Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited is a port of the PS3 version of the game Disgaea 4: A Promise Forgotten and has been remade to work with the PlayStation Vita hardware. For those that don’t know, the series is a 2D anime strategy turn-based game and boy is it all about the crazy. The animations are over the top and the numbers will go through the millions and billions with the max level being 9999.

Being a port, the game has not had any major changes but if it “ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited instead sees some additions and improvements taken from the other games. The PlayStation Vita version of the game includes all the DLC from the PlayStation 3 version and some bits from Disgaea D2. This gives you a lot of bang for your buck and enables you to spend momentous amounts of time in the Netherworld.

The main story is broken down into chapters and took about 40 hours to complete with the usual detours into the item world and battling pirates. Story is as Disgaea crazy as they come with Valvatorez, sardine loving Prinny Instructor wanting to reform the Netherworld as it has taken a turn for the worse no longer scaring humans and abstaining from drinking blood. As you go through the main campaign you pick up some quirky team mates: A girl who thinks she is asleep and dreaming, an artificially created boss who wants to be the “final boss” and an Angel who steals money (go figure).

Item world, Pirate Editor and Discipline Room (Not making this up, promise) gives you infinite amount of additional game time. The Item World, as before, allows you to delve into an item of your choice from weapons and armour to candy or glasses. In the item you can take two routes, level up more or get more innocents which are used to give extra stat buffs to the weapon and can be moved into other weapons.

Editing pirates, their ship and taking them to battle earns you additional bonuses, levels and CP which can be used to buy new parts. Take on pirate challenges or fight people around the world and become the best pirates you can be. Finally the discipline room allows you to capture enemies by throwing them into your home portal and torturing them later for items, money or obedience. All these side tasks will keep you busy even once you have completed the main story.

The Campaign HQ is your main strategic battleground, this is where you call the senate to get extra characters or better weapons and, like in the other games, enables you to recruit new characters for your arsenal. HQ also has buildings of sorts, which you are able to place down on the netherworld map to give bonuses to your characters that are standing on the relevant adjacent squares; a minor addition but one with useful buffs and some strange side-effects, such as being able to move any number of squares but only in a line.

Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited is a re-release so it comes with all the DLC from the PlayStation 3 version as well as some systems from Disgaea D2. Some new additions include a new tier of spells, an exclusive scenario, new job techniques and music tracks.

One of the only setbacks within the PS Vita version of the game was the slowdown that was found sometimes on large maps, especially in the item world. Graphically the mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D sprites is flawless and works well but on the limited Vita hardware pushes it to the limits. Fitting in some fresh new content would not have gone a miss either, only one new scenario seems rather thin and does not add anything really fresh into the pot.

A game that has not changed much since the PlayStation 3 but with the additional DLC, systems squeezed into a portable device, this is by far the best Disgaea game to date. Mountains of content appeals to both new players and old but it will for the veteran players be the same game in a smaller package, which is not a bad result.