PSA: Disgaea 1 Complete has some issues

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Last week, Nippon Ichi Software dropped Disgaea 1 Complete on the App Store seemingly out of nowhere. It also came with a pretty hefty price tag. Similar to Square Enix’s pricing of their beloved RPGs on mobile, Disgaea 1 Complete is a whopping $32.99. Although the game looks gorgeous and has some nice mobile-friendly design features like cloud saves, there are a couple things you should know about the game before you buy it.

First and foremost is that playing Disgaea 1 on touchscreen is pretty dang clunky. Although strategy titles with lots of menu navigation generally seem perfect for touch, there aren’t enough modernizations to this game to make playing it feel natural. Everything from moving Laharl around the castle to issuing commands in combat feels needlessly demanding in a way that lots of other mobile strategy titles don’t.

The other thing worth mentioning is that Disgaea 1 has some technical issues. Some of these are pretty minor, like the game doesn’t always move the camera to focus on units as they attack, but there are also some other, more worrying problems as well. In my time with the game, I hard crashed out of a fight and lost quite a bit of progress. I haven’t been able to replicate this problem reliably, which is good, but when paying an ultra-premium for a game on mobile, bugs like this are inexcusable.

Because of these issues, I’m unlikely to put much more time into Disgaea 1, which is a bummer. I was really hoping for a new tactics game to sink my teeth into, but this game is just a bit too onerous to play so I’ll have to find something else.