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inspired

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[wise man voice] disgaea is like alice in wonderland. the driving force of alice's worldbuilding is that it's what adult society looks like to a kid who's faced with unfamiliar and sometimes unfair rules from people who see them as only partially human, except instead of seven year olds in the late 1800s it's 14 year olds whose lives suck complete ass.

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there's a custom weapon for fusing a succubus onto a kit cat axe which afaik is the only two monster specific magichange weapon in the entire game. they also have custom colors for every tier in item assembly color change although unfortunately theyre locked to the same tier. and you know what. as cheap a shot as it is. i will admit its fun to go around whacking enemies with the fucking catgirl labrys

here's my favorite color palette bc it is also sort of trans colors.

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ALSO proposal thief redesign/colorations. this keeps the bandana and romper from the d1 thief while keeping the cat elements and making it detailed enough to line up with later disgaea designs. i also made it so it's limited color and the color blocks match so it's compatible with color customization

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uh oh disgaea 7 isn't that funny

the first problem with analyzing disgaea is that you have to understand that it's one of those stories where things have a comedy layer and a serious layer. the comedy layer is the actual onscreen action and the serious layer is the real life stuff it's an allegory for, i talked abt it with fuka but it's important to understand because the main reason disgaea stories get bad/boring is that they try to separate the comedy and seriousness instead of having the comedic exaggeration convey how real things feel. this also applies to having characters do bad things, essentially that "the characters he killed are fake but my annoyance is real" except that it's in-story. killing a bunch of characters is funny and quirky, but being a shitty boss is Real, so fuka's dad needs to be reformed but desco is allowed to kill and maim.

which is the ultimate problem with the story in d7 in general, the comedy and seriousness don't really work together and so the story feels like it keeps screeching to a halt every time it switches gears. this also means the comedy is really unfocused.

like ok, for an example. what is ceefore even doing. she's a weapons otaku who is, completely unrelated to that, an angel who can see souls which is just being an empath. there's no cohesion here, not even an explanation of why she's either into weapons or able to see souls, and then she just completely drops being into weapons in favor of just being an empath, which is nothing.

as a comparison, artina is an angel who is introduced as being a greedy thief who's shaking down random demon infrastructure and civilians for cash, but she has her backstory with val where as a human she was a compassionate and selfless war nurse, and on top of that she's lying about being that person. she's doing jokes related to her money-grubbing and lying about her identity, but when the moon episode happens and there' the revel of the reason she was sent to steal from celestia being that flonne is pressuring her to, the two halves of her character make sense. you get why artina would seemingly do a heelturn-- she was a nun-turned-angel who trusted her angel boss when she seemed like a good person who wanted the money for good reasons, and just got punked by flonne being a massive asshole. this is, firstly, pretty funny. artina demanding millions of dollars every time someone trips because she doesn't want to steal from someone for No Reason but there's no legitimate reason to collect the amount of cash flonne wants is the setup for a lot of solid jokes, as does her trying to hide her identity for seemingly no reason(outside of the 'didn't know how to talk to val after the thing' reason but i'm making another point). the reveal that it was all for flonne's vanity project which just happened by sheer coincidence to be useful is EXTREMELY funny and is the only Flonne Moment i unironically love because it both makes artina's character mesh and on the serious level plays into d4's themes of Sometimes Your Boss Fucking Sucks. artina also drops the act in the latter part of the game, which i actually don't love like i said i wish artina got to do more fun stuff, but she still has the rest of her character and her being the one to suggest that nemo pay his moral debts instead of trying to atone by disappearing IS the clearest ingame example of trying to work to make up for your crimes being the only true atonement and reincarnation which are present series-wide in the prinnies but not really explored outside of d4(on the comedy level prinnies are being forced to work shitty customer service jobs because they were murderers in a past life, but on a serious level the prinny system gives all humans the opportunity to atone for their sins and reincarnate with a fresh start, unless they're a 14 year old girl who wanted to take over the world when she was 6 of course). and artina's compassionate war nurse angle isn't uninteresting, she had the audacity to stare down tyrant valvatorez at the peak of his power and make a bet with him that if he couldn't scare her he wasn't allowed to drink human blood, and the only reason she didn't win is that at the climax of the story she thought he died, and her healing nemo despite his being on the other side of the war before being killed for it is the impetus for his entire villain arc. artina is an unambiguously good person, but that compassion is through experience, doesn't always serve her well, and is used to actually do stuff beyond give color commentary.

as opposed to ceefore who is doing Nothing. her backstory is that she was bullied for being an empath. that's fucking stupid that is always stupid not once in fiction has a character being bullied for being too powerful been interesting. she's not into weapons because of anything in particular and it doesn't do anything in particular that she's into weapons outside of the one joke of her liking explosions, it doesn't relate to her seeing souls at all, and the impetus for her dropping the weapon nut thing is her undoing her amnesia just. because nitra reminds her of her past. and then she remembers and just goes all in on being an empath except for even more sporadic repetitions of the same joke.

