Disgaea 3 - Playable by how much?

[ssshadow]

Look in this video , there is still an issue in battle where the cursor always wants to go down for some reason... I can't say for sure if it's the d-pad or one of the analog sticks that's doing it though. However since the d-pad can be used to fight against it, maybe it's the analog sticks.

Can you see if there are any other games with this problem? It's hard for me to test Dis3 because I can't see anything, don't know the inputs and it runs at 1/3 a frame per second... The analog stick(s) seemed to work fine in Arkedo SWAP as well.

I will look when I get home. Note that Disgaea input works as expected until the tutorial battle, which takes about 45 minutes to reach at interpreter speed

Yup! I tried playing it for a bit, between the invisible graphics (lol, that's the unimplemented z-culling probably), 1/3 fps speed, and invisible character sprites, I had no damn clue where I was going. Not sure why that would have problems when SWAP works fine with all of its buttons, too. Humph. I wonder if there are action replay codes or similar to move the player position... that would be useful for testing this game.

Anyway, let me know what you find.

Reading about z-buffering and z-culling on Wikipedia, that makes sense. It would also explain the black "trail" left behind objects moving when hidden surfaces become visible. TIL

So, to get into the tutorial battle, skip everything after pressing new game by pressing triangle. Once in game, outside a big door, move down the stairs, and across the big floor, so that you end up on the opposite side of where you began. There is a blue portal thing, and the shadow of a guy in the middle of it. (Picture) Talk to him, triangle several times to skip all the talking. Then select chapter 1, skip more talking with triangle, chose to do the tutorial, skip more talking with triangle, and you are done. You should be able to move the cursor/marker thing freely at this point in order to dispatch people from the blue thing in the middle, and move them around the field. (Look in my video)

Until the battle begins you do have an horrible 0,3 fps, and it takes about 45 minutes to reach the tutorial. Once there the frame rate becomes and acceptable 3 fps, although it actually feels even faster. At this point the speed isn't much of a problem at all. (It is 10 times faster than it was before)

A workaround for the missing graphics/flickering is to open the menu with triangle. This is just a small list in the corner, so you can clearly see all the graphics. Moving next to an NPC also fixes it as long as the NPC level and all that is displayed on the screen.

Finally, you can rotate the camera with R1/L1 and zoom in/out with R2/L2. At certain angles and zoom levels (such as furthest out) the flickering is much less severe.