All good things have to start somewhere. For me, I’ll have this site be the start of a long outstanding desire to write reviews about the games I play.
All that is to say, I’m going to write some of my thoughts here regarding the most recent game I’ve played, being Disgaea 7.
A little history on my experience with the Disgaea series. I’m not a veteran, my first entry was Disgaea 5 on the Switch. I downloaded that game after having played too much Fire Emblem, looking for something to scratch that itch on the Switch. Of course it’s also worth noting that I got that game during a somewhat dry spell between major releases on the Switch which caused me to try out a lot of other AA and Indie games that were on the console because I wanted to be playing this cool new console as much as possible.
That being said, much like many of the other games I tried out during that time period I bounced off Disgaea 5. Combat felt odd compared to Fire Emblem. Like “why do I need to press execute to attack” kind of questions. Then there was strange terminology being used, I still don’t know why they called the story scenes “Demo’s”, but it was super confusing the first few times I’d enter a stage and the game would ask me to “Skip Demo”.
So I didn’t play much, and moved on to other games. And then one day I was bored and browsing through my library and saw Disgaea 5. I gave it another shot, and this time I was hooked. See once you get into the groove, the oddities actually start to make some sense. Like the execute function is there because you can move every one of your units into place and queue up actions for them before pressing it to make one mega combo. And if I understand the way the game works correctly, it’s actually beneficial to do so because you can increase your combo up to double the default damage numbers by having every unit act in a row.
And then I found out that the game is made in a way that’s meant to be broken. Lets just say that I spent quite a lot of time grinding to make my characters as OP as possible whenever possible during Disgaea 5. And then, I’d just go to the cheat shop and up the difficulty to compensate. It’s this weird dichotomy that the series has, where it wants you to try and break it because eventually the game will stop pulling it’s punches.
Anyways, this isn’t a Disgaea 5 review, but that was my start with the series. After Disgaea 5 I ended up playing 4 on the PS Vita, which I had a similar bounce off before going back and loving it. I played Disgaea 1 Complete when it came to Switch, but never beat it. I got pretty far if I remember correctly, but the game was hard. And I played Disgaea 6 when it came out as well. Day 1 purchase, wish I hadn’t got it on the switch because of the performance issues but I had a lot of fun with it anyways. It’s worth noting though that Disgaea 6 did leave a bit of a weird taste in my mouth. The auto battle made it so near the end I was literally not even playing the game. I was just pressing auto battle over and over on whatever stages I needed to grind. And then even the story stages I would auto battle cause who cares at that point.
So I didn’t really have Disgaea 7 on my radar. It came out around a month ago and I wasn’t really interested. On a whim I picked it up last week because I looked at the steam reviews and saw largely positive things. And I’m happy to say that I personally share the sentiments of those Steam reviewers.
It’s hard to decide where to start when writing about this game. I suppose I can start here.
Graphics
Graphically the game looks fantastic. Personally I never had a huge issue with the switch to 3D, but it’s worth noting that it was and still is contentious. I’ll agree with some that if nothing else the HD pixel art of Disgaea 5 is gorgeous, and will probably stand the test of time longer than any 3D graphics they can pull out, but to me the style they’ve gone with makes it not super noticeable anyways. I was reading discussion about the pixel art vs 3D graphics a few days ago and it’s worth noting that it takes a huge load off development time to go with 3D, since the sprite work for custom animations required a lot of time.
Performance
I’m happy to say that the game runs fairly consistently well on my high end gaming PC. In all seriousness though, I’ve also got a Steam Deck which I’ve played a bit on, and I can say that the game runs fantastic on that as well. Every once and a while in the hub world I notice a small frame drop, but I don’t believe I’ve had anything of the sort happen in battles. I can’t speak to the Switch port however, but I’d be wary of it if Disgaea 6 is anything to go off of.
Story
It’s nothing to write home about, and that’s par for the course with this series I’d say. The characters are charming for the most part, I personally wasn’t a huge fan of Pirilika’s tendency to get phrases wrong, but I could be in the minority there.
Music
I probably can’t say that every track is a banger, but I will say that a surprising amount of the music from this game gets stuck in my head. The Jumbification song in particular is a notable stand out, for me at least. In that vein I will say that I wish it didn’t play during boss fights though, since some of those songs were also incredible.
Gameplay
This is the real meat and potatoes of a Disgaea game. I feel like the other sections could all be mediocre and if the gameplay is great people would still buy the games.
I’m happy to say that this game feels like a return to form for the series. 6 went off the rails a bit, and this game has course corrected back while keeping some of the better parts 6 introduced. Gone are the days of unlimited Auto Battle. Now auto battle is introduced about halfway through the story, and uses a new currency “poltergas”. This can be accumulated 1 to 1 by completing stages. In addition you can collect it in stacks of 10 and 30 from certain quests from the quest shop. I’m a fan of this change for the most part, it made late game grinding a bit less tedious at times, but it doesn’t make the game feel like the last time I played Fire Emblem Heroes. That is to say, the game doesn’t just auto play itself forever with no limits anymore. Also of note, auto battle is not available in Item Worlds.
