Today Nippon Ichi Software America (NIS America) announced that they will be bringing Makai Senki Disgaea 3 to the states in August of 2008. Considering the popularity of the previous titles, I cannot say I am all that surprised, but it is nice to have a concrete date now.

To celebrate I will explain one of the cool new features of the game:

Magichange

The player now has the option of changing a monster class ally into a weapon. Weird huh? This feature is similar to an option in La Pucelle in which the player could send their ally monsters into the dark world to find items, usually resulting in their death. Obviously the stronger the ally monster, the better the weapon will turn out, but you lose a good ally. Thats what they call a Catch-22 I believe.

In Disgaea 3 the effects are not permanent, since Magichange is only an ability. Your monster will temporarily become a weapon for an ally to use, allowing them to perform new skills, or give added effects (20% health regain etc). The duration of this affect is still not clear to me, as well as what happens to the equipped weapon of the receiving character.

In Phantom Brave, it was possible to use an ally as a weapon, but it was necessary to put down your equipped weapon beforehand. Doing so was not the best idea, as your weapon was about 50% of your stats. At the end of the battle, or when you had gone up a level in the random dungeon, everything was simply reset as if nothing happened.

I am guessing Disgaea 3 will be more rigid that Phantom Brave, meaning the receiving character probably just puts his equipped weapon “away”, and his new weapon becomes the ally monster. I would also assume the effects can be undone when the player wants. Basically, it appears to be a combo attack that is independent of any formation, other than the monster standing next to a human to execute it. Here are a few images I found showing a Flame Demon and Salvatore the Great performing “Burning Crush”: