The gothic horror atmosphere of the game is as brilliant as ever, too. Though Diablo 3 was never the most immediately beautiful game, everything within it - from the character design to the environment layouts, the way enemies shamble about, the haunting ambient sounds and music, and the incredible (if overblown) cut scenes create a tense, dark environment that is so complete that it remains a rare achievement among games.
Disgaea games never set out to be deep and meaningful narrative experiences, and it takes a real time commitment to start reaping the rewards of the combat system of any of the games in the series. But they are irresistable and ridiculous, stupid fun once they get going. Disgaea 4: A Promise Revisited is the kind of game that can ruin sleep patterns and kill productivity. But it's all worth it because it'll keep you chuckling right up to when that favourite Prinny hits level 9999, dood.
How much value you get from this game largely depends on how comfortable you are with online challenge and competition. Taken as an single player experience, Mario Golf: World Tour is either expensive with all its DLC, or a little too light in raw content for its own good from the base package. But either way, compared to Camelot's previous 3DS effort with the tennis game, this is a massive step up.
It's not that the game fails to offer something compelling; I sit there and take any individual piece of what went on in Professor Layton Vs. Phoenix Wright, and I liked it. It's just that the attempt to mesh two very different kinds of games together without any real attempt to adjust how either plays simply doesn't work as well as it should on paper.
If I haven't made this clear enough - this is a bad game. And yet, I couldn't stop playing it. Perhaps because it's so simple, it's easy to tune out to while I'm playing it. Like a bit of pulp fiction (or, indeed, the typical manga), Romance Dawn is a "page turner" without being remotely memorable.