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Lately, I've been on a spending binge. I finally bought a next gen system(my fried Wii doesn't count), a Sony PS3. Those that know me won't be surprised that my first two games I bought were Disgaea 3 and 4. I started up 3, but my friends all seemed to be playing 4 so I went ahead and swapped. Since I've been playing Disgaea 1 for like 7 years, the changes were pretty crazy for me. First off, they seem to have added a few features in the town marketplace. Namely, the skills/evilities instead of automatically leveling to obtain skills(although it appears you can still mentor characters to allow them the option to purchasing certain skills). There's an interesting government/city council feature which is where you pass bills and create characters, but now you can also place evil artifacts and forge relationships in order to improve team up attacks.

Now the reason I spent so much time re-beating and replaying Disgaea 1 was because of the Item World, trying to obtain the top level weapons, defeats the Item God 2's, etc. I've only tried a low level weapon to start, but its definitely changed. At every 5th you get to choose whether you are focusing on leveling the item, or the 'Innocents (aka Residents)' inside your item. Depending on what you choose, you will have a higher occurrence of innocents or mystery rooms. The mystery rooms are pretty fun, and well, mysterious. One might have a choice of treasure chests, others are totally random comedic relief scenes, you never know. Another thing that changed is the power blocks. You can stack blocks on top of each other to gain effects. Tossing a block of the same color adjacently to each other cause them to blow up, and damages anybody who happens to be on top.

So far I'm only up to Chapter 7 and only grinded up to 60 with my main, but I probably won't delve too much into the Item World and power grinding until after my first play through. I think lvl 6-3 with the +100 damage buff really helps power level til 50-100. It looks like 7-1 will be another one since it offers a +100 exp with expanding power tiles. All in all, I'm pleasantly surprised at how much I'm enjoying the game and the changes. I'll be even more happy once I finally unlock Laharl, Etna and the other older Disgaea characters. I noticed on the PSN store that Disgaea 3 has a $50 add-on which has a ton of new characters, maps, and an online vs feature! I'm probably going to get that, and at the same time hope a similar pack comes out for 4. Is anybody else playing Disgaea 3 or 4? What are your thoughts?