Likewise, the inflated numbers of Disgaea 6 are gone, back to the normal numbers of the rest of the series. I’m a bit indifferent on this, but I probably lean more towards smaller numbers if I had to pick a side.
The Juice Bar is back, you largely will get juice from the Evil Gatcha. That in turn is a new mechanic linked to the hospital. Whenever you’re healed in the base you get RP equal to the amount of HP and SP that was recovered. You can use that to pull on the evil gatcha. It’s a fun mechanic during the main game, it gets a little tedious during the post game though (if only they allowed us to pull 1000 or 10,000 times at once).
I’d say the game feels actually very well balanced throughout the main story. I used all of the uniques to varying degrees, and a few generics as well. There wasn’t really any “spikes” in difficulty until the post game, which is to be expected. I kind of liked going through the game with these characters and actually getting to use them as they’re designed.
Postgame Grind
Now as for the post game, you can kind of break it up into a few sections. For me it started with grinding to get all classes to max on one character. Once that was done I was able to reincarnate to get close to 10,000,000 in all stats but HP and SP. Then you get to do a fun dance where you repeatedly reduce that characters HP and SP to 1 so you can use the hospital to restore them, then pull the max level Evil Gatcha over and over again to get 10,000,000 from the juice bar for each of those stats, bringing you to around 20,000,000. This is the soft cap for all characters.
Now after the first time through I found the best thing to do was to grind out the juice bar first for every subsequent character, to get to 10 mil, then grinding in carnage matrialgahara 5 to max the classes. Either way that whole process takes a chunk of time.
Once you’ve done that on 10 characters you’re kind of able to fight carnage Ba’al, and everything weaker should be doable as well.
And once you’ve done all that you unlock the ability to gain more stats by killing Item Gods. If you do that at it’s most efficient you get about 100,000 per kill, which is very slow. At this point I’ve been trying to do that on one character when I feel like it and I’m around 1.5 mil higher than base stats.
In addition you can grind Items to improve them, and then there’s duping and the like, so it’s feasible to get incredible gear on all of your characters.
But to be honest there’s not really a higher difficulty fight than Carnage Ba’al in the game, so the grind feels a bit pointless, unless you want to get into
Online Play
I really didn’t dip my toes into this. But it’s worth pointing out that for some, online play could be a worthwhile endgame to grind for after hitting the base stat caps.
DLC
I very nearly forgot to add this section in. I haven’t interacted with any of the DLC, but the pricing model is obscene. The price of the game nearly doubles if you get all of the DLC included.
Of note though, why get these characters? The base game gives you 5 unique characters to play with, and the post game adds on 3 additional unique characters (1 of which is kind of a half unique). My point being your party is limited to 10 members on the field, and grinding for the post game is still fairly arduous with the fastest method taking around an hour per character in my experience. I suppose you could get the DLC to use during the main story, and add 5 additional uniques to your party. Personally I think the best reason to get the DLC is because of the Evilities that many of them have. For example, Pleinair has an Evility which allows you to gain extracts when defeating enemies. And the % you get is higher than that which you get from an evility that takes 300 battles to unlock without DLC. Zed has an evility which gives an additional 2% damage per reincarnation (which in the endgame is easy to max out at 50 reincarnations. Additionally he has another evility that gives 1% stat bonus per reincarnation, meaning you can effectively hit 40mil stats on your characters if you just pay 10 dollars. Valvatorez can effectively cut the grinding time for Class exp down to a fraction of what it would normally be with his Prinny Instructor evility. Mao gives an insane bonus to Item reincarnation when leading the reincarnation squad, adding 100LP per.
I’m sure there’s more worth pointing out, but the point I’m making is this. The DLC is a money grab that provides better options than those available in the base game. Even just writing those bonuses out made me want to drop 20-30 bucks to buy just a few of the packs because of the insane bonuses they provide. Like seriously, doubling stats and doubling effective damage on top of that is an insane boost, and would make the endgame grind significantly more trivial to complete.
All that being said, the DLC definitely adds to the game, but I’d rather buy it on sale with the insane price tag attached to it.
Conclusion
This is a great new entry in the Disgaea Series. If you enjoyed 5 and didn’t care for 6 I’d say give this one a chance. If you’re a fan of games like Hyrule Warriors or OSRS you might also have a crippling addiction to watching numbers go up, and I’d say you might also enjoy this game series. Of course it’s worth pointing out that this series is weird. I probably wouldn’t recommend the game to someone that likes Fire Emblem or other similar games unless they also like crazy numbers, because at the end of the day this game does end up playing less tactically and more “hit them hard before they hit me harder back”. There’s a lot to like here, give the game a shot if anything I mentioned sounds cool to you!
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