Surprise, Disgaea 4's PC version is out now

In July it was announced that Disgaea 4 would be next in the series of tactical JRPGs with over-the-top characters to receive a PC port, with a vague release date of "fall". Today, it appeared out of the blue on both Steam and Game Pass. Which is nice.

Originally released for the PlayStation 3 in 2011, Disgaea 4 is about a vampire leading a rebellion against the President of the Netherworld. But what it's really about is watching numbers go up, as you unlock its collection of over 30 characters and march toward level 9,999.

The PC version of Disgaea 4 launches without the original's online features, which included the ability to hop on a flying pirate ship to invade other players' games. They're coming at some point, however, with a developer on the Steam forum promising to keep everyone updated on that front.

Presumably this is a different situation to the PC port of Disgaea 5, which had to leave out its online features completely due to "irreconcilable platform differences".

All of the Disgaea games are currently on sale on Steam, with the first and second both reduced by 80%.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.