Disgaea as a series holds a special place in my heart. Discovering it in the early days of the Switch when portable content was far more limited than it is today, Disgaea 5 Complete completely changed my perception of what a Tactical RPG can be. Campy comedic storylines paired with a gameplay loop that laughs at the Fire Emblem games of old with their limited resources, Disgaea sees the peoples’ desire for big stats and big damage and challenges them to turn it up to 11 through hard work and grinding. This is a series that isn’t for everybody, but for those chosen few each new game offers hundreds of hours of min-maxing and discovery. After a lull with the mixed reception of Disgaea 6, we rejoin the series with a new unlikely duo in a new set of stylish Netherworlds to see whether Nippon Ichi Software can put things back on track.

Welcome to the Hinomoto Netherworlds

Though Netherworlds are often known for violence and destruction, ruled over by powerful demons, Hinomoto was different. Unlike the rest of this dark society, its residents valued honour and empathy, following tradition and a long-standing bushido code. All of this changed when the leader of the Netherarmy, Demmodore Opener invaded. Stomping out Hinomoto’s mightiest warriors, he united the warring Netherworlds with a puppet Shogunate under his mighty fist. We join the story many years after this historic event with a starry-eyed Hinomoto otaku Pirilika and her unlikely partner in the bushido-hating Fuji.

Now an unlikely partnership forming the core of your party isn’t new to the series, with staples like Laharl and Etna of the first Disgaea game, and Killia and Seraphina of Disgaea 5 really coming to mind. It’s a good dynamic that’s tried and tested, but I do think this iteration is my favourite out of the games I’ve played. Pirilika’s ditzy and ever-positive outlook is used well throughout the plot to setup jokes, with Fuji falling into the role of the straight man. More characters are added to the mix as the game goes on, but they do a great job in building on what’s established right from the start. Though Fuji takes centre stage in the marketing of the game as its protagonist, it’s fun to see Pirilika really be the guiding force as you progress, with her good will and misunderstandings not quite matching up to the modern-day morals of the Hinomoto Netherworlds.

The game really does find strength in its writing, and I’m not sure why that was such a surprise to me. The series as a whole has never disappointed me with its often-nonsensical antics and over-the-top progression. While it’s the endgame grind that stays in my memory, the writing that gets you there really is something to be appreciated. From start to end you have puns and references fitting with the larger feudal Japanese theme. From character names to maps and locations you really get the impression the writing team, and by extension the localisation team, had a lot of fun. And it doesn’t go unnoticed. I won’t go into too much detail on individual lines, but I will say I did a double-take when I saw a line from Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan video thrown in there. Much like the first time I played Disgaea, I found this such a contrast to the more serious Fire Emblem games I’ve been enjoying again lately. Disgaea 7 doesn’t at all take itself seriously, and yet does so with a straight face acting as though this is just the norm. It’s something so fundamental to the series that I somehow managed to forget prior to coming back now.

The Prologue to Grinding

With 15 chapters of story to play through you have a good chunk of content to get you started before you need to really think about maxing out any stats on your characters. After Disgaea 6, the progression of the story was something I was particularly interested in, with bloated level scaling and inflation of damage numbers being one of my big criticisms of the previous title. I don’t want to be dealing thousands of damage out of the gate; I want to earn it. And Disgaea 7 really met my expectations here.

You start the game in the double digits of damage, and that’s just great. It feels incredibly traditional and though it can feel a little slow at the start, you soon find a sense of momentum as you get back into the swing of things. The start is definitely made a little more cumbersome thanks to some lengthy tutorials (the first one in particular standing out as a colossal 17 page info dump!) but these swiftly clear up after the first few maps.

One area that definitely deserves commendation is the larger design of the maps you’re playing through. Each chapter features five maps that stay within a the confines of the respective Netherworld. Where I’ve found some games can fall into the habit of throwing the same map at you a bunch of times in a row, or fall into the trap of tedium in the name of longevity, Disgaea 7 manages to pull together something really quite enjoyable from start to end. You also see Geo Tiles used well from quite early on, these being colourful panels on the floor that take on the effect of any Geo Crystals placed onto them. My only real complaint in this department is how a number of the boss characters end up being of the same class, resulting in maps that can end up feeling samey despite their otherwise-interesting design. There is a reason for this in terms of the story, so I won’t dwell on it too much, but it’s definitely something that stayed on my mind during the later chapters.

