Genre: Strategy RPG
Publisher: NIS America
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Release Date: July 19, 2005

You play a lot of games when you have a job like this, and it tends to leave you jaded. Perfectly good games elicit no sense of enjoyment, and mediocre ones start to feel excruciating. So, it’s very rare for a game to come along that you don’t want to put down, that you keep playing just because it’s so much fun. Makai Kingdom has been, for me at least, one of those few games that got to become a true addiction.

Makai Kingdom runs off of the free movement system introduced in Phantom Brave, but on the whole is a much tighter gameplay experience. Like all the NIS strategy games, you spend most of the game trying to create characters from various basic job classes who can clear out the various battle maps you’re presented with. Success hinges on making the right mix of powerful characters and equipping them with the right weapons.

In Phantom Brave, the focus of gameplay was solidly on making super-powerful weapons by fusing different items together, but in Makai Kingdom the focus is back on the characters. Victory is assured less by getting good equipment than by creating a character with the potential to grow astronomical stats. You make characters out of ordinary items, like rocks and trees, using something like Phantom Brave’s Confine process. In Makai Kingdom, though, Confined characters remain in their bodies after creation – so you want to make sure you pick an item that will enhance the stats important to the character class. A character confined in an incompatible item will be weak, while picking the best item combinations can result in characters with super-powerful stats.

Raising strong characters is not so simple, though. Most of the basic classes available to you early in the game are quite weak – you’ll want to Reincarnate a character into several different bodies to make a truly tough fighter. This lets the character carry skills from old incarnations into their new body, and improve their starting stats and stat growth rate significantly. You can reincarnate characters at any time, although it will usually cost a nominal fee in Mana. Much as in Phantom Brave, mana functions as a sort of customization currency, and reincarnating a character – or reincarnating them into advanced character classes – will consume so much of it. You can also spend mana on things like generating new facilities, which will also – usually – result in a character’s death. This is a good time to start the reincarnation cycle.

The battle system for Makai Kingdom eliminates the initiative system that made Phantom Brave so very broken so very fast, and replaces it with a turn-based battle progression as in Disgaea. This alone works wonders to tighten up the gameplay. Makai Kingdom still doesn’t feel much like playing a traditional strategy RPG, since the lack of a grid dictates extremely unusual tactics, but the progression of a battle feels much more precise and deliberate. While winning fights often comes down to simply pumping character stats up to a particular effective level, you have a huge variety of character types you can opt to work with, and nearly limitless numbers of ways to combine them. Some classes are best used as healers; some can pilot powerful tanks, while some simply whack things with swords. If you’re a gamer who likes to futz endlessly with power-gaming possibilities in RPGs, it’s very easy to lose hours to deliberating about what your Pickpocket’s next lifetime should be, and what sort of team you’d like to crush the enemy with.

The emphasis in Makai Kingdom’s gameplay is entirely on user-created characters for most of the game. While there is a storyline, a humorous one about how the hopelessly egotistical demon Overlord Zetta manages to turn himself into a book and destroy most of his universe in the process, the storyline dictates that Zetta can’t really do much for you as a frontline fighter. Instead his role is similar to that of a base panel or Marona in Phantom Brave: he summons your troops, bases, and tanks onto the battlefield. Players who preferred to get through games by relying on Ash or Laharl to do most of the enemy-whacking will probably be disappointed by this, but it’s undeniably a major improvement to the amount of freedom a player has in creating a team. If you wish, it’s entirely possible to take on most of Makai Kingdom using nothing but spellcasters or gunslingers. The story does eventually make named characters available to you, of course; as in all NIS games, the main game is really just the beginning. Almost all of the major story characters and quite a few “guest” characters are available in Makai Kingdom, provided you’re able to beat them first. Unlocking everything will require several playthroughs and hundreds of hours of gameplay. You’re much more likely to get tired of Makai Kingdom or simply get too busy to play than run out of things to do.

The presentation of the game, as always for NIS, is very simple: 2D sprites on 3D rendered backgrounds. The facilities for the game are rendered, while the tanks are sprite-based. I was a bit disappointed to see that the sprites in Makai Kingdom were smaller and less detailed than those in Phantom Brave, but for the most part this doesn’t detract from the game’s charm. There are also a few really large cut-scene sprites, particularly for characters like Valvolga and Babylon, which really make up for the tiny battle-map sprites. The music for Makai Kingdom seemed to be by far the most improved part of the game’s presentation from Disgaea and Phantom Brave. A new team of composers came on-board for this game, and for the most part turned in a score that could actually hold up to the hours and hours of game time a player is likely to turn in for a game like this. The composition style runs the gamut from weird Dead Can Dance-like pieces to some almost sickly-sweet Tangerine Dream electronica, but all the pieces are catchy and pleasant to listen to for hours on end.

Players who felt a bit betrayed by Phantom Brave’s turn away from the macabre setting of Disgaea, and players who wanted to see Phantom Brave’s creative but very raw game engine refined both have a lot to look forward to in Makai Kingdom. The die-hard Disgaea fans probably won’t forgive the lack of a grid, but otherwise Makai Kingdom offers a gameplay experience that is, at the very least, every bit as addictive and fun as its predecessors. It will hit American store shelves in late July.

An attempt to rewrite history gone terribly wrong, Lord Zetta the ruler of netherworld brought destruction upon himself. When all seemed lost, three evil overlords appear before Lord Zetta to help him recreate his world. Now Lord Zetta wages war on a new world to become the supreme ruler once again, while the three overlords entertain themselves by creating more trouble for Lord Zetta.

Players will take on the role of Lord Zetta to command an army of determined fighters to reclaim what has righteously been his, the netherworld. Gamers will battle enemies ranging from vicious demons to determined soldiers with both modern and ancient warfare. Slash your enemies with the good old broadsword or blast your way through with the deadly rocket launcher; the choices are yours.

Makai Kingdom introduces a new summoning system referred to as the INVITE system that summons your facilities that contain army units to the battlefield. Every facility summoned to the battlefield will contain your troops that are then deployed to battle your hated enemies. In Makai Kingdom, battle maps are randomly generated, offering a new gaming experience every time you play. With unlimited variations of maps, gamers can expect countless hours of game play.