Makai Kingdom: Reclaimed and Rebound

Game has the most simple and dumb level design for the maps they are not fun, and simply the worst, the slowest the most UN-FUN leveling system of any of the nis games. This is a pain to play a pain to grind and a pain to make it to the very end. The only solace is the END is near the beginning, this is one very very short game. There are no grinding maps, you use dungeons you have to summon with mana, you have to have a food item equipped to summon the good grinding dungeon and these dungeons cost mana to summon. It's a pain to just get the maps you need to level on lol compounded by the fact they don't give much exp. There are no easy ways to share exp, other then BONUS EXP from the random BONUS GAUGE. So it is a massive pain to level up your squad. You'll be using thieves and that dungeon above to do it. Magic is a pain in this game it's randomly assigned on character generation, you go through 6 magicians and NOT get a single one that has all 3 elements. So it can take awhile to get your base squad of 8 going. You want magic in this game. You need to take advantage of an exploit with zetta and the box weapon to gain MANA in this game in the amounts you need. Without that exploit this game would be 100x more unbearable. As for the story if you played disgaea and ever wondered about Zetta, this game isn't gonna tell you much other then he thinks he's a badass without spoiling it, like said above its SUPER short, the story is short, they are so aware they made one of the pointed story characters to the plot corn, to point out how corny short it is, they clearly put this out in an Alpha build state during the PS2 days not even getting into how stuttery bad the PC port is under windows 11, it's actually best to play this UNDER LINUX\STEAMOS via proton then on windows. This is also one of the only NIS games i've played you need the bad ending to see the actual ending. I highly recommend you don't play this unless you've played all the other disgaea's and have nothing better to do. Like me.... Cause even DISGAEA 6 is better then this one and that says something about this.

This is a long winded review and there is a conclusion down below... if you don't care for a history lesson, just go down to the conclusion. So this is the sort of game that you really need to know the context for to get a lot out of it. NIS came to prominence as a company that makes strategy RPGs. First there was the Rhapsody the Rhapsody games on PS1, the first of which had a goofy musical angle to it. You can see a lot of the hit and miss humor that NIS approaches game development with there, but it never really caught fire or anything. These games were more like traditional RPGs with a little bit of grid movement in them. Think more Arc the Lad than Disgaea. In any event, these games never caught fire, so they didn't really iterate on them much. They decided to try new things. First they did La Pucelle in 2002. This was where the Disgaea identity really started. It was a more FFT / Tactics Ogre style grid based map approach to strategy RPG. Statistics became a lot more of a focus rather than an afterthought. This was also the first game where they started really pushing content that wasn't part of the main game. Not so much as Disgaea. The stat caps were much lower, and the post game was shorter. What's important to keep in mind about this game is that it did not initially receive an international release. It did ok in Japan, but they didn't think the numbers were there to justify localization. This was also the case for all but the first Rhapsody game. So the second thing we ever saw in the US to come out of Nippon Ichi Software was Disgaea. This hit JP in 2003 And Disgaea was novel. It makes a point of showing you up front that the power levels of your characters aren't high and that what high is in this context isn't something you would expect to see in the course of normal strategy game level caps. It leans hard into crude humor instead of the sort of light girl-anime humor you saw in their previous works. It was hugely popular and would have a huge influence on their work moving forward. Atlus (who published it stateside for the original PS2 release only) had a lot of faith in this one, so they actually put marketing muscle, pretty prolific VO staff, and even that whole Tsunami Bomb musical change into it. It took off as expected, NIS made a bunch of money, and it seemed natural to think that this would be the direction that NIS would take moving forward. My impression is that the main guys at Nis (Sōhei Niikawa, Yoshitsuna Kobayashi, and Takehito Harada) didn't really want to become the Disgaea company. They followed Disgaea by making Phantom Brave which is thematically a near total 180 from what Disgaea was. The game goes back to light-hearted anime girl humor. It isn't subversive. Instead of most places looking hellish you get a lot of verdant landscapes. But it keeps some things. Some obviously, some not so obviously. You get early hints of what high power looks like, but it's more like traditional end-game stuff for the most part. There were generally a lot less real characters on your team and the game focused on a very wholesome relationship between a child and her ghostly guardian. Mechanically it was a lot messier and experimental. Movement wasn't grid-based, it could break a lot with less than perfect automatic recognition of when and where to jump, and to make things weirder your characters would often slip and slide on terrain that felt like it really leaned in to how broken things were rather than tried to smooth it out. Perhaps more controversial than anything was the 'confinement system' -- all of your fighters save for Marona are ghosts. They have to be bound to Earthly objects (items if you will) and their time to be coporeal (IE active characters) is limited, usually to only a handful of turns. I think a lot of people hated that and it encouraged some rather degenerate play around Marona only builds. Focus on stat building switched from being primarily character focused with weapon focus on th…

Makai Kingdom is Nippon Ichi Software at it's absolute best. NIS fired on all cylinders when making this game. Just when you think you've found the ultimate cheesy move to hyper grind your units, Makai Kingdom looks up from it's newspaper, and says, "Good job sport, took you long enough to figure that out." Then it dares to ask if you feel like a big enough man to tackle one of it's many hidden characters. I am 100% more used to the PS2 version of this game, though. And yeah... some stuff feels a little different. Petta mode is just a bonus, so I have no complaints there. What I am slightly grumbly about is the limit on character names. On PS2, the names could fit ludicrously long names, from Reckendorff, to Rumbly-Tum-Tom-Tommy. Now, there's a tighter limit. I've been told this is due to being the PSP port of the game. I mean... it's a mega minor grumble. Not worth changing my recommendation even slightly. I have not yet learned whether the game still MASSIVELY forgets to tell you if all the unlockable characters have to be gotten on VERY specific runs of the game. The original gave you 3 runs to unlock Mickey... that's it. If you are on your 4th run? No Mickey for you! You get a single run to get Babylon now! Hell by the time I learned that on PS2, I was all the way up to Seedle. I'm hoping this was seen as a dumb decision on the re... (huh, what is this, exactly?) remastered version? Anyway, I hope the game let's me unlock whoever I want... whenever I want. Either way, play this game! Or... watch me play it! https://youtu.be/lfuexqTn_oU