Welcome Back, Disgaea.
As a longtime fan of the Disgaea series, I took no pleasure in reviewing the previous title, Disgaea 6. I scored it a 5 out of 10 and said, “While there is some semblance of enjoyment to be had here for those who like to see numbers go up, to see a series I’ve adored and followed for nearly two decades take inspiration from garbage mobile games in the spirit of greed and becoming bastardized as a shell of its former self, breaks my heart.”
In fact, it soured me on the series so much that I did not particularly care enough to play Disgaea 7 when it first released. Some time has passed since its release and now it’s gotten a full “Complete” treatment which includes various improvements alongside all the DLC. Having seen some positive buzz around the newest title and how it addresses the various faults of 6, I decided to give it a shot, hoping for the best.
It’s been over 4 years since I’ve played a Disgaea game, but it really felt like riding a bike and things just clicked into place quickly.
MSRP: $69.99
Platforms: NSW2
Played: 60~ hours
Pirilika, a self-proclaimed Hinomoto otaku, arrives in the place she’d dreamed of visiting since she was a child. Unfortunately, the Hinomoto she admired and read about all this time has become unrecognizable with a corrupt government running the place into the ground. She meets a powerful warrior named Fuji and hires him to be her bodyguard while she strikes out to restore Hinomoto back to its former glory.
As is often the case, the story presented in Disgaea 7 isn’t really anything particularly interesting. At the very least, it doesn’t take itself seriously and the characters themselves are pretty fun for the most part. Pirilika was especially charming with her penchant for coming up with tragic backstories for her enemies so she can empathize with them. The DLC that includes the various characters from the previous entries is always nice to have but once again, I would’ve liked to have the DLC event maps have proper voice over.
Adding some proper VOs to these events would’ve made the DLC more worthwhile.
As for the various gameplay elements of Disgaea 7, this is clearly where the meat is and boy is there a lot of it. If I were to sit here listing and explaining every mechanic, I would be here all day and night so I’ll instead focus on a few important ones.
First is the new mechanic introduced for D7, “Jumbification”. Just as the name implies, this is a mechanic where after filling up a Rage meter, a character can turn Jumbo sized and unleash attacks with huge AoEs. Normal attacks become 5×5 grids of destruction and their stats are increased significantly along with additional properties which usually affect the whole map. It’s a good way to turn the tides of battle in otherwise hopeless situations but it’s important to remember that the enemy can do this as well. While it looks quite impressive, the limitations of the mode not allowing for any skills and the fact that enemies will usually trigger their own Jumbification right after I did made its use quite limited for the most part.
I see no other gods other than myself here.
The other mechanic is the dreaded Auto-Battle. In D6, I was able to program my units to have them battle it out on their own and continuously repeat the same map over and over again. Given I could do this infinitely without any limitation, the game was built around using this with its inflated stats/levels and this got to the point where the most efficient way to play D6 was to not play it at all and just leave it on while it plays itself.
Thankfully, D7 has addressed this in two very clever ways. First, while auto-battle exists, it requires a finite resource to trigger. The resource could be gained either by finishing quests or by manually completing a map. Also, after completing the first instance of auto-battle, I could choose to skip as many of the map completion as long as I had the resources right then and there, preventing the need to leave the system on while it went through the motions. Those changes along with the fact the stats/levels didn’t require nearly as much straight grinding, made auto-battle a boon to the game without it feeling too overpowered or necessary to be efficient.
There’s also a lot of classes to master and the animation work for some of the animation was quite well done.
As for the technical side, D7 runs very well on the Switch 2 and while there were some instances of brief slowdowns, it ran perfectly fine for the most part and looked quite sharp doing it. During my 60~ hour playthrough of the game, I did end up crashing a few times, navigating between various menus quickly but thanks to auto-save, I thankfully did not lose much progress.
While I still prefer the 2D sprites, the 3D animation work has improved.
As the follow up to the worst game in this long running series, D7 had a lot of work cut out for it. Thankfully, the team at NIS was up to the task and addressed most of the issues, putting together a welcome package to remind me why I loved the series in the first place. While there are still some improvements to be made, I’m more than happy to report this is certainly a much needed course correction for the series at large.
Fun Tidbit: D7 Complete also includes various balance updates and bug fixes which go beyond just including all the DLC. So just getting regular D7 with all the DLC will not be the same experience. This is unfortunate and I think these changes should be added to the original game as a free patch.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