As you progress you’ll come across a few new features to the series to spice up the map, and they’ll have varying impact on you while you’re just working through the story. These are Hell Mode and Jumbification. Hell Mode becomes available quite early on, and is a chargeable meter for any character in possession of an Infernal Treasure. These treasures are unique to certain characters, and with them come both unique trigger conditions and unique effects on activation. All of this is packed together similar to the Revenge system of Disgaea 5 with a meter to track how close you are to being able to pull the trigger. Hell Mode can be incredibly powerful, but I did find myself disappointed to see it limited to a select few. I can understand this to some extent for the story portion, but it feels as though there should have been a way to put these treasures onto generic characters in the postgame. I largely ended up ignoring it with how much I enjoy playing with the generic characters, which is a bit of a shame.

Jumbification is a different story though. Available on every character, it charges using a meter of its own that fills based on the whole team attacking and being attacked. Once full, you can pick any member of your team to Jumbify, supersizing them with a Kaiju-themed scene and placing them at a cardinal side of the board of your choice. This supersizing lasts three turns for you, but is unlimited for AI opponents. Despite this it manages to feel surprisingly balanced. Your actions while Jumbified are limited, but it’s not to say these limits make it bad. On the contrary you become ridiculously strong, fully healing your HP and SP, and granting you access to a 5x5 attack that can be aimed anywhere on the board. As well as this, you can engage in some giant vs giant fighting and take a more powerful swing at another Jumbified character. There’s a lot to enjoy with this one, and there’s some fun strategy in holding onto your Jumbification until you need to heal, or making use of the placement of your Jumbified character to move across the map, with your character reverting to their normal size next to where they were giant, in oppose to where they started.

Moving On and Scaling Back from Disgaea 6

With Disgaea 6 leaving a sour taste in its wake for many long-time fans, it is interesting to see just how many of its systems feature here in one way or another. Starting with what is probably its most egregious sin, I was over the moon to see 17 generic classes available out of the gate, with more than 40 in total to pick between and master. By comparison, Disgaea 6 had just 22. A part of the reason could have been that Disgaea 6 was the first 3D entry to the series, but for what these games cost at launch and just how many classes were cut, it’s not much of a leg to stand on.

Those same 3D graphics return for Disgaea 7 though they do appear to polished up a fair bit. The environments of each world you travel to feel distinct and frankly just look great, this carrying into the hub world where you’ll undoubtedly spend much of your time. Outside of its looks, I really appreciate how compact this hub is. On top of the shortcut radial wheels returning from Disgaea 6, everything is on a single map within a small area. This makes moving from place to place much smoother, and keeps everything within reach. You’re only really slowed down by loading screens, which will vary from platform to platform, and PC to PC.

The Juice Bar is back and serves as a way to pump up your units with stats, experience, and mana you’ve accumulated on your journeys. Notably you cannot use the bar to increase your class or weapon mastery, and perhaps more notable is the fact it no longer costs HL to use. The trade-off is that your stat increases are limited to a billion for HP and SP, and ten million for other stats, per character of course. It’s still an important part of building a strong character, but now it’s more just one piece of a larger puzzle than the core area you should be putting all your attention.

Finally we have what was probably Disgaea 6’s most controversial change in the evolution of auto battling: Demonic Intelligence. Though I came to appreciate the depth of the system, its impact was inevitable in changing the very fabric of the postgame experience. It became a problem of optimisation and figuring out the best way to not play the game. It’s surely interesting, and perhaps something worth an in-depth look of its own, but many saw it as a step too far; it seems NIS was paying attention. Demonic Intelligence does return, but it’s a shadow of what it was in the previous game.

