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Analysis: Layered Gameplay in Disgaea
by Gregory Weir
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May 6, 2009
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[In this opinion piece, writer and designer Gregory Weir (The Majesty of Colors) examines the layered customization options in Disgaea -- as an example for how other games can incorporate such complexity..]
One of the primary appeals of roleplaying games is their customization. A player can shape her characters and the party as a whole to her specifications, which can support a wide range of gameplay styles.
One player might want a hack-and-slash, action-filled game, and so build characters that are best at dealing and absorbing damage. Another player might prefer a more slow-paced, bag-of-tricks approach, and focus on special abilities like status ailments or techniques that control the flow of battle.
By incorporating this customizability, roleplaying games broaden their appeal. The more variable a play experience is possible in a game, the wider its possible audience.
However, customizability introduces a paradox. More customization provides a more varied experience, but it also introduces complexity. The old Gold Box Dungeons & Dragons computer games have a complex character creation process that must be completed for each character in the party (as many as six). They offer pre-built characters, but in order to customize the party at all, a player must roll random stats, choose a name, gender, race, alignment, and class, create an icon, and possibly customize spells.
This has to be done for each character before play even begins. Purchasing equipment is also a virtual necessity before the adventuring can really start. Each of these steps requires the player to consult the manual for things like the function of spells or the power of weapons. To enable customization, a game must become more complex, which will scare away many of the players that the customizability would attract in the first place.
The trick to resolving this paradox lies in layering gameplay. A game can allow customization while keeping it entirely optional by separating the customization from the primary gameplay flow. That way, a player who wishes to customize can do so as much as she wants, while one who is uninterested can skip it entirely. One game which excellently demonstrates this technique is Nippon Ichi Software's Disgaea.
 Prince of the Netherworld
Disgaea is a game in the tactical RPG style first pioneered by 1990's Fire Emblem. The player controls Laharl, prince of Hell and heir to the throne, and his team of vassals and soldiers as he fights to gain control of the Netherworld and defeat various threats to his world. Battles occur on a grid, with each character maneuvering and attacking.
On the surface, the game is rather simple. Battle is tactical, with outcomes depending on the characters' strengths and the player's strategy in positioning and choosing targets. Some battles include "Geo Panels," which apply modifiers to certain squares and can be disabled by destroying their associated "Geo Symbols."
Characters gain experience by battling, which makes them increase in level and strength. Equipment can be purchased at stores, and new characters can be created via the Dark Assembly, a sort of demonic parliament.
This is the "top level" of Disgaea's gameplay. A player could complete the game while barely ever delving any deeper. However, by taking on more challenges to customize her characters, a player can make her party even stronger than it would be through experience alone.
The first of these deeper layers of gameplay is the Dark Assembly. In addition to creating characters, an assortment of proposals can be passed, from "Raising Military Funds" to improving the contents of the store to opening optional areas. Each of these proposals requires a vote, which requires senators to like you. Senators' disposition can be improved by bribing them, but if all else fails, the player can pass it by force, which requires her to defeat all of the disapproving senators in battle.
This allows the player to customize the scope of the gameplay by changing the difficulty of battles and opening new, more difficult arenas. The Dark Assembly ties into the main gameplay by requiring resources: mana, which is obtained by defeating enemies in combat, combat power, which comes from experience, and bribery items, which can be obtained with money or in the course of regular gameplay.
The next layer of gameplay is item customization. Unusually for a roleplaying game, items in Disgaea are all slightly different, even within the same "type" of item. Two Short Swords will have different rarities, which in turn determines the number of "Specialists" that live inside the item. These resident specialists are randomly chosen, and modify the weapon's statistics.
Each item in the store may have different statistics because of this. By hunting around, a player can find the perfect weapon or other item for a character. This isn't strictly necessary to do well at the game; a Chain Mail bought at the store will usually be better than a Leather Jacket, so players can just rely on the rough ranks of the items. However, a player interested in customization can gain an advantage.
Item customization doesn't end there, however. Each item contains an "Item World:" a randomly-generated series of battle maps. By completing these battles, a player can level up the item itself, which increases its statistics. Additionally, some levels of an item will contain the item's Specialists, which can be "subdued" in battle. This doubles the bonus the specialist provides and allows that bonus to be transferred from item to item. There's even more to the system: items contain special boss characters that can be defeated to make them even more powerful, and new, incredibly powerful items can be stolen from enemies inside the Item World.
A player who is interested in getting the maximum benefit out of her items can spend more time in the Item World than in the actual storyline, subduing specialists, completing levels, and customizing her characters' items to any specification. However, the Item World is almost entirely optional, beyond a visit or two that serve as a sort of tutorial for the feature.
Beyond the Dark Assembly and the Item World are additional layers of complexity. Characters can be transmigrated to reset them to level 1 with increased stats. Hidden character classes can be unlocked by completing certain requirements. Secret unique "story" characters can be recruited through optional side-quests. Finally, the game also contains a "New Game +"-style feature that lets a player replay the game while maintaining each character's inventory and statistics.
For advanced players, there's a wide range of options for customization, but players who want a simpler game can simply ignore them. Indeed, the game itself advises players, "Don't worry, you can still beat the game with minimal knowledge." This combination of complexity and accessibility means that the game welcomes new or casual players while encouraging players who like to customize their gameplay.
 On Being an Overlord
How can other games duplicate Disgaea's two-pronged approach? The first step is to have gameplay which is based on simple rules, yet offers the possibility of depth. This is the old "minute to learn, lifetime to master" trick. Designers should think about several interacting mechanics. Disgaea combines tactical positioning, character leveling, and special techniques for its basic gameplay, then complicates those with Geo Panels, a lift/throw maneuvering mechanic, and different types of weapons and damage.
