Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited

Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited is a portable, content-expanded version of the tactical RPG from Nippon Ichi Software, and on PlayStation Vita it stands as one of the most content-packed games ever released on the console. The main hero, Valvatorez, is a vampire who once swore an oath never to drink human blood, and lives on sardines instead. As a lowly official within the Netherworld's demonic bureaucracy, he gradually takes a stand against the corrupt leadership of the entire realm, and his crusade for justice is as absurd as it is surprisingly touching.

Battles play out on grid-based maps, where terrain height, unit positioning, and colored Geo Panels all matter, and chain-destroying them can transform the entire map in a single turn. Characters can be lifted and thrown, stacked into towers for combined attacks, or sent into the Item World — randomly generated floors hidden inside every item. Numerical values grow to absurd heights, levels stretch far beyond the usual hundred, and the game knowingly celebrates this escalation as both its main joke and its main draw. You also build your own units from a wide range of classes, and nothing stops you from fielding a party made entirely of oddities, which you then experiment with in later, much harder maps.

This unlimited depth is the game's greatest asset. The main story takes dozens of hours, but the real content for dedicated players runs into the hundreds. The Vita version added new characters, scenarios, and interface improvements, and is ideally suited to playing in short bursts, since battles are self-contained and the game can be put down at any time. Visually it relies on sharp hand-drawn sprites on three-dimensional maps, which stand out nicely on the small screen. Humor, parodies of anime clichés, and exaggeration are typical for the series, and critics praised precisely the combination of comedy with an exceptionally elaborate tactical layer that holds up against anything else in the genre.