Loads of Disgaea 4 Details Dood!

Recently, Nippon Ichi Software blessed their fans with an announcement and official trailer release of the fourth entry to the Disgaea series. The sprites have had a major overhaul compared to what they were in Disgaea 3. Along with some new gameplay features, Nippon Ichi has also revealed the brief overview of the new story which will hopefully live up to the previous games' zany sense of humor that it's known for.The story of Disgaea 4 centers around the vampire Valbatouz and the series' mascot the prinnies. If you've played any games in the series you know that prinnies are the souls of sinners who as punishment are forced to work in the Netherword to repent for their sins. 

Valbatouz is the guide for these poor souls, specifically he is in charge of prinny education. Unlike most vampires Valbatouz does not drink blood, apparently due to a certain unrevealed incident. This lack of sky whale hack donuts blood sucking results in him being rather weak, and is the cause of the low rank he holds. Fed up, he starts a revolution to take over the Netherworld with a prinny army as well as many others fighting along side him.

Accompanying Val is his retainer Fehrihhi and former junior high student Fuuka. Fehrihhi is a silver-haired werewolf who is very loyal to Valbatouz, often referring to him as "His Excellency Val". Fuuka is a prinny sent to the Netherworld who, unlike most prinny, wears only a prinny hat. This is due to the large amount of sins she has committed in her life. Strangely she has no memories of her human life or how she died, and because of this she believes everything that's occuring around her is a dream and refuses to take things seriously. Despite being a prinny she portrays an extreme amount of power.Disgaea 4 has a similar set-up to the rest of the series, you go through a text based story, often with hilarious dialog, which is told in the form of chapters. In between these chapters you have a base in which you can do a multitude of things, from buying weapons to creating brand new characters. Speaking of characters, Disgaea 4 adds a new class of character: the Professor. Some may remember this class from Makai Kingdom, another Nippon Ichi title. Right now it's unknown what changes the Professor has gone through since then.

One of the new features is the act of "fusion", in which two monster can be fused together to create a significantly more powerful one. The new monster is both larger, faster and has a higher ability level, better attack range, and throwing/receiving capability. Fusion isn't limited to one class of monster, two monsters of completely different classes can be fused if desired. It is unknown which of the monsters' sprites is used when the fusion is finalized, but the decision most likely level or stat based.Disgaea 4 also gives the player the opportunity to invade another player's Netherworld like an online battle. 

Unfortunately you can only fight a team controlled by AI instead of fighting players directly, though I'm not surprised since you can reach the levels of 9999 the battles could be extremely one-sided.There is this very bizarre feature that involves characters donning top hates, canes, mustaches, and other classy add-ons. No details are available on this feature right now though.
Personally all of these details has only made me more excited for Disgaea 4. It's looking to be not just an excellent title in the series but an excellent game in general. Disgaea 4 releases on February 24, 2011 in Japan and Summer 2011 for the US. For more information, videos and screenshots visit Disgaea 4's official site here.