A few years ago, Nippon Ichi produced Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny, a new entry in the long-running series that aimed to shake up series conventions by introducing auto-battling and transitioning to a 3D art style. Not all the changes it brought were positively received, but fortunately, the game sold well enough to not only keep the lights on at the company but to also justify the development of a proper successor to address those criticisms.
Director Shunsuke Minowa said that one of the team's main goals with Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless was to go with a “back to basics” approach, and that was absolutely the right call. Disgaea 7 feels like the ultimate distillation of the Disgaea experience, successfully merging the innovations of 6 with many of the traditions of earlier games, all while throwing in some worthwhile new ideas of its own. It’s an incredibly compelling new entry, and we can’t recommend it enough to any strategy RPG fans out there.
Disgaea 7 is set around the same time as Disgaea 4 and takes place in a cluster of Netherworlds called Hinomoto that’s inspired by Edo period Japan . The story kicks off with Pirilika, a rich, spoiled otaku who comes to Hinomoto to experience its culture, notably its famed Bushido code. To her dismay, Hinomoto has since lost its Bushido due to being taken over by the evil shogun Demmodore Opener and his magistrates. She’s quickly joined by a lazy, miserly samurai named Fuji, who bonds with a magical sword she had in her bag that just so happens to be one of the legendary Seven Founding Weapon, and the two set out to collect the other Founding Weapons, kill the magistrates, unseat the shogun, and restore Bushido to Hinomoto.
In keeping with series tradition, the story is about as silly as it gets, packed with all kinds of jokes and goofiness to keep a generally lighthearted atmosphere. Fuji, for example, is allergic to any kind of friendship or empathy, which causes him to cough up blood every time someone thanks him for helping or expresses any kind of affection. He also has a daughter (or, at least a girl who thinks she’s his daughter…) who chronically blows up buildings because he won’t tell her that he loves her. As our leading duo tours the worlds of Hinomoto, they cross swords with all manner of larger-than-life personalities and while some of the jokes get played out a bit, it’s hard not to be enamored with the tone of Disgaea 7. Stuff like hearing a Prinny (an idiot penguin that explodes when it trips) cheerfully exclaims “your life is mine, dood!” as it charges into battle is simply charming in a way that only Disgaea can capture.
While Disgaea is ostensibly a traditional turn-based SRPG, there are really two interrelated levels to how you play Disgaea 7—the gameplay and the meta gameplay—so we’ll start by describing the gameplay. Here, things are simple to grasp and you’re focused on directing a handful of units through turn-based battles focused on routing the enemy team while trying not to get outplayed yourself. You have to take typical elemental and stat strengths or weaknesses into account while deciding matchups, terrain also plays a big role in the sense that stages are built with varied elevation and will often have special Geo Panel floors that alter the stats of any unit that acts while standing on them. It can be a little tedious to direct a team of a dozen characters—individually selecting everyone’s movements and actions to take—but battles are satisfying to engage in and offer ample rewards.
There are over forty classes to experiment with in Disgaea 7, giving you near-bottomless depth to the teams you can build. Old standbys like the Gunner and Cleric are back once again, while new ones like the Maiko and the Zombie Maiden bring some interesting new ideas to the table. The Maiko, for example, is especially effective against male enemies, while the Zombie Maiden powers up every time another team member dies in battle. You’ll have no trouble finding interesting applications for each class’s nuances, while the relatively low difficulty of the story missions ensures that you’re given plenty of leeway in the first few dozen hours to test out compositions and see what playstyles click with you.
It wouldn’t be a proper Disgaea entry without some goofy new idea to change things up, so it doesn’t take long before your team is introduced to the concept of Jumbification. As your team takes damage a power gauge will gradually fill, and once it hits a certain threshold, you can have any character Jumbify themselves to turn into a 200-foot-tall monstrosity that can't even fit on the battlefield. Jumbified characters can attack any units on the field with area-of-effect attacks that hit about as hard as you’d expect from a Kaiju, and each character brings with them a unique Jumbility that casts a passive effect which affects all units on the field, such as giving everyone an HP regen effect or causing everyone to explode when thrown.
Enemies can Jumbify, too, which adds an interesting additional layer to the underlying strategy and timing for when you want to use the mechanic. Characters can only stay big for three turns, and if you’re caught without your own nuclear deterrent to retaliate against a newly Jumbified enemy, your entire team can be annihilated in one turn. On the other hand, Jumbifying can be a ridiculously easy “I win” button if you manage to catch the enemy off guard with it, leading to a very delicate balance of power that always looms in the background over all the usual skirmishes taking place in battles.
