana(you get mana by killing enemies, getting mana equivalent to their levels). The things you can ask for are determined by the number of promotion exams you passed, which are battles using only the one character you are promoting against at least 3 opponents.
In the Assembly, you can ask for better/worse items in the store, stronger enemies, improved movement and counterattack, extra maps and different stock in the stores. When you ask for any of that, you must pass in front of the Assembly. Here you can check the members’ levels, see how much they like you, and bribe them so they’ll like you more (the more they like you, the more likely it is for them to vote in your favor). When you’re done with bribing, you can begin the voting. The number of Yays and Nays is counted, and the one that’s higher wins. But that’s not all, the weight of each Yay depends on them member’s level. 
If they accept, everyone’s happy. If they don’t, you either give up for now, or show them who’s boss and beat them up to force them to accept. Of course, not every member is a weakling, so you have to come up with strategies to “beat” them. The more popular one is to throw enemies on member’s that voted FOR you and are higher level. That way the strong enemy will be gone and the good member won’t fight you.
Also, in the Dark Assembly, you can create characters and reincarnate. When creating characters you chose who their “master” will be, and what “level” they are, from “good-for-nothing” to “genius”, which changes their base stats a bit. Reincarnating will revert “story” characters to level 1, and depending on what level they were before that, they’ll get higher base stats, and “generics” will be able to either get to a higher tier of their class or change class entirely, also getting stat boosts. This is also crucial when building a character up. 

Minor problem
Ssince the DS has weak processors, it can’t calculate damage/enemy turns as fast as the PSP and PS2 versions. In one story mission(near the end of the game) the enemy has a lot of units and it took like 10 seconds for them to even move. It’s barely noticeable most of the time though, but there is a slight delay compared to the PSP and PS2 versions for some things.

New Stuff?
This is not a direct port, a few things were added.
Mainly Etna Mode(this was also on the PSP version). This is a mode where, at the beginning of the game when Etna is trying to wake up Laharl, instead of waking him up, ends up killing him, and is now aiming to become Overlord herself(Demon: “What happened over there?” Etna:”Oh, I killed Laharl” Demon: “You’re so clumsy, hahaha”). Fun mode, and a bigger challenge than the normal mode, since the enemies start at around level 65 and end at around level 300, whereas “Laharl mode” ends with level 100 enemies (in the main story mode at least). It’s a fun mode, with an interesting “what if” story. This is unlocked by opening Etna’s secret chamber and reading all the diary entries before the last chapter(in “Laharl mode”), then you can start a “New Game +” in Etna mode.
Other than that, the DS version adds new playable characters that the PSP/PS2 versions didn’t have. You get Adell and Rozalin (main characters from Disgaea 2), Overlord Zetta (Badass Freaking Overlord from Makai Kingdom) and (ZOMG this is awesome!) Pleinair(badass silent anime girl from most NIS games and some other random things like a cameo in Pani Poni Dash).  Great stuff
New DS addition is “Prinny Commentaries”. Basically, while the story plays out, a prinny appears on the top screen and comments on what’s going on. 
Finally, there’s a couple DS specific features. In the castle, the top screen displays info about … random stuff >_>. You can see if you got the 3X EXP/prinny days thing from the assembly activated, you can see your current shop level and enemy strength boost level and you can also see if anyone on your team needs healing at the hospital. Pretty good, but nothing you couldn’t find out in another way. In battle, the top screen displays the map of the battlefield. At first I thought it would be stupid, but it’s actually pretty useful at parts, like figuring out Geo Chains and such. Also, everything can be controlled by touch screen, but I’d rather just play with the control pad and buttons. 
Also the DS version corrects some glitches the PSP version had. 

Overall
So, is it worth getting? Well, Disgaea is still an outstanding game, no doubt about that. The slightly worse graphics (it’s really not too bad, surprisingly) don’t detract from the experience as a whole. The sound however is a slight turn-off, but really, it could have been worse. The lack of Voice Actors sucks, but if you played the PS2 version you already know how it goes, and reading is not TOO bad .
Overall, if you don’t have a PSP, it’s a good alternative if you want some badass Disgaea action on a handheld. If you desperately wanted a playable Pleinair(like i did), it’s also awesome . If you really want a time-waster, you’ll love trying to get your stats as high as possible. Who DOESN’T want to dish out over 1 billion damage in one attack? Really, this is a great game, and if you haven’t played it yet you owe it to yourself to try it out.