Like a tenacious bat out of the wackiest possible hell, Nippon Ichi Software has returned to the SRPG arena to once again curb-stomp the rules and reach nearly unmatched levels of mechanical depth and complexity while doing it. In other words? Disgaea is back, dood. For those who have remained on the periphery of the series and its zany, bottomless take on the strategy-roleplaying paradigm, imagine taking an endless math test at the bottom of the Mariana Trench while a nearby Greek chorus is reciting Paradise Lost from memory and revising it on the fly into the style of Dr. Suess. Now imagine that that experience does not figuratively or literally kill you but is also ridiculously fun.
That’s Disgaea, an infinite multiplication table at the edges of sanity and/or the universe, a graphing calculator in the shape of a video game in the shape of delight. For those already in the snare of the series’ irresistible off-beat swagger, monstrous damage numbers, and pick-up-and-throwable penguins who explode for their sins, you already know this. Similarly, you already know that Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless is out in western territories this October. With this latest entry imminent — and arriving just in time to celebrate the series’ 20th — we had the awesome opportunity not only to pick Director Shunsuke Minowa’s brain about inspirations, aspirations, and much more, but to take a preview build of Disgaea 7 for a spin, courtesy of NIS America. The short story? Disgaea 7 will arrive this fall wearing a thoughtful coat irreverently.
The long story is what follows.
My time with Disgaea 7 began with a quick overview of the game. Mechanically, the team reported, this is the Disgaea you know, the one you fell in love with anywhere from zero to 20 years ago. Director Minowa and the other staff on site were keen to drive this point home. In fact, now ringing in its third decade, the series has roots. “Getting back to [those] roots,” Minowa-san told me via interpreter, was a goal of the D7 team. Disgaea diehards will instantly catch the meaning, but to spell it out: Disgaea 6 wasn’t exactly the best-received entry in the series. In many respects, D7 aims to address D6’s drift away from the core Disgaea experience and right the ship.
Speaking of roots, the game’s story and setting also stem from this concept. Disgaea 7 adopts a traditional Japanese style, driping this aesthetic like a wet sponge. For example: the yokai-inspired characters. The concept of bushido plays a particularly important role. The Netherworlds of Hinomoto, where the game takes place, once knew harmony under this code of moral conduct. But now, bushido has been dropkicked to the curb by the dastardly dogma of the “Hinomoto Code of Destruction,” under whose toddlerishly evil tenets (e.g. “Decree #3 – Friendship and love: HARD PASS.”) violence reigns and might makes quick work of one’s enemies (because here, there is no “right”).
So yeah, things are bad, at least according to Pirilika, a “Hinomoto otaku” and bushido adherent/fangirl. Based on the mythical maneki neko, she’s one of the game’s two protagonists. The other — and the staff on-site made sure to accentuate that these are two equal protagonists, not a hero and a sidekick — is Fuji, a dragon-themed demon who actually ascribes to the Code of Destruction! In this way, the two make for ideological foils of one another even as they join forces to score some decidedly uncommon loot: the “Demonic Founding Weapons,” seven special armaments of certain significance.
Unfortunately for them, the back half of Chapter 2 — the vertical slice of the game buttered and served to me — reveals that one of these weapons belongs to none other than Yeyasu, a sleazy, pointy-coiffed slacker of a shogun as blockheaded as he is spikeheaded. His introduction involves flagrant dereliction of his courtly duties so that he may attempt — woefully unsuccessfully — to court women in the streets. The women in question, incidentally, are of the Maiko class, a character type that you can add to your team later in the game. Anyway, Yeyasu’s carousing earns him a bit more than the loss of what meager dignity he probably started with, and the ruckus he stirs up plants a target ripe for our heroes’ aim right on his empty head.
This plays during the game’s between-stage story sequences: 2D portrait-based affairs anyone who has played a Disgaea game knows. Voices can be set to Japanese or English. The voice actors lean into the game’s funny and cool characters to deliver punchy performances. I did notice some strange fluctuations in volume throughout, indicating poor audio mixing, a wrinkle that I hope and assume will be ironed out before launch given that I was playing a development build of the game.
All of this, however, is scant more than set dressing to the real meat on Disgaea 7’s bones: how it plays. I’ll reiterate here what I told the NISA staff prior to my getting started: my first Disgaea love was Infinite, a spring-breezy, adventuresome PSP spinoff as gridless and statless and level-grindless as any Disgaea has been. While I’ve helped myself to a decent dollop of the series’ bulky plating of rich strategy in the decade-ish since (mostly the first game), tactical thinking has never been my strength, and these are games at which I still blow harder than a wind tunnel full of industrial fans during a hurricane. All of which is to say I went in expecting to get wiped like a kitchen floor. Which I did.