All this is well and good, but now let’s get into that meta-gameplay. Much like its predecessors, Disgaea 7 gradually reveals to you that it’s not all about grid-based battles. Hour after hour, the game continues to dole out dizzying amounts of additional mechanics and systems that all give you more tools for building your team, giving you absurdly fine-grained levels of control over every imaginable facet of a character’s stats. All this is in service of the endgame—which the developers claim takes about 400 hours to clear—as you work to build an insanely optimized team that can take on the immense challenges that lie in waiting for you.
To give you an idea of the depth here, not only can characters each be equipped with a vast array of equipment that alters their stats and builds, but each individual piece can be min-maxed through something called the Item World. Here, you can send your team into the item itself to explore dozens of floors of randomized enemy encounters, each one being harder than the last and raising the item’s level more if you can manage to prevail. Eventually, you come across Innocents, small creatures that live inside of every item and affect its stats in myriad ways. You can breed, fuse, and fight these Innocents, all to get their stats even higher. This can further boost the stats on the items they come on, which then boosts the stats of the characters you equip them on. Then, once you finally max out an item, you can choose to reincarnate it to start the whole process over again, but with better stats to begin with this time.
Suffice it to say, the story of Disgaea 7—which takes about thirty or so hours to clear—feels like the tutorial for the substantially longer and richer endgame grind. And while this endgame will always still have you engaging in combat in the same way you did when you started the story, more of your time will increasingly be dedicated to comparing stats and abilities between items, balancing your team's skill load-outs, and testing different class and sub-class compositions on different team members. If you’re not the kind of person who really enjoys getting into the weeds like this, then we can comfortably say that Disgaea 7 is not for you; this is the epitome of an SRPG that encourages (and eventually requires) min-maxing at virtually every imaginable turn.
To help make the grind a little more manageable, Demonic Intelligence has returned from Disgaea 6 to allow auto-battling to take the wheel, though it’s been reined in a bit. You now need to spend a consumable resource called Poltergas to have your team run itself, and this can only be done on stages that you have already managed to clear manually. Some may be a bit miffed that you can’t just set it and forget it like in Disgaea 6, but the flipside is that auto-battling feels like a useful tool and not a crutch. With it being relegated to a more optional design, the endgame grind isn’t built to be nearly as monotonous and repetitive as it was in Disgaea 6, because the developers are assuming that an actual player will be at the controls for most of it.
Auto-battling isn’t just used for grinding anymore—it’s a critical component of Disgaea’s first competitive online multiplayer mode. Here, you carefully construct a self-sufficient auto team and then can choose to test its might against other players’ teams that are at a close rank to you. Rankings reset each season and with each refresh come new stages with new rules, necessitating that you tweak your team and create whole new ones to adapt to the changes. Though it does feel kind of weird that you can’t just directly play head-to-head with others in live games, this mode nonetheless feels like a good first step for online multiplayer for Disgaea, particularly in how it rounds out the endgame offering. If you’re part of the small, incredibly dedicated group that will manage to completely clear the endgame, this ranked mode will offer a virtually limitless series of challenges as you engage in the meta and struggle to the top of the leaderboards.
Visually, Disgaea 7 sticks to the 3D art style that saw its debut in Disgaea 6, and while this will no doubt still bother some fans that were fonder of the rich spritework of the earlier games, its application here feels more confident than before. Character models have been improved and animations for the more bombastic attacks are more over the top than ever before, but most importantly, performance is at an entirely acceptable level this time around. If you play on the Graphics mode, there are some frame drops here and there, but nothing like its messy equivalent in Disgaea 6, while Performance mode sticks to a smooth 60 FPS with a slightly softer resolution. It’s really a night and day difference from before, and we’re glad to see that the new art style is given a proper chance to shine here.
Conclusion
Disgaea 7 offers up yet another enjoyable entry in the long-running series, offering up a more refined take on the famously in-depth gameplay systems. New mechanics such as Jumbification add some interesting wrinkles to the SRPG battles, while new modes like competitive ranked online bring even more playability to a game that’ll take you hundreds of hours to see to completion. Perhaps best of all, Disgaea 7 is very newcomer-friendly, though we will add that the very deliberate and measured approach to min-maxing isn’t for everyone. Whether you’re looking for an excellent new RPG to sink a lot of time into or you’ve been a fan of Disgaea since the PS2 days, Disgaea 7 is a worthwhile entry that we’d recommend you pick up when you can.
Comments 36
So difficult to be there day-one for this when I have all the previous entries on Switch I haven't played through yet.
Oh that's great news! Disgaea 6 was a technical mess on Switch! Bought it day one and had either to play with some severe slow downs, or very blurry graphics. I gave up on the game and sold it few weeks later. It was the first Disgaea game that I didn't complete and with which I didn't spend 100+ hours. Will definitely give Disgaea 7 a shot!
Awesome but we still need Disgaea 2 & 3 on Switch. Disgaea 1, 4-6 were all fantastic.
