Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a SRPG with a focus on leveling and grinding. There is a story mode, which takes place in the Netherworld and follows Mao, the son of the Demon Overlord. For a petty reason, he wants to defeat his father and as such, he must take on the class of a Hero. It’s a contradiction given that demonic traits are the complete opposites of heroic traits, but the story is mostly made for laughs anyway. It has a lot of self-aware references, puns, and humor. While it can get too much at times, it generally works and is enjoyable.
Mao is technically a student at the Evil Academy but like a true demon honor student, he doesn’t attend class. He has a rival, Raspberyl, as well as the hero who accidentally stumbled upon this place, Almaz. Together, they are dragged by Mao along his quest to defeat his father. The story isn’t spectacular as it easily gets distracted, which is to be expected. The whole story is voice acted, which is impressive.
The main gameplay is the battles, where it takes place over grid-based maps set in an isometric view. The isometric view means it can be annoying to see properly at times. The overly sensitive back touchpad option to change the camera zoom makes it annoying as you will accidentally trigger it time and time again. The game has a ton of playable characters, although apart from a few story characters, the rest of your party are generic characters. You can even create and train monsters, so the game and its mechanics are overwhelming for new players.
The battle system throws in a few additional things that sets itself apart from other SRPGs. Characters came move, attack, and use spells, that is normal and to be expected. However, they can also lift blocks in the environment, or other characters, and then throw them. This can be clunky as it is all menu-based but can be extremely useful in travelling a little bit further than what a character normally would be able to move. The other thing is that when you select a character to attack, it puts them in a queue. The action in the queue only gets activated when you decide to. This is important as it allows you to position characters to gain the advantage of a team-based attack before you can then revert and move them somewhere else after the attack is done.
Levels and equipment play an important role in the game. With so many characters that you can use in the game, it can be hard to level up properly and evenly amongst all of them. Therefore, you are forced to replay previous levels to quickly grind up their levels. This isn’t as bad as it sounds and can even be a satisfying process. A lot of power gain will come from better equipment and this is where the game doesn’t do a great job at its tutorial since it doesn’t explain how all those systems interact with each other.
Each character has a bunch of skills that they can learn. Characters hitting enemies will give them mana points which is used to learn new skills. These can be passive and active skills. With so many game mechanics, it’s only natural that some of them are easily forgotten and feel tacked on, and this is one of them. However, the many mechanics do give the player flexibility in how they want to approach the game. The story levels are somewhat easy enough to progress, with a little bit of grinding of course.
The unfortunate thing with your party consisting of so many generic characters that you have created is that you don’t have story attachment to them. Yet because story characters join relatively far into the game, you’ve probably already got your preferred team and it will be a chore to keep every character up to date in terms of levels and equipment. The game has some ridiculous difficulty spikes even during the story. Enemies often like to one or two shot your characters, which combined with overwhelming numbers, can make some levels unfair. This artificial difficulty to force you to grind holds the game back at such an early stage. At least once you hit a certain point towards the end of the story, you can quickly grind up levels for your characters and easily crush all enemies from then on.
The game’s graphics are so so. Since it is in an isometric view, the characters are represented by sprites. The story is told via visual novel styled cutscenes. The attacks during battles can be flashy but you might want to turn them off so that you don’t waste too much time during battles as these are long animations. Even if you turn animations off, you will see the attack animation the first time you’ve ever used it, so you won’t be missing anything. The game does the annoying thing of forcing you to manually save as you cannot quit a level without reloading. It’s an archaic practice and does nothing to add difficulty. If you lose during a level, at least you don’t completely lose your progress.
The story is surprisingly not too bad. It isn’t amazing or stellar, but it is enough to keep you invested in it. The characters slowly creep up on you in terms of how likeable they are, as you understand them more and more from their actions. The dialogue has a good balance of stupidness and funniness so that it works and doesn’t detract from the plot either. It plays into tropes and subverts them at times. For example, you know a character is suspicious and will betray you at one point, but then the game also knows this and will give you a surprise on top.
The story takes around 25 to 30 hours to complete, although this really depends on how much you grind to get through it. As mentioned, once you hit a certain point, it is trivial to grind up a ton of levels that makes the rest of the story levels a piece of cake. However, the postgame assumes that you have grinded like this, plus more. There is a lot to do in the postgame, from the DLC stories to the expectation that you are to grind to level 9999 and defeat the super boss. That is literally hundreds of additional hours, if you like this type of content.
For the DLC, you don’t have to grind *too* much. However, its levels can be painful to play. It was already present in the story where there will be special layouts in stages with certain tiles having special effects. It basically slows you down and you’re forced to advance in a certain way. You will get levels where it is impossible for your characters to hit back or advance, leading to a frustrating, annoying, and horrendous experience. The DLC is comprised of five additional stories, and they all take place after the main game. It takes around another six to eight hours to complete if you have sufficiently leveled characters. They are a little bit of extra fun with the characters before the postgame grind has barely any story.
Overall, Disgaea 3: Absence of Detention is a fun SRPG, even with the grinding aspect. It can be annoying if you wanted to play this as a typical SRPG for the story as there are difficulty spikes in every chapter. However, if you can spend a little bit of time grinding, then it is very satisfying when you level up and get better gear, to the point of easily passing through the level. The postgame content is crazy for the fact that it assumes you have grinded and will continue to grind. However, there is a lot of content here and even if you don’t play the postgame, the normal story is fun and worthwhile enough.
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