Kerdakai

I always refer to the series as "stat porn". There are stats to determine the stats of your stats. Literally.

Disgaea, or pretty much any NIS game, is custom built for a limited audience, but that's why they have such rabid fan support. I don't know that any other dev today making retail, disc-based games is as unrepentant in their catering to a small niche. They're uncompromising in their adherence to number-obsessed, grind-demanding, crushingly dense anime SRPGs.

Massive global recession + console-priced handheld + lack of any "killer app", and dearth of compelling software overall = fiddling sales.

Really, the fact that the system has sold as well as it has is a testament to the power of the Nintendo brand and the faith people place in it.

This is a story that makes me happy.

And before you just write this off as a one note "parody" game, I would argue that it in many ways improves on the classic 16-bit games it draws from. The combat, though rooted in a very traditional Dragon Quest flow and presentation, demands genuine strategy, and through level up rewards you're offered substantive ways to customize the combat roles of your characters.

Plus, for $3, you're getting a 10-15 hour game with great sprite-based graphics and a fun story. As someone whose formative years as a gamer were in the mid 90s, this game felt like a giant bowl of bread pudding, familiar and comforting without being staid.

In all honesty, I've never played a CoD game (not out of rebellion or anything, but simply because FPS games tend to bore me), and even I'm tired of the predictable "backlash" the series generates whenever mentioned online. There's so much genuinely interesting, diverse stuff going on in gaming right now that it seems almost criminal for the genuinely dedicated gamer base to waste so much time fuming about it.

Plus, for all of the old-school FPS players out there lamenting how Kotick has ruined the gene they loved, and how you wish we would all just go back to playing Quake mods over 56k connections, try being a longtime console gamer in this day and age. When you grew up on platformers and JRPGs, the current tidal wave of FPS games, no matter how watered down, is an embarrassment of riches compared to the meager scraps and indie genre tributes that we've had to subsist on.