A new low.

As someone who has followed the Disgaea series since the very beginning, I eagerly anticipate new entries and the wait for Disgaea 6 has been especially long as it has been six years since the last title was released.

I remember back when I reviewed Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance, even though I enjoyed the game overall, I noted that there were some elements like the way the post game and DLC was handled which worried me as a possible slippery slope for things to come. Having completed Disgaea 6, I find that many of my fears were realized as not only is Disgaea 6 easily the weakest title in the long running series, it has taken too many influences from predatory mobile games and is in danger of becoming another footnote in the long list of game design choices that have gone on to kill beloved franchises.

The goofy character interactions are usually one of Disagea’s strong points but it’s severely lacking here.

MSRP: $59.99
Platform: Switch exclusive.
Length: 30~ hours for main campaign, 100+ for post game content

After the loss of someone important to him, Zed harnesses the power of “Super Reincarnation” which allows him to continue to revive time and time again, getting stronger in the process. With a single minded focus to become stronger to fulfil his goal, Zed encounters a cast of characters that are also bent on revenge and goes after the greatest threat to all dimensions, the “God of Destruction”.

While the initial setup felt interesting enough as it was a way to incorporate the reincarnation mechanic built into the game with the story but all in all, the pacing of the story felt slow and drawn out. This was mostly due to the way the narrative was structured as it begins as a series of flashbacks told from different perspectives for entirely too long and they constantly repeat the same themes and ideas over and over again. The characters do not fare any better as they ranged from at best, tolerable and at worst, insufferably obnoxious. Zed himself is boring due to his single minded desire to get stronger and others like Melodia who breaks out into song constantly made me want to turn off the volume on my TV. Things improve somewhat with some additional character development throughout the course of the adventure but not by much and I felt zero attachment to even a single character in the whole game which is pretty damning given that this is an RPG.

The dramatic flair for battling the almighty “God of Destruction” was crushed under the fact that I was fighting the same boss over a dozen times with barely any differences along with the trope of “you beat the boss but actually, you lost” happening more times than I care to remember.

The post game certainly offered more challenges and various ways to get strong enough to overcome them but there weren’t any story implications and despite reaching levels and stats, the likes of which I’ve never attained in any other video game, it felt like an empty accomplishment, not having anything meaning to do with all the strength.

If you like big numbers, this is the game for you.

Even though Disgaea is an SRPG with movement grids and turn-based combat, it’s quite unlike any other SRPGs out there in the market as the series has always been about numbers.

BIG NUMBERS.

Maximizing the most optimal way to get the best weapons, max out my levels, stats and much, much more. Figuring out the sheer amount of mechanics around the simple act of making numbers go up and making use of them in creative ways was always one of my favorite things about Disgaea.

While that remains true in D6, there’s one nasty twist to the formula that changes everything- “auto-battle”. Don’t get me wrong, auto-battle has existed in Disgaea for a long time but this time around, it is configured in a way where the game will automatically enter the level, make the AI take specific actions which could be programmed using gambits and repeat without any input from me.

At first, I thought this was a great idea but the more I used the system, the more I felt detached from any semblance of enjoyment of the game. I would leave the switch on, let it auto battle on a leveling map, come back 30 minutes later, confirm that all the characters have been level capped, reincarnate and repeat the process.

I thought this would be a stepping stone method that I would only use temporarily while I gathered up the tools that would allow me to cap out my characters in one or two battles like I have been able to in all the previous titles but even with the most ideal setup, it was impossible to max out the millions of levels in a short time which made auto-battling all the more necessary if I was going to tackle the post game challenges. Item levels also grew exponentially as well which also required using auto-battle with specific gambits to quickly make my way through the item world.

In a game where much of the enjoyment comes from finding the most efficient ways to do everything, the answer to almost all of it became, “auto-battle”. The best way to play the game was to not play it at all and in my 120~ hour save file of D6, only about 30-40 hours were me actually playing.

When I thought about other games that would largely play itself, it reminded me of mobile games and resemblance became more striking the more I thought about it as just like in those games, I could purchase boosters which would be active for a set number of battles which dramatically increased my gains.

These boosters could only be purchased as microtransactions and not farmable within the game itself and add to that paid DLC characters which were quite obviously completed before the game’s release which held powerful abilities which could be used to make leveling/increasing stats much more efficient so I suppose in this case I would be “paying to be more efficient” instead of “paying to win”.

The major difference between those mobile games and Disgaea 6 is that one is free to play and the other has an MSRP of $59.99.

Whoever thought it was a great idea to make the most visually demanding Disgaea game a Switch exclusive in the States needs to take a hard look in the mirror.

When I heard that Disgaea 6 was going to use 3D models instead of the gorgeous 2D sprites they have been known for, I was apprehensive but at the same time, I wanted to give them a fair shake as there are plenty of series that have successfully made the transition from using 2D sprites with 3D models to great effect like Guilty Gear.

Still, I was a bit concerned that since we were only getting the Switch version of the game in the States, I wondered if performance would be a factor and lo and behold, it most definitely is.

There are three visual modes to choose from in the options and none of them are ideal. Maximizing performance gave the best, most consistent frame rates while making everything look pixelated and extremely rough and the visual focused tanked framerates to sub 30 consistently while still not looking that great. The option in the middle was supposed to be best of both worlds but still stuttered consistently which had me playing on performance mode during the majority of my playthrough.

The 3D models themselves weren’t too terrible despite me vastly preferring the 2D sprites but their limited animations made them look awful, especially during story cutscenes which took away from what small semblance of drama the VAs managed to portray given the terrible script.

I honestly have no idea why the PS4 version of the game did not make its way to the States considering literally every other Disgaea game has been on a Playstation platform.

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.

Sad Tidbit – I think a lot of the balancing issues came from the decision to increase the max level to 99,999,999. This had a chain reaction in how leveling became much more time consuming and made stats incredibly bloated, requiring even more grinding to be able to compete with the toughest enemies in post game.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.