The second step is to pick aspects of the game which can be optionally customized. If the core gameplay is designed with depth in mind, there should be various ways that players could be allowed to customize it. The key is to include default configurations and simple alternatives so that the customization can be ignored by uninterested players.
Finally, the customization should be tied into the primary gameplay so that it is not just a separate, disconnected "edit mode." The classic RPG way to do this is through experience, where playing the game provides a limited resource which can be used to improve and customize characters. Disgaea uses this method, as well as a couple of others. The Dark Assembly uses a social approach, where non-player characters must be persuaded with gifts. The Item World uses a side-quest approach, where separate challenges must be completed to customize items. Note, however, that even the Item World challenges use the same character statistics and gameplay as the main game.
Using this "layered" approach to customization, where players can delve as deeply into the game as they want, will attract players interested in customization and keep them engaged, while not alienating new or casual players with an overly complex beginning experience. This helps to resolve the essential paradox of customization, where greater customization requires greater complexity. By using the techniques demonstrated in Disgaea, designers can make deeper games that appeal to a wider range of players.
[Gregory Weir is a writer, game developer (The Majesty Of Colors), and software programmer. He maintains Ludus Novus, a podcast and accompanying blog dedicated to the art of interaction. He can be reached at Gregory.Weir@gmail.com.]
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If going deeper makes the primary layer easier, isn't this giving an advantage to the hardcore players who already have an inherent advantage? Am I missing something?
Disgaea is a very deep game. There are levels and a linear narrative as in most rpg's that can be completed by the average player with much satisfaction. Being primarily a strategy game, however, many players play for the game mechanic and raw strategy, regardless of the narrative, and Disgaea offers an unlimited amount of gamelpay after the story is finished, and very much stands on it's own as a pure strategy game.
This is a great article, as I have always felt that Disgaea gets overlooked, despite it's cult status. Anyone who has not played this game (or any other NIS srpg's, as they all have similarities), I would highly reccommend. The original I feel is still the best, but Disgaea3 on PS3 is excellent as well, and still has all of the game features mentioned in the above article. I just hope for the next one they re-draw the sprites in HD.
To provide incentive to hardcore players Disgaea included a vast amount of endgame material. With a team sufficiently strong the player could unlock new characters, invade the human world, and find new bosses to fight that would be impossible without leveling outside of the normal game.
As for Disgaea I think they should update it to play more like Valkyrie Chronicles for the next Disgaea, but keep all the Disgaea deep gameplay and just use the strategy gameplay of VC.
Second, it's interesting that both Disgaea and MoM, with their multiple arenas of gameplay, would seem to fall afoul of the "one good game is better than two great games" rule of design from Sid Meier as cited by Soren Johnson in a recent Gamasutra feature (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23458). Does layering or making optional the different "levels of play" (i.e., playstyle-focused features) of a game answer the concerns raised about designing a game to feature multiple playstyles? What if those multiple playstyles are designed (as Disgaea is said to do) to have many interconnecting effects?
Third, after some thought, I find myself wondering: by "layered," does the author really mean "optional?" In other words, what's really the most important game design-specific quality of the multiple levels of complexity in Disgaea (and similar games)? Is it that these levels are "layered" to interconnect in many ways while still offering different styles of play? Or is it really more that some of the deeper/more strategic levels of play are optional? Aren't layering (high interconnectivity between different levels/styles of play) and optionality (low requirement to master some levels/styles of play) two separate and different questions of game design?
Finally, assuming the key point is really the optional nature of deeper/strategic play connected to the more usual action-focused tactical game, there's an important practical question: how do you sell optional complexity to a publisher or other financial backer? My impression from listening to developers is that the mere word "optional" gets translated by money people into "content that some players won't ever see, so why pay for it." Calling it "layered complexity" won't obscure from a thoughtful investor its central quality of being optional (if that's what "layered" is intended to mean here)... so how can that important game design element be justified to such an investor? (This isn't a criticism of the concept of having multiple and/or optional styles of play in one game; I actually like such games. I'm just curious how developers pitch the concept of optional gameplay content... but maybe that's worth a feature article all by itself. :)
I'm not so sure that Disgaea's approach is necessarily the best or only way to add complexity and/or depth. It seems to me that a lot of what any given game will have (broad horizontal complexity/depth versus vertical) is heavily dependent on the audience and history of that game - the difference between a turn based strategy like Silent Storm and one like Disgaea where both have depth and complexity but do so with a different approach.
At the same time, I find Disgaea a little too frightening to a new player in the Tactical RPG genre. The menus are too crowded, and when you enter the item shop, you get a little confused after seeing a lot of the same weapon with different prices and statistics. Maybe it's a game that you don't need to delve deep in its mechanics in order to finish it, but it wasn't tailored so that a new user would feel comfortable when playing it for the first time.
I think that Disgaea was pitched as a complex Tactical RPG, those parts are not exactly optional, they are working underneath, even if you don't delve deep trying to enhance your team and equipment.
I forgot to finish my comment. The thing is, it's really time consuming to do these deeper layers of customization, so I think that the developers simplified the game so that you are not obliged to go to the Dark Assembly or the Item World. It was simplified to the player who didn't want to go through all these side quests, and not to the new player who is already confused by the game name.
Also - NIS got rid of the grid with their follow up srpg Phantom Brave. It's not like Valkyrie Chronicles, but I'd be surprised if at least one member of the development team was not a fan. Also, they took the genre even further with titles like Makai Kingdom and Soul Nomad.
NIS has a very tiny development team by today's standards, but they manage to release almost annually. I really feel that their games could benefit from a longer development cycle to improve the visuals. While their art direction is outstanding, the low-rez sprites turn-off a lot of gamers, and I believe graphics are the only thing holding back their games from more mainstream success.