Geek-Culture News
Time to Return to School for Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention
Posted 10:57 pm on Saturday, April 14th, 2012 by Chris Del CastilloIt’s that time of year when Spring break is over and it’s time to return to studying and getting ready for midterms. But if you lived in the Netherworld none of this matters because being an Honor student in the Evil Academy is as easy as ditching classes, not listening to your teachers or following the rules. But if you did follow the rules and attend your classes you will be labeled a delinquent.
In Disgaea 3 your main character is Mao, who has never attended a class and hence earned the title of Honor student. Mao is the son of the Overlord, who is also the Dean of Evil Academy. One day the Overlord steps on Mao’s video game console and he vows revenge for the thousands of hours of lost save data. And to defeat his father he studies and realizes that the only way to do this is by getting the title of a “Hero” since in anime, games and comics they are always victorious against overlords. Mao will do everything the simplest way he can to achieve the title of “Hero” even if he has to steal it for revenge.
Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a port of 2008′s Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice and similar to the earlier releases of Disgaea now gone portable, but this time for the Playstation Vita. If you played the original Playstation 3 version of the game, everything in the original game is still present and updated with all of the DLC the game offered including all the characters, extra Raspberyl DLC chapters. Even both English and Japanese voice tracks are still in the game.
Things new for Absence of Detention are: new more powerful Tera level magic from Disgaea 4, animated character portrait during cutscenes, new attacks for created characters, 2 added characters Rutile and Stella Grossular made exclusively for Absence of Justice, and not to mention the addition of Fuka and Desco for Disgaea 4 as bosses and playable characters.
If you haven’t played the original you’re in luck, Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is your almost-never-ending Strategy RPG. This allows you to level characters up to 9,999; you will just have to put in plenty of work and time to do this.
You begin the game with Mao and a few created characters to start a team. As you go up in level, more new skills and abilities will be able to be leveled up and purchased, because what kind of demon wants to do things the right way, instead you use Mana to buy skills, and level up your current ones or purchase Evilities (Evil abilities, lol). Mana is obtained by having a character or characters attack and defeat enemies, the stronger the enemy the more exp and Mana you get. You can use any of the team assault attack or skill merge (using multiple characters special techniques that are compatible) techniques; you can also use clubs to help level up characters once you unlock them.
Mana does much more than just help you power up or buy new skills and abilities, by saving up Mana you can call the student body together to get new clubs. Areas are unlocked but only if the Student body votes for you. So you must use any underhanded trick possible to do so, Mana will also allow you to create new characters or reincarnate your old characters to power them up.
Battles are simple tactics style: you have player phases and enemy phases, you start from your base panel and can have a certain amount of characters on the screen at once, and your job is to wipe out all enemies or defeat a boss to proceed. The game is broken into chapter and parts creating a full story game; and even when you are done there is plenty more to do, especially grinding. Having the right team and skills are important to moving forward in later chapters and at anytime you can replay stages to level up to get ready for the fights ahead.
Add tons of hilarious jokes, some prinnies (to toss around and explode), and playable characters from previous Disgaea games and the item world. Prepare to lose yourself in hundreds of hours of game play to go through or as D3 says, “It’s over 10 Million hours of gameplay!” I won’t lie expect to grind quite a bit for the extras.
My first playthrough in Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice had me put in more than 120 hours, leveling up my characters to level 350 and working to unlock the DLC characters by completing their battles. There were quite a few characters for DLC that spanned much of the Disgaea series and other NIS America games. Eventually, I found myself missing out on a few extra characters and the extra Raspberyl chapters, which was about $50 plus in DLC. This joined my collection of games that I would play again in the future and never have. With Absence of Detention available on a handheld, it gives me more chances to enjoy the game on the road, seeing as I have already dropped another 70 hours on the game to unlock everything, and it’s always pretty worth it since its been over 3 years since I picked up the game. So, if this is your first time playing or even your 2nd or 3rd there is plenty of new things to enjoy including the 4 new characters, new story scenarios for certain characters, and the ability to use the front and rear touch screen ability, added exclusively for the PS Vita.
The only thing I found myself never using is the touch screen ability front or rear, depending on how you hold your Vita the rear touch screen will let you set your map how you like it map and scroll though menu screen, I found myself finding this not needed so I easily turned it off via option menu.
Growing up Chris watched a lot of the original Saturday morning cartoons and developed a love for arts and animation. Growing up he tried his hand at animation and eventually script writing, but even more his love of video games, anime and technology grew.
