Nippon Ichi

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Nippon Ichi Software (often shortened to NIS or N1) is a video game company based in Japan. They are relatively famous for their use of detailed pixel art sprites instead of the photorealistic 3D models that the rest of the industry is leaning towards, and their many Strategy RPGs with absurdly high Power Levels.

"Nippon Ichi" is Japanese for "Japan One" or, in other words, "Japan's Best". No, they're not arrogant at all, what makes you say that?

Nippon Ichi opened an American branch, called NIS America, in 2003 that also publishes games from companies other than its Japanese parent company (not unlike Atlus USA, which localized several of NIS's games before 2003 and today distributes several of NIS America's games), such as Gust's Atelier series.

NIS America is now apparently in the anime licensing business. All their releases are subtitled-only and they will never dub their anime no matter what.

Games developed by Nippon Ichi (Note that this list only includes releases outside of Japan):

• Jigsaw Madness, an oft-forgotten Puzzle Game that was their first title to be released outside Japan.
• Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure (Original PS 1 version published by Atlus.)
• La Pucelle: Tactics (Published by Mastiff)
• Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (Original PlayStation 2 version published by Atlus)
• Phantom Brave
• Makai Kingdom: Chronicles of the Sacred Tome
• Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories
• Soul Nomad and The World Eaters
• Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice
• Puchi Puchi Virus
• A Witch's Tale
• Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero? (Gaiden Game to Disgaea series)
• Disgaea Infinite (A Disgaea Visual Novel)
• Zettai Hero Project: Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman
• Cla Dun: This is an RPG
• Prinny 2: Dawn Of Operation Panties, Dood
• Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten
• The Witch and The Hundred Knights
• Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance
• Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny

Nippon Ichi America also serves as a publisher for several other smaller development houses in Japan. Releases from these include:

• Nearly anything from Gust Corporation; the two have been partners in Japan for some time and that extends to America as well, with Gust products essentially forming the "second tentpole" of Nippon Ichi America's output. This includes games from the Atelier series (from Atelier Iris on, currently) and Ar tonelico.
• Generation of Chaos, Aedis Eclipse and Spectral Souls, developed by Idea Factory.
• Blade Dancer: Lineage of Light and Dragoneer's Aria, developed by Hitmaker.
• Grim Grimoire, developed by Vanillaware (has cross over in Soul Nomad).
• Cross Edge, developed by Compile Heart.
• Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love, a port of the fifth game in the Sakura Taisen series, developed by...Sega. Okay, so they aren't always smaller development houses.
• Trinity Universe, not the table top game, which is a combination effort with Idea Factory and Gust. Features Etna, Flonne, and Prinny from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Violet and Pamela from the Atelier Violet as guest cameos.
• Cave Story 3D
• Neptunia: An Eastern RPG series created by Compile Heart and Idea Factory for the Play Station 3, in which Moe girls fight the Console Wars.
• Mugen Souls: an Eastern RPG created by Compile Heart for the Play Station 3 in which a self-proclaimed god would like to Take Over the World.

Anime licensed by NIS America:

• Toradora!
• Persona -Trinity Soul-
• Pandora Hearts
• Our Home's Fox Deity
• Working!! (released as Wagnaria!!)
• Katanagatari
• Arakawa Under the Bridge
• Kimi ni Todoke
• Dororon Enma-kun
• House of Five Leaves
• Natsume Yuujinchou
• Brave 10
• Daily Lives of High School Boys
• Otome Youkai Zakuro
• Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day
• Bunny Drop

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Nippon Ichi provides examples of the following tropes:

Gameplay Tropes

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Most games stick with two-digit level numbers (or they'll give you a level 100 if you're lucky). The norm for Nippon Ichi is four.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You might have 50+ characters, but you can only ever bring out 10 on any given map.
• Attract Mode: Most games will either play a cutscene with backstory or demonstrate some of the crazier stuff available if left alone at the title screen.
• Bonus Boss: Cameos from just about every other game appear in every other game, but Baal deserves special mention—he is in every major game by Nippon Ichi and is always the ultimate threat.
  • And as soon as Zetta calls him on this fact, Asagi makes her premiere.
• Bonus Dungeon: Any item, any character, and in some games, any adjective.
• Cap: Averted in most, there generally is no damage or stat caps and characters can do many thousands or even millions of damage in a hit if brought to a high enough level.
• Combat Medic: Most Nippon Ichi healers can fight just fine, though some require tweaking using things like Disgaea's Apprentice system.
• Color-Coded Armies: Usually life bars only, although the Disgaea port for the Nintendo DS also featured color-coded icons on the minimap.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Usually averted hard, as the computer cannot throw except in Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom (one of the NIS-produced strategy guides even mentioned this, pointing out that the games would be far harder if the computer had this ability). The Anti-Matter ability in Soul Nomad is an exception.
• Cut-In
• Everything Fades: Applies in all games except Phantom Brave. In that one, piles of corpses may impede movement or targeting. A moderate amount of damage applied to the corpse will remove it. You could also simply use them as a weapon, stepping stool, distraction, etc etc.
• Extended Gameplay: By the bucket, even if you do generally have to start a New Game+ at least once to get at some of it.
• Glass Cannon: Common result of obeying One Stat To Rule Them All. The Magic-based classes typically fall into this trope.
• Hub Level: Games that don't use a world map typically have one of these. Phantom Brave combines the two.
• Improvised Weapon
• Level Grinding: And how!
• Magic Knight: From Disgaea on, there is a class explicitly named this. Some plot characters also qualify, and use of reincarnation can make almost anyone a Magic Knight.
• Mana: Mana in Nippon Ichi games is different from how it's handled in other similar games. There is indeed a secondary bar called "SP" which drains as you use special abilities, but Mana is a separate statistic from that. It's usually generated from defeating opponents (depending on the game) and is a measure of how much hidden power or potential a character may have. In the Disgaea games, this means you can ask for different things from the Dark Assembly. In Cla Dun it's how many slots a character gives you for upgrade items. In Phantom Brave, mana is used to gain new skills on weapons and fuse them to make them stronger.
• Monster Allies: From the very beginning, monsters can join the party.
• New Game+
• Nonstandard Game Over
• One Stat to Rule Them All: Because of how damage is calculated, defense becomes increasingly useless as attack power increases. At high levels, the most viable strategy is to pump your attack stat (usually ATK or INT) as high as possible and just blitz the enemy in a one-turn do-or-die attack. In Phantom Brave, Speed can claim a tie or even a solo first if used as the attack stat.
• Over Nine Thousand: The sheer amount of high levels in most N1 games is just staggering to the average RPG fan. Add in that you can also level up weapons and abilities to insane levels and...
• Player Mooks: A staple of nearly all the Turn-Based Strategy games. Makai Kingdom takes the cake here, as until you get to the bonus content, literally none of your playable characters are plot characters.
• Recurring Boss: Baal, Laharl, Prier, and Asagi.
• Rocket Tag Gameplay: High-level random dungeon enemies and bonus bosses can usually kill player units in one hit regardless of defense stats. The reverse is generally true, though bosses are a bit more resilient.
• Signature Move: The skill Dimension Slash has become a recurring sword skill and usually one of the strongest ever since the first Disgaea, though it's name and appearance somewhat changes with each game.
• Splash Damage Abuse: In games with tiles (La Pucelle and the Disgaea games), the area of effect for magic can be abused to extend the range of your spells by a couple tiles. The 7-tile checker array is especially good. In titles like Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom, the trope still applies, though targeting can be a bit trickier (this is due to the tricky aiming with area of effect skills in these non-tile games).
• Sprite Polygon Mix: The characters and interactable objects are sprited, while the backgrounds are rendered.
• Turn-Based Strategy
• Updated Rerelease: Currently, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, [[Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure]], Phantom Brave, Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories, La Pucelle, Makai Kingdom and Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice received one, though the PSP versions of La Pucelle and Makai Kingdom have yet to leave Japan. Only Soul Nomad and The World Eaters has yet to receive one.
• White Mage: The Healer classes.

