YMMV / Makai Kingdom

• Anti-Climax Boss: The optional encounter with Asagi must be unlocked with a level 1000 character and a massive amount of mana. Asagi herself is level 50 and will likely go down with one hit.
• Ass Pull: The fact that Salome is Petta's mother is not nearly as out of nowhere as how she proves it. By restoring Zetta's body, albeit temporarily. Though maybe her mana in the main story is just that badly drained.
• Awesome Ego: Zetta is arrogant, hammy, and boastful, which is the reason for a lot his fans.
• Base-Breaking Character: Petta. While she's won over plenty of fans with her cute design and adorable interactions with Zetta, several others see her as a lame attempt at tacking on another Token Mini-Moe to a Nippon Ichi game that is unusually low on them. The fact that she shows up much more frequently than any other characters besides Zetta and Pram in the other games also leaves a bad taste in their mouths.
  • She may have won more fans after Disgaea 5. This being due to being a superb gun/support character with an Overload skill that allows other Overloads (including really deadly ones like Tyrant Revelio and Murmur of Rage) to be used twice per battle. Note: the language in the US version is misleading, making people think Overloads have to be already used for Future Eyre to work, when it's actually "+1 use per battle".
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When King Drake powers up to fight Zetta, making bold proclamations about his true power, a random image of an old man riding a motor scooter appears on screen, embarrassing poor Drake. Zetta apparently recognizes the picture and tries to inquire about it, but Drake yells at him to forget about it and the picture is never brought up again.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The revelation of Petta's mother is probably meant to be more a surprise for Zetta than for the audience, but even not knowing the original story doesn't help that the number of characters in Petta mode can almost be counted on a single hand. Of the two female characters that aren't Zetta's daughter, Pram doesn't exactly treat him with kindness.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Alex is quite fondly remembered due to his high number of funny moments as well as his cool design. After a long period of absence, he has managed to become a recurring DLC character in the most recent Nippon Ichi games alongside staples Zetta and Pram, something most of the rest of the cast has never enjoyed.
• Funny Moments: Upon recruiting King Drake, you'll see his Intelligence Aptitude is only TEN PERCENT.
• Good Bad Bug: The game prevents you from using more movement points than is logically possible (if you can't go from point A to point B in a straight line, you can't go as far as the movement circle indicates). However, if you wait as close to your starting point as possible, you can move with the remaining movement points from that point on (because the game assumes you went there in a straight line anyways).
• Ho Yay: Alex's obsession with his rivalry with Zetta makes it easy for fans to see that there may be more there, especially once he starts helping Zetta for the sake of being The Only One Allowed to Defeat You. And then there's his Bad Ending where he actually defeats Zetta. He spends billion of years trying to find another enemy worth fighting, only to realize that his life is empty without Zetta.
• Moral Event Horizon: Seedle nearly raping Salome in his backstory. It's already a rather disgusting crime on its own, but what really makes this monstrous is how obsessed he is with destroying Salome and everyone who cares about her because of the humiliation of dying to the woman who didn't let him have his way with her.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Similar to Disgaea: Hour of Darkess, If you have a character committed to an action then interface with another one, that action is locked in and cannot be cancelled.
  • Transitioning playthroughs erases any Random Dungeons you've created with no way to get them back.
  • The movement system doesn't allow units to ever truly block each other. This makes damage-sponge tanks completely useless since enemy AI prioritizes weaker characters anyway.
  • You wouldn't be blamed for seeing Food items like Corn or Rations as little more than secondary healing items given the game never deigns to tell you their actual purpose.^note Food items have TEC ratings that indicate value. Having a Chef feed a character (or enemy) food increases their EXP gain (or EXP payout, for enemies) by the value amount, up to 900 percent with multiple chefs/food. Also, equipping someone Level 100+ and having them wish for a dungeon will give you a single-floor 3X3 spread of enemies twice the wisher's level for Level Grinding purposes.
  • Enemy invites. If an enemy invite timer reaches 0, they invite a building on top of (probably) the weakest unit in your army, which itself has several enemies inside ready to jump out and kill them. The countdown timer is randomized, and sometimes it starts at 1, making it next to impossible to prevent if the inviting enemy spawns too far away. Unless you're overpowered for the level, kiss any unit you were trying to keep alive goodbye. It's bad enough that if you see one you can't kill in a random dungeon in time, the only smart thing to do is to end the floor ASAP.
  • The autosave on Reclaimed and Rebound only seems to activate when you save, which renders the feature kind of pointless.
  • When a unit dies in battle and is subsequently revived back in the hub, they must be manually re-assigned to whatever building you had them in, as well as re-summoned to the hub (although the latter is only an issue for units that provide services outside of battle, such as Mechanics). Similarly, if a building gets destroyed in battle, everyone that was assigned to it must be put back in.
  • Each time an enemy goes out of bounds, all other enemies currently on the map level up. The problem is that this applies even when enemies go out of bounds on their own accord (either because they used a balloon attack or because Artificial Stupidity drove their pathfinding over the edge of the map), potentially resulting in enemies several magnitudes stronger than the player prepared for.
• Superlative Dubbing: While most of the dubbing for NIS games are generally well-regarded, Makai Kingdom was the first one to really hit it out of the park for many. Crispin Freeman, in particular, steals the show as Zetta and many lament his inability to return to the role in Zetta's later appearances.
• Woolseyism:
  • In Japanese, Zetta's self-declared title is Saikyou no Maou, the strongest Demon King. Although variations of the original title exist (Strongest Overlord in the Cosmos), he commonly refers to himself as one Badass (Freakin') Overlord. Guess which one fans preferred?
  • The title of the game itself was originally called Phantom Kingdom in Japan. It was supposedly renamed in order to remove any confusion about it being related to the previous game, Phantom Brave. Since the demon-filled setting is much closer to Disgaea than Phantom Brave, this makes a lot of sense. Despite this, the game's systems are closer to those of Phantom Brave, such as the lack of a grid, while others are a mix of both, with Confine being used to create new units, but it is done so out of battle with similar classes to Disgaea.