Not even the “prince of darkness” can operate unchecked. The President has to answer to the people; the crown prince of the Netherworld has to answer to the Dark Assembly. In Disgaea, the Dark Assembly functions in many ways like the Senate. For the cost of Mana, a “Proposal” can be brought before the Dark Assembly. Once presented, Assembly members vote on the idea. Votes can be swayed in your favor by bribing Assembly members with items or by force, the latter being more daring, as not only do attitudes towards you carry over from session to session, making an Assemblymen less likely to lean in your favor the next time around if you beat a “Yea” out of him in the past, but many Senate members are very high-level creatures that will put up one hell of a fight.

Exactly what kind of Proposal you are allowed to petition depends on your Demon Rank. Higher-ranking demons can bring larger and larger Proposals before the Assembly. So if you want to get an increase in military spending, you’ll have to ascend the ranks; if you want to ascent the ranks, you must take a Promotion Exam, a solo fight to the death against tougher and tougher opponents to prove you have what it takes to advance. 

Once your demon reaches level three he, she, or it can Transmigrate to another class, transferring most of their mastered class skills to what is essentially a brand new character. If used wisely, and in conjunction with the Mentor/Pupil ability sharing, all-powerful characters are incredibly possible, albeit with a lot of time and a lot of effort. It’s worth the commitment though, as a warrior who can heal or a Priest who can throw down are incredibly valuable later on in the game; plus the more classes you advance in, the more hidden classes you can unlock.

Characters aren’t the only things you can build up with a little elbow grease. Equipment and items can also be leveled, but not like any way you’ve ever seen. No, unlike most games where use or augmentations increase an item’s power, you most make use of the clever “Item World” in order to unlock the full potential of your inventory. In Disgaea, there is a world inside each and every item, an “Item World” if you will, an unending series of randomly generated dungeon levels full of hostile creatures. Once inside an item, every level cleared powers that item up in the outside world, as well as makes the next level that much harder to complete. More powerful items, “Rare” or “Legendary” items or items of unusual strength, have much hairier creatures in them than common and weak items. If a level is too tough, finding the portal to the next level can skip it, but the item will suffer a slight penalty. It’s best to finish each level, however, as you are essentially killing two birds with one stone, earning precious experience for your characters while enhancing their equipment.

Another clever idea is the Netherworld Hospital. Unlike other strategy RPGs, where party members can die permanently, Disgaea takes a friendlier approach – all fallen comrades can be resurrected at the Netherworld Hospital, but there’ll be Hell to pay, literally - Hell points, the currency in the underworld. So essentially there is no major risk in combat, aside from the eventuality that all ten of your chosen warriors die on the battlefield and the game ends of course. No matter how beat up you leave a fight, or how many party members were slaughtered, you’ll always be able to go to the Hospital and be repaired with the money you just won. In fact, you’re encouraged to take a beating! Prizes are allotted based on how much health has been restored to your party at the Hospital, so the more damage you take, the more you heal, the closer you get to unlocking some really sweet loot, the kind you can’t find randomly or buy at the item shop.

Much like everything else in this game, the item shop also has a nice little twist. The Rosen Queen Company, Netherworld Branch keeps a steady stock of your basic equipment and usages at a reasonable price. Their shelves can be restocked to your liking, however, by using the Dark Assembly once more. You can stand before the Assembly and ask for more expensive, high-quality items to be carried, for specific types of items to be carried, like footwear and glasses, or for price-cuts on certain goods. Every time you succeed in getting the inventory modified, you increase in Product Rank. Every time you buy or sell something at the shop your Customer Rank goes up. Those two ranks determine the overall quality of good available and their buying and selling costs, respectively.

The Dark Assembly, Transmigration, the Item Worlds, the Mentor/Pupil bonuses, the Rosen Queen inventory, all these things are just icing on the cake if you will; window-dressing, albeit incredibly original and complex window-dressing, but dressing all the same. Those extras aside, Disgaea looks like your standard strategy RPG; and what I mean by that is out on that battlefield Disgaea appears only slightly removed from a Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre, at least at first glance. The differences between Disgaea and other strategy RPGs, the forgiving, methodical pace of the combat that leaves much more room for planning, and the Geo Panels, are more subtle and only become appearance after taking the game through a few rounds. Of course fans of the genre will be overjoyed by all of this, the familiar feel and methodical pace, but casual role-players and action gamers will definitely feel left out in the cold.

Disgaea has a much more deliberate pace than other Strategy RPGs. It definitely feels like a chess match, with each move planned out well in advance, taking the strengths and weaknesses of each of your pieces into consideration before hand. Although you can only have a maximum of ten characters on the board at any one time, characters can be swapped in and out of a match freely, meaning a Cleric, for example, can simply pop out to heal someone for one turn, then be relieved by a more battle-friendly character like a Ninja or an Archer. Also, although the combat is turn based, actions can be executed at any time, in any order, during that turn and any action assigned, but not executed, can be undone before the turn ends, allowing you to recover from mistakes and experiment with some degree of freedom. If that wasn’t enough, human characters can pick up and throw other characters across the map, using up their action for that particular turn. These may not sound like major features, but put them all together and you have for some highly strategic gameplay: you can use weak characters to throw strong ones where they were previously unable to move, saving their moving turn to put them into position beside an enemy for an attack; you can move characters out of the Base Panel, where your party members are dispatched or returned, to set up a Formation Attack for another character, then after it is executed undo their moves to send them back and save yourself a turn; you can move characters around to test certain ideas out and undo them if they won’t appear to work out as planned; you can dispatch a low level character to finish off weakened, powerful enemies to receive the Mana and experience, then send them back to the Base Panel on the next turn for protection; you can move characters close enough towards a Cleric to be within range of a healing spell, execute it, then cancel the move to save a turn; and so on and so for. There really is no limit to how much leeway you have within the system to create strategies that will give you the edge in battle.