Genre: Strategy RPG
Publisher: NIS America
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Release Date: July 28, 2005

Buy 'MAKAI KINGDOM': PlayStation 2

If you love tactical RPGs, then get ready to open your wallet. Nippon Ichi Software’s Makai Kingdom will undoubtedly scratch your itch, while also providing some more of the innovate gameplay they’ve become known for as developers. While not quite as deep as the endlessly replayable Disgaea, Makai Kingdom is still a bit improvement over Phantom Brave and a lot of fun on its own. You’ll probably be able to waste a good hundred hours playing this game before you begin getting tired of it. The gameplay for Makai Kingdom is easy to get into and tight enough to hold your interest, while the new game systems and the inherent weirdness of the free movement system help keep it fresh. Fans of Disgaea’s weird sense of humor will be pleased to see that NIS has returned to their comedy-driven roots for this title, offering one of the funniest and strangest casts they’ve served up yet.

Makai Kingdom’s story is, well, a lot of different things. On the grand scale it’s the epic story of demons and the people who become them, with even a bit of love story dashed in. In more broader, funnier strokes, it’s the tale of a demon lord named Zetta who severely screwed up an attempt to save his kingdom from destruction. Instead he inadvertently caused the end of his universe by setting fire to the Sacred Tome, the magic book that controls all creation. In a last-ditch effort to keep the entire universe from exploding, Zetta merged himself with the Sacred Tome using the Confine ability. Now, he’s more powerful than ever before, but also has to deal with problems like having no limbs, no kingdom, and absolutely no dignity. This is where the player comes in; since Zetta is, shall we say, “indisposed”, then he’ll need an army to take care of the butt-kicking he once handled on his own. You, the player, determine what that army will be.

You’ll begin by choosing from some basic classes, and unlock newer, more powerful, and more monstrous options for your army as you play through the game. After you finish the game once with a “generic” army, you’ll have the option of playing super-difficult endgame scenarios that let you start acquiring the in-game, named characters to fight with. These characters are as grotesquely broken as always, but since it’s late in the game before you get them, they unbalance the gameplay a bit less than in previous NIS games. The downside is that it’s in the very end of the game when the combat engine begins to buckle under the stress of all the power-gaming NIS’ strategy game style always encourages. Damage becomes a bit too random, and it gets hard to predict just what your attacks will do. Still, this applies mostly to the final bonus fights in the game, and it’s a long fun ride until you get that far.

The game’s developers are pretty forthright about Makai Kingdom being a more rushed production than usual for them. Fan rumors, in fact, assert that Makai Kingdom is the left over bits and pieces of a game that NIS started developing for the PSP. There’s no way of knowing whether this is true or not, but the fact remains that Makai Kingdom is both obviously rushed and weirdly remarkable to be so have been created in such a short time.

The graphics and AI clearly suffered a little in the rushed development; the interface is a little crude, the graphics a bit on the muddy side, and your enemies prone to bouts of completely random behavior. You’ll only notice this when playing the game for extremely prolonged periods, though, and even when you do it doesn’t hurt the experience much. If anything, it just makes me wish NIS had been able to sink another 3-6 months into the game before release; then you could’ve had something that was really Disgaea on the Free Movement system, and probably bigger, more colorful sprites all around. You also probably wouldn’t have had the irritatingly low limits on the number of buildings, items, and characters you can have on a battlefield at any time, although part of me wonders if this is just a limitation of the PS2’s ability to handle onscreen objects.

Every NIS strategy game has a slightly different “gimmick”, something unique to the game design that keeps you from playing the title in quite the same way you’d usually play a strategy RPG. Makai Kingdom, instead of using one very obvious gimmick, uses three different ones that interact in some interesting ways. The most obvious is the incorporation of facilities into gameplay. Facilities have all kinds of functions, starting with their ability to let you place multiple characters on the map by storing them inside a base facility. Then characters inside the base can go in and out of it during a battle, which can come in handy given that you can only have 8 characters active on the field at any given time. Different bases can grant bonuses to different characters, like bonus money, bonus EXP, or healing every turn. You create facilities by spending mana and then sacrificing one of your characters, and certain kinds of facilities can only be made by sacrificing a certain kind of character. Facilities aren’t really an optional mechanic; you’re not likely to get too far in the game unless you exploit them properly.

Unique gimmick number two is vehicles. They show up a bit later in the game than facilities but make a very big difference once they do. Vehicles are exactly what they sound like, tanks and robots and things you can have a character with a suitably high affinity for technology (the TEC stat) pilot. Vehicles tend to do extremely heavy damage and have high stats, but can only keep attacking until they run out of SP to fuel their attacks. You can opt to carry characters or items around in a vehicle, or have the pilot hop out and attack with his or her weapon after the vehicle has attacked. There are certain kinds of facilities and characters that specialize in using vehicles, and while you don’t have to use them, they’re an awful lot of fun once you do. Even if you don’t, the enemies will, so you’ll at least have to master anti-vehicle techniques.

The third special gimmick is actually pretty similar to the transmutation mechanic from Disgaea, but here it’s called “Reincarnation”. Reincarnation lets you reincarnate a character you’ve opted to sacrifice into another job class. Certain skills and abilities from their previous life will carry over, and their rate of stat growth will improve; they’ll also receive bonus points to invest in buffing whatever stat you want to buff. Makai Kingdom is a game for die-hard power-gamers, and this is the heart of the game’s power-gaming. You can use creative reincarnation to create some beastly-strong customized characters, or simply to create amusing ones that are still pretty tough. You can feel a bit lost with all the options for reincarnation the game throws at you, but once you figure out what works and what doesn’t your inner munchkin is sure to take over and start making crazy long-range plans for your characters’ future incarnations.

Visually, Makai Kingdom is actually a little less appealing than previous games. The sprites are smaller on-screen objects than in Disgaea or Phantom Brave, and with the free move system this means that a big pile of characters in one place makes finding any particular one pretty hard. The vehicles are, as a trade-off, quite cool-looking. Facilities have cute designs and are 3D rendered to match the 3D backgrounds, which have their moments but are nothing particularly spectacular. The only real aesthetic improvement over the previous NIS games in Makai Kingdom is in the character designs, which are really amusing and occasionally awesome, and the music. Unlike all the previous NIS games, Makai Kingdom used a team of composers and as a result there’s a lot more variety to the soundtrack. The music is a big improvement over Phantom Brave’s, and has a very different character to it than the Disgaea music. Finally, as always, the English version offers both language tracks for the story cinemas and in-battle voice clips only in English. Like a lot of fans, I wish the Japanese in-battle voices were available, but this is a severely minor complaint.

Makai Kingdom does a great job of catering to the compulsive, play-to-crush RPG power-gamer without becoming as obsessed with micromanagement as Phantom Brave’s gameplay inevitably was. If you like RPGs at all on the crunchy or the funny side, then you’ll definitely enjoy Makai Kingdom enough to be worth the price of admission. It’s not quite as good as Disgaea but doesn’t fall quite so short of the mark. Playing around with giving your soldiers guns and tanks is fun, and the return to a more whimsical and humorous storyline is refreshing. You may want to give Makai Kingdom a pass if you aren’t much on goofy humor or playing the same game compulsively for hundreds of hours, but I imagine most other folks will have a lot of fun with Makai Kingdom.

Score: 8.5/10