Does the jumbification slow down battles too much? I'd hate to have a grinding flow halted by big fancy HP sponges.
That being said, the demo is very promising, the English voice-acting is more fun than ever (I've always turned it to JP, but might stick with the English this time), and the fact that every class is here is awesome. Not to mention the new wrinkles to item reincarnation...
I'm just thankful the auto-battling isn't as major a part of the game. There was no point to play D6, since it would just slow down your progress lol
I got a great feeling based on the demo that it'd be a series best, far more polished and focused than 6
Really looking forward to the full game
“Perhaps best of all, Disgaea 7 is very newcomer-friendly”
“Might be too technical or complicated for newcomers”
🧐
Love SRPGs, but this series just never clicked with me.
Happy that it is running so well and about it's high score for the fans anyways
@Magician Bruh! Where is your commitment? It's for precisely that reason that this is a must-buy for me 🙃
Fine. Okay. I'll just be broke this year. That's okay. I'll be getting this day 1. MASSIVE step up from 6 just from the demo alone. Thanks for the review!
@gcunit You know the tale, my friend. Too many games, not enough time to play them all.
The performance is better than with Disgaea 6 (always stutters) but I would not call D7 smooth.
Disgaea 5, 1 Complete and 4 are smooth, D7 is better than 6, but you still need to make the choice between sharp but very stuttery performance (poor frametimes) or more fuzzy but stable performance.
Unless the reviewer has some patched version, the early copy I got has the performance I mentioned (because local stores don’t care about release dates and already sell it here, they only watch out with Nintendo made releases)
Just like with the available demo.
The game itself is fun though, not the top 3 Disgaea, but miles ahead of D6.
But is it better than the best, Phantom Brave?
It may be a stupid question, but do I need to play the previous games in the series to play this one? Or is it like Final Fantasy? Universe,monster,items. I really want to play Disgaea.
@PinderSchloss We've just added some extra clarification to the con there. Good spot!
I got Disgaea 5 at release because I always liked the look of this series and there wasn't a ton available on Switch at the time, but I very quickly ran into the issue where I couldn't really figure out how to get better at the game because of just how much stats there were to keep track of. Like if I lost a battle I couldn't even figure out what I should do to improve except "raise character levels".
It's nice to hear that the campaign is relatively easy but I'm worried that in the postgame I will once again look at each character's eight tabs of stats/skills/abilities and wonder what would be the the smart thing to improve next.
@AlanaHagues Much better, thanks! : )
I was paying extra attention to that aspect because the previous game was so complicated : )
Cool I will eventually get this. (Still need to get 4 and 5 on the Switch. I should have bought 5 when I saw it at a local game store.)
I didn't play the demo so I was unaware of how well this could have turned out. Glad it's a great game!
@JokerCK You can start with any Disgaea game. So you can start with 7 if you want.
Hm... I dunno. Feels like the series has been sliding downhill since D4. Maybe I'll pick it up on a sale? Demo certainly made it seem more playable than D6, but I can't exactly say anything about it hooked me.
The idea of an "auto-battler" built in seems really interesting. I really wish this didn't release in such a busy window, I don't think I'm going to have time to invest in it for at least 3 months
@CactuarDavid
I think the best way to handle this aspect of some JRPGs is to accept that for the most part, it's actually not that important, and by the time it is important ... you'll likely get it, or at least be motivated to invest the time. There is a generally rule in system complex JRPGs that you can beat the game with minimal optimization just by leveling up.
Then there will be "side missions" and most of the end game, that is going to require you do some minimal optimization to get the best out of your characters. It's not until phase 3, the "world bosses" and the optional stuff in the end game that you need to fully understand the system, considering not just your own abilities but enemies weaknesses and full equipment optimization.
It can be really jarring for min/max minded people, but in all honesty the best way to enjoy the game is to NOT min/max until you HAVE to min/max, rather then look at it as something you have to do from day 1 with your first set of characters. I mean there really isn't a point in min/maxing a dude you're only going to have in your party until they unlock an upgraded class, after all, and the game is set up like that (with you constantly changing who is in your party) so that it's very forgiving on previous "mistakes" in how you built your team. By the time you realize there was something you forget to consider, it's time to make a new character anyways.
@Magician
The game are, by design, not connected and they basically all tell the same cliché story using the same cliché anime stereotypes over and over, so it doesn't really matter when you start and it's best to give yourself a bit of time between entries. This isn't a negative, it's just the artistic choice to find it's humor though satire and meta-commentary of popular culture.
I don't know why because I like these types of games, but I have 5 but could never come close to finishing it before getting bored. It's really weird, I want to continue playing these games, but...for some reason I just lose interest after a while.
