There’s a trailer out in English for Disgaea 3, but the game won’t come out for a couple more months. Fortunately, I can review it for you right now! It’s just one of the advantages of living with a part-time translator.

The short review is, it’s Disgaea again, and if you’re a fan, that’s probably a good thing. I’m all for innovation in gaming, but sometimes you just want to level a guy up to 9999 and have a few laughs along the way.

Plot-wise, Disgaea 3 sticks much closer to the original than Disgaea 2 did. You’ve got a demon boy with flowing red neck decorations and more than a few father issues, a petite female demonic companion and a naiive defender of truth and justice trapped in the middle of it all.

The story takes place in a demonic academy, where the honor students skip class, don’t do homework and generally break all the rules as good demons do. Shady demonic delinquents collect money for charity, donate blood and have to cut their dungeon-plumbing short to be back in time for curfew. The Dark Student Council has taken the place of the Dark Senate, and you manage your team by homeroom seating instead of a menu.

Most importantly, the game is funny, or at least the Japanese version is. Whether or not that’s still true for the North American version is going to be up to the translators, and they’ve got their work cut out for them. One major character, a home economics teacher, speaks entirely in difficult-to-translate cooking metaphors.

The rest of the game can be described as “bigger, crazier, more OCD.” In addition to the random item worlds, there’s now character worlds where you can level up your pawns. The item world pirates from the previous games make a reappearance, but now you can BE the pirates, tossing treasure onto your ship and taking off again. Special attacks are as over the top as ever, with one having your character run all the way around the circumference of the world to come back and smack the targets with an axe.

So, yeah. You like Disgaea? You’ll like this too.

Complaints? For one thing, the game is a PS3 exclusive. Who can afford one of those (besides my roommate)?

And despite being on a new console, Disgaea 3 doesn’t really take advantage of it. The character portraits are nice and sharp in HD, but the in-game sprites and special effects still look like their PS2 counterparts. If you’re a Disgaea fan, you’re probably not really in it for eye candy, but the quirky art of Takehito Harada is one of the main draws of the series and it would have been nice to see the sprites a little more close up.

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