Instead of being able to automate any map, you’re limited to those you’ve already cleared once. That in itself already has serious implications, removing the series staple Item World from the equation completely (we’ll come back to the Item World in more detail later!). On top of this though each automated turn will now use up a new currency, Poltergas, which you earn by clearing maps manually. In essence you still have the same problem of optimised automation, but on a much smaller scale. You need to make sure you clear whatever map you’re farming in one turn, and if you can, you’re rewarded quite handsomely for it. After you’ve cleared a map using DI, you’re given the option to repeat that clear as many times as you want, assuming you’ve got the currency for it, instantly claiming the cumulative reward. This means you can repeat a map up to 300 times once you’ve got your DI down. It’s well-balanced, but I do feel the system’s flexibility is wasted now. I’ve yet to find a situation were I’m not just telling a character to move to a specific place and use a specific attack. There’s no reason for conditions, checks, or any real embellishments. You make one DI to clear one map for grinding, and that’s its use.

There is a new mode on offer that could have offered some redemption for DI, but it ultimately falls on its face for the same reason as stated above. Demonic Shogi sees you controlling set pieces on a map and giving them a set of instructions to be able to clear them. You have a number of stages to clear of increasing difficulty, and I really do like the idea here. Because these are a list of single set maps however, you really just need to pretend you’re controlling the characters and issue direct instructions. There’s nothing complex or varied, and nothing that really requires you use DI to its fullest. This could’ve been fixed in a number of ways. Having multiple maps chained together would’ve been great to see, forcing you to create a single set of instructions that was flexible to adapt. Even giving you a chain of random maps akin to the Item World and grading you based on how far your instructions carried you would’ve been really interesting. The maps that were picked for Demonic Shogi are fun puzzles, but the inclusion of Demonic Intelligence just feels shoehorned in to give it a distinct reason to be in the game.

The Postgame Grind Loop

In terms of building a perfect character, there’s a decent combination of the old and new at play. For series veterans, you’ll be happy to know the Martial Dimension is available pretty early on here. And for those not in the know, the Martial Dimension is a series of five optional maps that are setup to give you a real challenge when you first clear them. For managing this feat however, you get access to some of the best maps to play on repeat to grind experience and mana. Though it’s entirely not necessary, and certainly not optimal, you’re able to start grinding as early as a few chapters into the game. If you want to power level to enable you to rush through the story you’re completely able to, and the Cheat Shop further supports you.

Available from Chapter 2, the Cheat Shop again returns to allow you to fine-tune the Disgaea experience to your liking. Chief among this tuning is the ability to redistribute the percentage of experience, mana, money, weapon mastery, special skill experience, and class proficiency received as you play through the game. The way this works is by giving you a pool of Cheat Points (CP), with each point being a percentage point you’re able to put into each of these rates. At the start of the game you’ll have 600 CP, representing the default 100% rate in each field. You’re also limited to how low each of these can go from the start, with this limit decreasing and eventually disappearing as you progress. What this means is that if you’re just focused on experience for example, you can reduce the rate in which you receive everything else to be able to get more. As you play more, you’ll be able to push this further and further, optimising your grind in a really natural way.

Once you hit the endgame is when things really start to ramp up though. With the story finished you’re free to start planning just how you’re going to get your favourite characters from the pits of mediocrity to taking down the biggest titans the game has to offer. To me it feels as though there’s less to do than usual here, but I will confess I’m not yet finished with the game, so there may be some depth that’s gone a little over my head.

Much of making a unit great can be split between two areas: buffing the unit, and buffing the equipment. Buffing units has been grossly oversimplified in Disgaea 7. Where before you might have had to grind maps to collect essences, play an entire board game to unlock the best of what your unit is capable of (nobody liked Chara World… I just want it back!), here things really aren’t so complex, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. The game feels far more streamlined than my experience with Disgaea 5 Complete, but I do think something was lost in this. Much of the game’s grinding come from two areas: the hospital’s Evil Gacha, and the revamped Item World.

