So I'm thinking about buying disgaea 3, but I had a couple of questions.

1. I know it's a tactical turn based RPG, how similar is it to the Final Fantasy Tactics series in it's gameplay? Does it more closely resemble a different strategy RPG?

2.How deep is it? I hear that it's incredibly deep, but from what I can discern from reviews it almost sounds like there are a ton of things you can do, but that it's unneccessary. In other words it's deep if you want it to be deep. Thoughts form people that have played the disgaea series?

1.  Very close to identical except that you have reincarnation instead of class/job changing and lots of special moves like (pick up/throw) which Tactics never had. 

2.  There are people who have played Disgaea 2 for 500+ hours and still haven't done everything that can be done.  Deep enough for you?

1. They are similar in the fact that both have the things that are typical to most Tactic RPGs, grid turn-based system, leveling up, job system. The little thing are what separates Disgaea to most Tactic RPG, like lifting, level 9999 cap, etc, so is not easily comparable to anyone

2. It's true that it's as deep as you want it to be. For example, the first one can be beat in 40 hours with the characters in level 70-80. It's up to you how much you want to play it. If you want, you can easily spend more than 100-150 hours.

Excellent, thanks words of wisdom. I will definately pick it up then. I love the tactics system, so it's good news that it closely resembles it.

About the reincarnation though, is that similar to the job system? That is to say are their jobs or classes that you can change?

You reincarnate so you can change jobs (or the improvement of the job you're in), but keeping some stats. The catch is that every time you reincarnate you're back to level 1

gotcha, sounds interesting. I guess you gotta choose carefully. Thanks Zexen.

Essentially say you pick Female Fighter as your starting class.  You accumulate enough mana and you can choose to reincarnate.  You get 1 mana per level of the enemy you kill and you need 100 to reincarnate so you need to fight a bit first.

Then you get to choose what to reincarnate into.  You can reincarnate into any class you've unlocked.  If you get to certain levels, you unlock better versions of existing classes.  For example, once you reach level 10 with a Female Fighter, you unlock Female Warrior.  Her stats and skill gains improve over the original.  Get to level 20 with a Female Warrior and you unlock Female Destroyer... and so on.

Some skills like spells carry over between classes so you can level up as a Blue Mage/Skull and switch over to a Fighter yet still cast spells (not as effectively of course).

Also, each time you reincarnate, you stock levels.  Your level stock is the total number of levels you've gotten with the character in every incarnation.  Depending on the number, you get bonus points at reincarnation to start out even stronger.  Reincarnating with 5000 levels will make a much stronger character than 50 levels.

Finally, depending on the amount of extra mana you spend, you retain a certain percent of all your skills and the like.  Spend a ton and you can retain almost everything.  Spend none and you retain... very little.

sounds pretty sweet, alot of details and customization. I think I'm going to like this game.

Nice. I was wondering if I should pick this game up, and now I know what I should do.

Its a great series, i picked up the PSP version and its a lot of fun. Looking forward to 3!