Everyone has a topic of conversation or two that will make them light up brighter than a firework. This is one of mine. With the recent news that NIS is going mobile, I am giddy with the thought I might be able to bust out insane bonus point totals on my iPhone and iPad. For years I have been hooked on this game and specifically the mini-game area of item world.
Before I go further, I have to make a confession. I am not an anime fanatic, neither am I a detractor. This puts me in a kind of weird position as most people I know fall into one of these two camps. This is how the scenario usually unfolds: Friend A makes a reference to a popular anime or anime related meme, I chuckle in polite response, Friend B rolls eyes into back of head, keels over and dies. Usually.
The point I am making is that with the recent NIS announcement to move towards mobile, we have the distinct possibility of seeing Disgaea on mobile in the near future. Disgaea is a turn based tactical strategy RPG which I originally played on my good old PS of 2. It’s gameplay improved on my very favority Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy: Tactics. It also has an over the top anime setting that some find a little jarring. I love the game for it’s gameplay mechanics and in particular a mini-game that exists in an optional zone called item world. This mini-game is a series of pretty random maps and enemies but most of them are covered in disco floor inspired colorful panels.
I first encountered the game as a college student. A good friend of mine, knowing I was a big FF:T fan, handed me a ps2 game box and told me to clear my schedule. It was over a winter vacation and most of my social group was headed out of town so I did just that. I eventually managed to get the game back to him, but it was several weeks and a game purchase of my own later. I dove in, not quite understanding how unending the game can be once you disregard the game’s primary story line and just grind away at the mini-games.
The point of the panels is to destroy a little pyramid that hits everything standing on a square of that color, and then changes the color of each of those squares. If another pyramid is destroyed by doing this, you can create a chain reaction that (with very careful planning) could end up hitting every single pyramid on the map, with the clear colored pyramid last, and consequently clearing the map of all panels. Depending on how successful you are and how many bonus points you obtain, you get increasingly rare and valuable items as you attain each point goal.
I won’t go into excrutiating detail because I really actually enjoyed learning the ins and outs and nuances of the panel game for myself. What I can say is that rarely have I ever enjoyed a puzzle game so much as this one. My characters were almost always in danger of dying just to pull off the big point stuff. The stakes were especially high when you saw a particularly valuable item high up on the bonus loot chart. The pressure would be on then to pull out the stops and get dangerous.
I like seeing new gameplay on iOS. No matter what your opinon is on western culture story lines vs eastern culture storylines, I want to see more games with under represented gameplay be successful. The more off the wall the better. It’s really the basis for whether or not a game can become a modern classic or is just another face in the crowd. Look at stuff like Cut the Rope($0.99) and World of Goo($4.99). They really didn’t have much depth outside of very impressively imaginative gameplay elements but I consider both to be landmark games.
After just a handful of years of the App Store, we are still in the infancy of mobile gaming. Hell I can remember the dejected look on my buddy’s face when he heard that the ngage was not going to be a financial success. But the great thing is that now we are in a position to see innovation and imagination in the games we take with us wherever we go. There are still a lot of things in flux including pricing structures, copyright laws and (as I have previously lamented) discovery methods. Even with all these things kind of buzzing around us, we can still see amazingly fun stuff in the future, so keep your download fingers poised because we can all give business to those games that bring a unique experience to the player.