But the story of my unfortunate yet deserved downfall will prove all the more schadenfreudian given sufficient setup, so let’s take this step by step. The first level of the three established the game’s look and feel. The version I played was on the PlayStation 5, an in-development English build that the staff from NISA assured me was not entirely representative of the final product. From a technical standpoint, they needn’t have disclaimed it: the game ran dreamily at what seemed an unbroken 60 fps and loaded in a flash. I can’t speak to its performance on other hardware, but I have heard it runs sufficiently across the board. On a more aesthetic level, the game pops with prismatic primary hues, crisp candydrop colors in the stages contrasting with neon glow-in-the-darks back at your base, a Japanese-castle-themed mobile hub with the bouncy subcurrent of an electric night festival.
And it’s elastic, snappy like a fresh rubber band. Disgaea 6 ushered the series into full 3D and garnered a somewhat trepidatious response — and subsequent poor reputation — for it, the Switch version especially for performance-related reasons. Disgaea 7 represents the series’ sophomore try with 3D characters, and the experience pays off. Models are clean and colorful, with bold outlines. In the PS5 version I played, attacks and specials are brisk and can be brisker to suit your preferred pace by way of the speed and animation-skip settings — great for the level-grind inclined. Then there are the character portrait cut-ins for combo attacks, my favorite bit of Disgaea’s audiovisual viscera. They return in Disgaea 7, of course, and they feel better than ever, slicing the screen for one airless heartbeat where time hangs frozen and your foes’ fragile lives await collision with painful clusters of massive numbers.
Controls-wise, Disgaea diehards know what to expect: the way to steer this menu-driven ship is already electroshocked indelibly into the impulses that live on the tips of your fingers, its schema spiderwebbed like some sticky symbiote into the wrinkles on your gray matter. For everyone else, myself included, the series’ particular style of menuing and turn ordering takes some easing back into. Disgaea 7 doesn’t alleviate that, nor should it have to: this is how the series works, and work it does.
During this first stage, I was introduced to the new male Bandit class, a counterpart to the series’ longstanding female version (though the class debuted as a male design in D1) and part of the team’s endeavor to include male and female varieties of every character type. As an ally on my team, Billy Ray Joe Bob (that was my Bandit’s name) boasted excellent movement and abilities out of the Solid Snake playbook: a box to outmaneuver enemies and gain the upper hand — literally, since you can stand on the box to attack enemies from on high and smite foes with extra damage.
In hands as tactically clammy as mine, BRJB definitely didn’t perform to his utmost, but I can easily envision more adept players using this class to run circles around the competition, which also included a male Bandit in this stage. A neutral unit — a new type of unaligned character that may help or hinder according to various conditions — this Bandit waited off to the side, guarding a treasure chest just begging, in true Disgaea fashion, to be beaten to a splintery mulch and disemboweled of its trove. The keeper of the prize did end up attacking me, but unfortunately my party mopped the other enemies into tidy oblivion and ended the stage before I could discover what exactly he was guarding.
The next stage provided a taste of Fuji’s “Hell Mode,” a sort of limit break state. Besides allowing Fuji to deal devastating damage (and, satisfyingly, finish Yeyasu off with a single superpowered special), this mode also proves Fuji a beast at short range. Like this, he and Pirilika form a perfect battling pair, Pirilika picking enemies off from afar with her bow while Fuji’s skills decimate up close. Unless you’re intent on committing to a themed team right out of the gate, these two will probably serve as mainstays in your roster, if not the centerpiece.
I thought I had trounced Yeyasu for good at this point. But then, after I opted not to try the sidequests (bonus missions) I had unlocked in the interest of time, I entered my third and final level, where, lo and behold, he returned, this time larger than life. That is: Jumbified. This is perhaps the most delightful of all of D7’s new bells and whistles, whereby characters grow to gargantuan size to duke it out on the sidelines of the stage. Or, if you or the AI should so choose, to drive a vengeful, oversized fist straight into the fray for a huge AOE splash. Enemies can Jumbify and so can you, as soon as you build up your “Rage Meter” by dealing or accruing damage.
Before long, I had grown Fuji to colossal size to take on the kaiju-sized Yeyasu. This was where my plans, insofar as I even had any, started to disintegrate. Sad as it is to admit, I’d met my match. Fuji lost the bout and Yeyasu literally crushed my other units. Now, Rage Meter built back up, I had no choice but to Jumbify a generic Fighter, who, frankly, stood no chance. Players better than me (i.e. most people) should not expect friction from this early-game battle, but alas: my end had arrived. The loss did teach me one thing: that Jumbification is balanced thoughtfully. Since the Rage Meter builds in response to damage taken, AOE attacks from a Jumbified foe prepare you to Jumbify any of your own units who survive the onslaught, a double-edged sword whose razor glint shines in your favor.
Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless is shaping up to ship this fall as a worthwhile entry that the Disgaea dedicated will appreciate as the series commemorates 20 years. It arrives in October for PS4, PS5, Switch, and Windows via Steam. We thank the team at Nippon Ichi Software and NIS America again for the opportunity to try the game prior to launch.