nitra herself actually has the potential to be a super interesting villain but she's undercut by ceefore being as boring as she is and also the writers really wimp out on her motivation. firstly because of ceefore's amnesia nitra isn't introduced at all until her episode so her twist villainy is revealed like two stages after she's introduced. BORING! if ceefore wasn't an amnesiac nitra could've been present as a side character in the story for long enough to get to know her good persona so it would actually do anything when her secret was revealed. nitra's motivation itself is actually why she's interesting, though, which is that her weapon nut-ness means that she thinks that being an infernal treasure, weapons made by killing and amalgamating the souls of a bunch of people, fucks super hard and she wants to help the villains make more of them. that's great! having nitra be so invested in being awed by the power of these weapons to the point that she literally does not care if people die to make them and wants to be one herself makes her work on a comedy level as an insane evil freak while on a serious level she allows the two infernal treasure protagonists, ao and suisen, to interact with someone who 1) does not see them as people and doesn't care about their personhood, 2) wants to make more things like them, and 3) knows a lot about them, enough to specifically design tactics against them if they have to fight. having a villain who is funny and quirky in a way that denies the protagonists basic personhood is super potent and gives you a lot of room for character conflict. honestly she could have been one of the major villains-- the infernal treasures are the driving force of the story, so having a villain who was this singlemindedly focused on them would've made them feel a lot less like macguffins and hopefully forced the story to actually do interesting stuff with the infernal treasures instead of just making them all copy-pasted color-swapped suisens who are just one character apiece and also sometimes they're just weapons and also artina has one for some fucking reason so in d7 artina did canonically kill a bunch of people to make into an infernal treasure because i think they straight up forgot that that was how treasures were made. instead she shows up to tell ceefore her backstory, turns heel for a stage, immediately has it revealed by ceefore that she actually just doesn't want to die because she died before becoming an angel, and then appears in the end roll call because she's just a normal angel now. awesome

and it really does all come down to ao and suisen in the end. they're the most interesting main cast characters by a long shot.

suisen is a traditional infernal treasure who was created from the murdered kid brother of one of the other main party(and also a bunch of other souls but they forgor about that after one line of dialogue establishing it) who was originally introduced as also an amnesiac(BORINNGGGG) villain but then after his true identity reveal he just became a kid brother character. this kinda sucks and also he's kind of just desco but worse. desco's one of The examples for disgaea's serious and comedy layers working well together. her need to be the final boss as a comedy layer allegory for a younger sister whose sister fuka who she'd never actually met before consumed her entire life and made her Really Weird makes her a really endearing character and it's really satisfying and cute when she and fuka develop an actual sibling relationship. her being fuka's kid sister is extremely relevant and present in all aspects of her character, and her being a construct who was created as a tool for her sister is part of the story, as is her becoming a person beyond that purpose. suisen. doesn't. he's introduced as a bog standard emotionless robot character before, like ceefore, doing a huge character overhaul the second he's informed of his backstory, except he was so little of a character before that he just starts being a kid character who also says percentages. that's nothing, which sucks because as mentioned infernal treasures are a really potent concept. if suisen's other souls were more present then if yeyasu was more deeply written he could have really complex feelings about what his kid brother's been made into, or if he knew some of the other souls that also, and suisen himself could have all the potent character development identity issues can do to you. suisen could have to grapple with not really being able to be a cohesive person, having to decide how to exist as someone with a lot of overlapping needs and wants and traits, and because he's made of existing souls he'd have to deal with people who knew the people he was before and may or may not accept/like him as an amalgamation or believe that those people really still exist. you could even have him try to only acknowledge ikki because he wants yeyasu to accept him as his brother and then struggle with his other souls feeling crushed and forgotten, until he's ultimately forced to reckon with the fact that he doesn't get to be a single person anymore. does he end up trying to integrate? does he learn to live as a collective? or does he keep stubbornly trying to pick a 'real' him?

ao on the other hand was created by fuji as a desperate attempt to save the souls of his fellow disciples, so for her being an infernal treasure isn't bad and she really strongly cares about fuji and sees him as her dad, but due to his curse he's incapable of being nice to her and so she lashes out and tries to prove her value to him by wrecking stuff which he gets stuck with the consequences of. her identity issues are the same as suisen's except that she doesn't even have an acceptable face. 'ao' is a constructed identity by the souls of fuji's fellow disciples. why did they coalesce into this character? how strong is this cohesion? why does ao want to be a new person entirely instead of a collection of the extant souls? fuji's fellow disciples were kids when they died, so it makes sense that ao's childish, but how does adult fuji feel about what he knows is the souls of his peers now seeing him as a dad and being stuck in perpetual childhood?

bc ao and suisen are both Objects. suisen is literally mechanical, and ao also seems to be unchanging. they're static, trapped in the moment of their death forever. in exchange for power they're put in eternal limbo.

like ok in gameplay terms, i actually really liked overloads, with the individual overlords all getting character-appropriate ultimate attacks, and the evolving overloads is imo the best 'gameplay reflecting narrative' thing the series has done. that's why it really sucks that the infernal treasures just get given to like every unique character. why does artina have an infernal treasure?

honestly if it was me i would've had all the infernal treasures be people since fuji is already connected to ao, yeyasu is already connected to suisen, and ceefore could be connected to major villain nitra, so if you can get pirilika in there somehow the characters would still have a reason to be here. in narrative terms it's way more interesting to have the dilemma be that you gain this incredible power but at the cost of losing your unquestioned authority over your own identity, rather than "well you do have to kill a lot of people" since outside of story characters killing people is almost exclusively a comedy crime in disgaea and so it doesn't FEEL like a heavy price to pay(to the point that i actually think it'd be really funny if you did canonically establish which souls make up all the legacy characters' infernal treasures. who's in artina's treasure?!).

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