Review: Disgaea 7 Rights Disgaea 6’s Wrongs

Ahead of Disgaea 7’s debut, members of the team at NIS promised they were taking into account feedback from Disgaea 6. Early indications suggested the game was on the right track. Now, after about two weeks with it, I’ve seen for myself that it wasn’t all talk. NIS delivered. It isn’t dethroning Disgaea 2 as my favorite installment, but it feels more like the stronger entries in the series and I enjoyed it more than Disgaea 4 and 5. 

Disgaea 7 begins with Pirilika, a rich business woman obsessed with the Hinomoto Netherworlds, finally getting to go visit. However, she finds the concept of bushido is abandoned and the people in charge abusing her power. It’s then that she meets Fuji, a wandering ronin allergic to empathy in deep debt. While he initially is going to take advantage of her naivety and otaku tendencies to quickly get the money he owes, he finds himself bound by a contract to help her get the Seven Founding Weapons and change Hinomoto before he gets his money.

As the duo begin to head around Hinomoto and increase the size of their army, Disgaea 7 feels like a traditional strategic-RPG entry in the series. You dispatch units, which level up, learn new class skills, and can use weapon skills while traversing the map. You gain experience for facing foes and defeating maps. Completing the map missions can earn you extra experience, money, and items, and you can take on quests that grant rewards like access to new generic unit types for, say, beating X number of enemy types. Geo Panels return and are a major focus, adding buffs, debuffs, and the ability to destroy them to change panel colors and deal damage to anyone standing on those spots when it happens. Verticality can also be a thing for some maps, as well as stage traversal, which makes lifting and throwing allied units helpful to reach objectives or complete them more quickly. 

What I noticed right away with Disgaea 7 is that the maps felt like an improvement over Disgaea 6, even in only the first four chapters. The first chapters’ are all good learning experiences and great for grinding units up to level 10. From there, you gradually get to see them scale in complexity. At the same time, the generic enemies you face offer a great sense of balance and scaling as well, and it felt satisfying to see the types I’d face in the first chapter grow and still feel like they could be threats in the latter half of the game and Item World.

I will say I’m not the biggest fan of the Jumbification System. In some situations, it feels like a way to artificially inflate the difficulty and allow the enemy to get in some cheap shots. In others, I felt like it perhaps made a situation a little too easy for me. There’s also the matter of it feeling like a move best pulled with unique party members, such as Fuji and Pirilika. A super-sized Prinny doesn’t carry the same weight.

Conversely, the Hell Mode system is fantastic. That these Founding Weapons have conditions tied to their use keeps them from being abused or a reliable crutch. They really feel like something you build up to in a battle and use at a critical moment. Plus, their weight of the abilities also ensures the relevance of the characters in your crew that can access them. One of my favorites, which isn’t a spoiler as NISA discussed it before launch, is how useful Yeyasu is when using Tokugawa Tenge as a crowd control measure.

I also appreciated that the Item World is a place I’d actually want to visit in Disgaea 7, compared to Disgaea 6. This time the rarity of the item determines how many floors it will have before you head into it, with 10 being the minimum and 30 the maximum. They can be quite challenging, which is great if the story maps are getting a bit easy due to level grinding and character improving. Like the story mode stages and their missions to complete, the Item World offers that to increase the level of the item and give you a chance to get a Mr. Gency’s Exit. When you happen upon the Innocents, you can get them to affect the stats of your items and equipment to make them stronger. However, they only change the stats now. There’s also an Item Reincarnation feature tied to going through the item world, which lets you pass on the promising Properties and Specials of any item or piece of equipment to a new incarnation and different sort of item or piece of equipment via reincarnating it. It can get engrossing, and I found it more enjoyable than general character building sometimes.

That isn’t to say that Disgaea 7 is lacking when it does come to improving members of your party. It’s very good at that too. Reincarnation is present, as usual. You can set characters’ classes and have them level up in that to learn more skills. Evilities are back and quite handy for building someone up. It’s very easy to customize a character’s moveset, build up their stats, and determine their abilities, and there’s basically no barrier to learning how to do this. By the time you’re in the second chapter, you could already be starting to grind levels to work on different class skills or visit the Dark Assembly to unlock some of the basic niceties that are locked behind there, like the hospital’s Evil-Gacha, the ability to change your class, and some minor character improvements. Basically, there’s still that depth to make your party your own, and thankfully Disgaea 7 also offers the wider range of demons and monsters that was lacking from Disgaea 6. 

I’m also pleased to say that Disgaea 7 runs rather well on the Switch. I only played in handheld mode and, unless there was a situation with a lot of units on the field or effects, it ran really well. The character models looked fine in action, and the special attacks also looked quite good. I did tend to play in Graphics mode, rather than Performance, and did eventually turn off effect animations once I was six chapters in and realized I wasn’t encountering anything game-breaking.

Playing Disgaea 7 is a heartening experience. While Disgaea 6 may have shaken some people’s faith, this entry should restore the confidence that the team knows what they’re doing. It’s more in line with what a longtime fan of the series would expect to see. Like hey, they got it right this time. It made me glad to not only return to the Netherworld again, but keep coming back for the supplemental challenges.

Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless will come to the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and PC on October 3, 2023 in North America, October 6, 2023 in Europe, and October 13, 2023 in Australia.