Story and Characterization Tropes

• Ax Crazy: Every Disgaea has at least one somewhat ax crazy guy, but Sapphire embodies it. Everybody in Soul Nomad's demon path.
• Badass Normal: Pick a human, any human (game play wise). Sapphire embodies this trope story wise. Subverted with Adell who only thinks he's human.
• Black Comedy: There's usually at least a little of this in most Nippon Ichi games.
• Bittersweet Ending: Several, the normal (non canonical) ending of Disgaea 1 is probably the worst offender.
• Butt Monkey: Poor, poor Asagi. You can't sink much lower than second banana to a Prinny.
• The Chessmaster: Regular trope used even used by good characters (used most often by good ones at that).
• Crossover: Most Nippon Ichi games feature Secret Characters from other Nippon Ichi games.
• Cute Bruiser: Almost every game in Nippon Ichi's collection has at least one, and usually many more.
• Dark Is Not Evil: That's every Nippon Ichi game in a nutshell, really.
• Deadpan Snarker
• Defeat Means Friendship
• The Ditz: Usually as a foil for the Deadpan Snarker.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Asagi... maybe, kinda. To elaborate—Asagi was a demo character used to test out one of the games's engines (the persistent rumor is that she was supposed to be the main character of the canceled Makai Wars for the PSP), but the developers liked her so much that they kept her around as a cameo in other games. She usually bemoans the fact that she doesn't have her own game yet and tries to take your game for her own. So she's an Early Bird Cameo for a game that hasn't been made yet.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Seedle, Drazil, and Super Hero Aurum all get lectures like this.
• Everything Sounds Sexier in French: Mid-Boss, as well as the fact a lot of characters have French words for names (La Pucelle especially so).
• Everything's Better with Penguins: Prinnies have been a Nippon Ichi staple since Disgaea, dood.
• Fallen Hero: Thorndyke and Gig in Soul Nomad. Thorndyke's fall is in the Demon Path and Gig was tossed (through the actions of Drazil before the game) down. Super Hero Aurum also applies.
• Gag Boobs: Most female characters either have these or are on the other end of the scale.
• Guile Hero: Sereph Lamington, Champloo (to a lesser extent) and Lady Virtuous. Lamington especially shows just how scary these characters can be.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Laharl, Ash, Zetta, and Mao somewhat subvert the trope by having the option to wield different weapons, but their stats and their promotional art seem to gear them more towards swords. Cornet and Prier averts this by using a trumpet and a baton respectively as does Adell who is geared toward Good Old Fisticuffs, although he does have the option to use a sword like the above characters. Only Revya plays it completely straight as he/she is stuck with the Onyx Blade the entire game.
• Heroic Sacrifice: It usually ends up triggering the main character's Unstoppable Rage and, in some cases, their Super-Powered Evil Side. Coincidentally, except for two cases, all of them had blond hair.
• Hidden Depths: Lamington, Adell, and Champloo are MUCH smarter than they look and act.
• Improbable Weapon User: Oh boy. Every game has plenty but Phantom Brave takes the cake. Or fish. Or phonograph.
• Light Is Not Good: See "Dark Is Not Evil".
• Like a Badass Out of Hell: Kill too many Demon Overlords (or a strong enough singular one) and you become one. Very important rule to remember throughout the games. This is the canonical ending to Priere of La Pucelle -- in the bonus ending she becomes Overlord Priere after beating up too many things inside the bonus dungeons, in all her cameos, this is the role she appears as.
• Moe: Nippon Ichi loves using this trope, Flonne and Marona stands out the most.
• Multiple Endings: And it's usually far harder to get the worst endings than the good endings.
• The Multiverse: All of the tRPGs take place in the same multiverse.
• No Fourth Wall: Mostly in the Disgaea series but even the more serious games have been known to break the fourth wall (Usually in post-game content).
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Marona and Almaz. Deconstructed with Artina's death in Disgaea4, which caused Nemo to become an Omnicidal Maniac.
• Noble Demon: Most of the demons claim to be evil, but they're simply rude jackasses at worst.
• Obligatory Swearing: The developer's localization team are fond of placing at least one mild to strong cuss word (shit, ass, bitch, slut, etc.) in all games with a Teen (or equivalent) rating, which actually is almost of all of their games; still they're rare and doesn't sound gratuitous at all, exception goes to Makai Kingdom in which the script doesn't waste a chance to drop some bombs, and yet it comes out pretty funny.
• Older and Wiser: Borderline—many of said Bonus Bosses tend to be earlier protagonists.
• Only Sane Man: One per game.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: In NIS games there have been two recurring types of werewolfs, one is the constantly transformed man-like werewolfs and the other is of the humanoid with a wolf tail variety who are rarely seen completely transformed, if ever. The first type appears in the Marl Kingdom games and in Phantom Brave, the other types appears as plot related characters in both Marl Kingdom games and Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten, namely Gao, Ran Ran and Fenrich.
• Out-of-Character Moment: quite common in their games, particularly the post-game content.
• Parental Abandonment: It would be easier to list the NIS characters that have living parents.
• The Plan: Used a lot by both good and bad guys.
• The Power of Love: Expect this to play a vital role in the plots of nearly all their games. It's used as a serious plot device even in the stories that directly parody it.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: How Seedle and Hawthorne are revealed to be utter monsters. After Jennifer asked if demons molested Laharl, he took offense to the human perception that demons are rapists.
• Really Seven Hundred Years Old: The demons and angels in their games have very long lifespans, to say the least.
• Running Gag: Asagi attempting a Hostile Show Takeover in each game. It sorta works [[Prinny: Can I Really Be The Hero?]], where she's the main character of her own mini-campaign... About various Asagis attempting this.
• Scarf of Asskicking: Shows up enough that even Nippon Ichi's Moe Anthropomorphism has one.
• The Stinger
• Stripperiffic: Many, but the sexytype monsters (drawn by the artist of the Marl series instead of the Disgaea artist) take the cake. Not to be outdone, the Disgaea artist has drawn nudist green flower-girlsguys and warrior women wearing a pair of belts as a tube top.
  • Lampshaded in Disgaea 2, where said flower-man's name is 'BRIDGET.'
  • Not to mention that only a handful of the male characters actually cover their chest.
• Superhero: The Prism Rangers, Superhero Aurum, and the newest, Absolute Victory Unlosing Ranger, Star of Z.H.P.[yada yadda].
• Translation Style Choices: The localization team always goes for exotic english names for some titles and locations for The Multiverse, and even the game itself; Maoh (Devil King, Devil Lord, The Devil) becomes Overlord, Makai becomes Netherworld but it's basically the same thing; also as seen in Obligatory Swearing above, words and titles like Badass and Frickin Badass are used to set in stone how strong the character is.