Every so often, I get the urge to dust off Disgaea: Hour of Darkness or boot up the PSP port of it and slowly march along toward some of the postgame content, secret bosses, and stuff like that. I’m not rabidly attentive enough to sit there for hours straight, powering everyone up to level 9999, transmigrating them back to 1, and starting all over again, but as the NPC in the castle says, you can beat the game with minimal knowledge. Which is good. If it was mandatory, the internet funnymen of tomorrow would treat it like the Deadly Towers of our day. Even though its own sequels added bells, whistles, and made the graphics slightly better, there’s just a freshness to the original that keeps me coming back. If a Disgaea 4 happens, you just know that they’ll introduce another brand new world and cast, then push sales up by recycling NPC designs and making nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to Laharl and Etna. Or better yet, make all the guest stars DLC you gotta pay for. Cough. Cough.

I can breeze through Chrono Trigger in a few hours and get a nice ending, or if I’m in the mood, beat the end boss right out of the telepod at the Millenial Fair. Sometimes I like to pick a random chapter of The World Ends With You or Phoenix Wright to re-play. But Disgaea has something else going for it, at least at the freaking glacial pace I play RPG’s anymore. It’s kind of like watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times before then spotting something you never noticed. On my second time through I ‘got’ Item World and the whole Specialists business. Gathering EXP bonuses made level grinding easier. Easier grinding lead to unlocking the bonus maps. And the PSP edition added Etna Mode for whenever I get bored milking the regular game.

Isn’t that the best unlockable bonus? More game?