Disgaea 2 is Coming to Linux

That’s a pretty big surprise. You may remember me lamenting on the fact that Japanese games are rare on Linux, if not inexistant… well it looks like someone is trying to prove me wrong. We had the recent release of Danganronpa I and II earlier this year, the announcement of Street Fighter V in December 2015 (sadly it looks more and more like vaporware now), and now NIS America seems to plan to release Disgaea 2 for Windows/Mac/Linux, with a tentative release date of January 2017 for Windows. No idea yet about whether or not this will be a Day 1 release for Linux as well.

In case you don’t know Disgaea, it’s a famous series of tactical-turn-based-JRPG, where the focus is basically on effective tactics with your resources at hand to win battle with odds against you. Note that Disgaea is not a casual game, it’s actually pretty hardcore in the genre and can get really difficult as you progress. There are tons of options (to level up your characters, to learn new techniques, to buy new weapons and armours) so this is very much a time hole once you get into it.

Disgaea started on the PS2 (I still remember playing the first episode on that console), with subsequent versions making it also on the PSP (Disgaea 1 and 2 at least), Disgaea 3 and 4 on PS3, and the latest Disgaea 5 on PS4. It’s well know for its very anime-like looks, as well as its supremely cheesy humour.

Disgaea 2 should at least be very light for most recent hardware, so I would be very surprised if it did not play well even on a 5 years laptop. The Windows requirements list “OpenGL 3.0” so it looks like the whole game will run with OpenGL as the graphics API. That’s a smart move for once.

Anyway, really good news. Looking forward to that one, whether in January or a little later. In the meantime if you want to play the first episode, I would recommend to play the PSP version with PPSSPP, the excellent and unrivalled PSP emulator.

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