Evil Gacha is a quick one to explain, with you healing at the hospital now giving you Hospital Points in place of static rewards for healing so much. This HP can then be spent on a series of increasingly-expensive gacha machines, each with better and better rewards. At the top end, you’ll be earning stacks of stats that go directly into the Juice Bar. What this ultimately means though is that to cap out those ten million per stat, you’ll need to be spending a lot of time standing in front of an NPC mashing the A button.

The Item World is at least a bit more involved, and the revamps here are actually mostly positive. Instead of an endless stream of random levels as in previous games, the Item World is now broken down into chunks based on your item’s rarity, giving you either 10, 20, or 30 floors before facing down a powerful boss character. When you reach the end, the item can then be reincarnated to become stronger while maintaining some of the strength it’s already gained. These more bitesized excursions feel much more manageable to me than just jumping into an indefinite number of floors until I felt like stopping. On top of buffing your weapons there are also a few quirks in the Item World that’ll contribute to your larger stat development, but with these being at the very end of the endgame I’ll leave them somewhat vague.

What amuses me about all this grinding is that, more than ever, it really isn’t necessary if all you want to do is beat the game. Even if you want to get all achievements, it’s actually not really required you spend hours upon hours buffing weapons and pumping stats. You’ll need to get to a certain baseline sure, but already fans have found ways to take down even the toughest enemies with some really cool and unique strategies. The community is one really big part of Disgaea as a series, and while I do think it’s something to be celebrated, I feel like it’s important to bring up that such a community almost seems like a requirement for a common player to get the most out of the game. As a series it could certainly do better in signposting players towards means of growth instead of just giving them a wall upon completing the story and expecting them to climb over it one way or another. The occasional item or skill having an awkward translation from time to time certainly doesn’t help either, though it does seem the localisation team at NISA have been updating the game since launch to fix these.

A £100 Game?

It’s about now that it’s probably worth mentioning the DLC available to buy at launch. This has become something of a series staple, and it’s not a positive one; if you’re a PC player you might not even be aware of it with the PC release usually being a “Complete” package. On offer is seven sets of three-map DLC that each offer you three characters to add to your forces from previous titles, priced at £6.69 apiece. There’s also an art book, cosmetic set, and special weapons at varying prices, but they’re not quite as important. I actually sold my special weapons by accident, doh!

Now the idea of paying an additional £45 on top of a full-price £55 game is already bad enough, but it only gets worse when you learn these DLC characters contain skills that’ll significantly speed up your grind. It’s a degree of pay to win that’s really unfortunate especially in a game that has an online arena mode to fight other peoples’ AI-controlled teams. I will clarify that you don’t need the DLC to beat the game, or get all achievements, by any stretch. Regardless, having this amount of additional content at launch and locking some fantastic skills behind it just doesn’t sit right with me. It gets worse mind. If £45 of launch day DLC wasn’t bad enough, you also have a delightful assortment of microtransactions to choose from, this giving your experience, mana, and HL gains a x2, x5, or x10 multiplier on top of whatever skills you have active in-game. These were added first in the Complete+ release of Disgaea 4, and were later seen in Disgaea 6, and I will make my stance on them clear again: use Cheat Engine if you really want to speed things up. Don’t support this. This is a £100 game if you’re buying what would have parity with the “Complete” releases; this shouldn’t continue, and NIS should be called out for it.

Closing Thoughts

When all is said and done, is Disgaea 7 worth your time? Undoubtedly. This is a fantastic entry to the series and one I can really recommend to any fan of Tactical RPG games, or just folks who enjoy a fun and lighthearted story to follow. Having said that, can I recommend you buying it now? If you’re new to the series, absolutely not; and that’s not to say it’s particularly unfriendly to newcomers. It’s a great game to start with, but where it finds fault is in its complete lack of value when compared to older titles like Disgaea 5 Complete. If you happen to be a series veteran and wanted to check in to see if things were looking up after Disgaea 6, you’ll have a blast. Otherwise, check out the cheaper entries to the series and wait for a sale. It’s a good game, but I feel gross for having supported a company who feel £45 of launch day DLC and microtransactions are reasonable for a £55 game. Do better NIS.