I hate disgaea. The dungeon crawling in this game is super rewarding and fun, be it the hand-crafted levels or the mad rush of the procedural ones, it does a good mix and keeping you on your toes and getting into the flow state. It's a shame its also a disgaea game with its like ten pointless character progression systems and generally useless way of making you have 40 dudes to do those 10 systems on. That part is not fun. The lack of QOL with the battle system also increases this, to the very end of the day I had no idea what was actually going on in most battles because there was no way to tell what was going on, or what the enemy was doing when they did action X or Y. One late-game grinding enemy would sometimes cast the same spell and instakill some of my dudes, and sometimes do nothing, and it wasn't because the spell was rng I think. Just baffling design.

Otherwise, its a very exciting story that falters only slighty in tone and writing juuust at the end. I don't even hate the way it took the ending or post-ending stuff, I like the thought of it. Just executed a bit poorly. What stuck out to me the most was the sort of quiet emotionalism of the writing. The game is really good at drawing feelings out of you in its scenes, it recognizes that people are often irrational horrible people but also sometimes...maybe not, in a good way.

It's also not afraid to take on heavy topics, but with a light enough flair to not feel lurid or casualizing. Watching Nachiroux deal with her very real teenage problems like loving her mom but also hating to be around her due to reasons she struggles to say aloud, or how she's trying to relate to another girl who has so many of her own issues that she struggles to communicate her thoughts is wonderful and all too real. Eureka is no slouch either, she has her own big ball of Issues that her airheaded optimism only just barely conceal from going out of control. It's hard not to love them as you watch them go through the labyrinthine plot so much larger and also smaller than the both of them. I felt it stumbled just a little at the finish mark, where it really felt like the writer's ambition got the best of them juuust a little, but not enough to meaningfully take away from.

Altogether, probably Nippon Ichi's best game, but that's damning it with faint praise because what is there of Galleria is very good, and the things I don't like about it are more the things you get with the studio.