@Drac_Mazoku Yeah I'm still not happy with the switch from the lovely HD 2D sprites to 3D but these do look a lot better than D6 did so I'll tolerate it.
As a whole it looks like a great return to form.
It's great the gameplay and performance are better! Yet the big reason I hesitate is because of the writing lately in the games. I honestly didn't mind the gameplay of 5 and 6 too much since I just stick to the main story.
5 and 6 both suffered from an amount of predictability and too much structure. Arcs felt very obvious from the outset since the arctypes felt less like parody anymore and more just settling into them. The chapter to chapter pattern especially in 5 felt a bit boring, characters taking turns to be introduced then chapters taking turns to tiptoe through their growth.
Maybe this was a series wide issue, or maybe diminishing returns. 2 and 4 were i thoight some bigger highlights. Maybe I'm off base too. Anyone have a sense of how D7's story holds up in comparison to the series? Or were 5 and 6 just as good as the rest and I've oversaturated myself on those outings?
@Jappio 5 had a weak story IMO and 6 is fairly well known as being the low point in the series.
But while we don't know A LOT about D7's story the developers have stated they are trying to return to form after D6's failure.
So at the very least there was a deliberate effort by the devs to avoid the mistakes of 6.
Disgaea 3 is my highlight of this series. Definitely too grindy for my taste, but the story and over the top characters made up for it.
Glad they worked harder on it than they did 6, as I do love the franchise. That said I still need to finish 5 and then spend insane crazy amounts of hours post game so I've got awhile before I think about getting this.
@Jappio As far as the writing goes, it kind of feels like 3 was around when the writing took a huge hit in favor of tired gags. 4 and 5 had decent stories, but were often held back by the same issues: one note characters with a gag being their only personality.
@Metazoxan Yeah, hoping that at least some renewed intent in the story will help!
@SpoonySpoons Yeah, 3 def felt like a shift in that way. I didn't get the same feeling from 4, personally, but it perhaps was still in that same vane and just saved by a better cohesion of elements. Why I see it as 5 (or rather, maybe DD2) as the start of the decline. 3 felt really heavy in the gag department, but it felt at least passionate about going all in on that at least. 5 and 6 just kind of stradled the line not really going either way enough between comedy and story u_u
Thanks everyone for the thoughts on it so far. Figured worth a shot to ask about the story since it had been out in Japan for awhile.
While I'm at it, anyone know if the skits/base conversations are now voiced in the dub?
Seems to have reached the heights of no.4 according to the review. Dangnamit I'm going to have to download if off the wishlist then and apologise to ma wallet.
(I liked 1 & 4 but didn't complete 5)
Thanks for the review.
This new Disgaea looks great! Out of all the Disgaea games, the first one on PS2 will always have a special place for me! I went to a local store that had plenty of imported games and new released PAL games about a week in advance. I first went for an imported Naruto game thinking that it had ENG sub, but it didn't. Went back to the store and was allowed to exchange the game with another one. Then I saw this Disgaea, it was brand new, I knew nothing about it, and they had just received it, once again in advance. I was intrigued by its cover and decided to go for it. And man, was I on for quite a trip! First game ever that I played for 300+ hours! The art style, the humour, the gameplay, it was just magical! And god, the game's trailer is gold too with an amazing Tsunami Bomb song!
@CactuarDavid there is a basic attk stat, and overall defense stat. Fist users want atk/spd increased in pretty equal quantities to boost damage dealt, where's gun users want hit. Def for physical dmg reduction, res for elemental. That's the main crux of it, but like @headpirate said, it's often more fun to play until you get stuck, then try to improve from there, at least until you're at post game and really trying to one shot things etc!
From the demo to the trailers it's fine. It's still easy to beat the first two chapters which is fine but was still confusing I haven't restarted 4 or 5 in a way to check but playing 2 & 3 are more in my mind besides the odd parts of 5 & 6.
The characters are fine, better than I expected as was unclear during the trailers but more clear in game. The combat is what it is.
I haven't noticed too much other than he hell feature from 5 returning but for one specific character (at least so far whatever the other major enemies/weapons offer in gameplay then just story who knows).
No auto attacking from 6 in 7? For grinding? The level scale was odd in 6 but I didn't hate it, quests 5 & 6 were fine, rewards for specific things in 6 were fine, didn't use many of the new features that much really.
The new features weren't as awkward as Pikmin 4 controls/quality of life features was and bothered me the entire game but still the new features were so good still.
The review confirms other details at least.
I feel like my wishlist is worse than my backlog.
Sounds awesome. I’ve only really ever spent heaps of time with the first game, and dabbled in a couple of others. The first game holds a special place in my heart ❤️ and I’m looking forward to getting this when it releases here tomorrow in physical format!
bought the 1st one played maybe 45mins of it, just cant get into these. might head back after i finish xenoblade series and SMT5
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