Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

The battle system is wildly creative while also boasting an enjoyable lead cast with a great variety of different classes and comps to use. Map design is often clever and has really neat puzzle elements to go along with strategy typical in SRPGs.Often this series gets flak for being a "grind fest" which is a bit of a misnomer. While you do have to grind for new custom party members to be useful and grind even more for the post-game, you can complete the main just fine with little to no grinding.

On the surface it's a pretty good SRPG, and what sets it apart from something like Final Fantasy Tactics is the infinite grinding potential. You can complete random dungeons to upgrade the stats of every single item in the game (even each individual insignificant healing item in your inventory), and if you want them, there's an infinite number of those random dungeons to occupy you far beyond the main storyline.

An appealing tactical game, though it's more about playing around and building up your characters than challenge per se. The constant advancement to ever more overpowered stats can be fun if you care for the constant grinding needed to achieve them, though. The goofily energetic yet character-driven anime-style plot was a fresh change of pace for the genre at a time when Japanese strategy RPGs were generally bogged down in drawn-out "epic political intrigue" of variable quality.