Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Genre: Strategy RPG
Rating: Teen
Platform: PS4 (JP), Nintendo Switch (JP, NA, and EU)

Nippon Ichi’s most popular SRPG just keeps coming back, and this time, with a protagonist that reflects their persistence. But does the latest incarnation come with a significant power boost, or is NIS’s determined SRPG starting to decay?

Disgaea 6 stars a zombie named Zed, whose mission is to slay the God of Destruction that threatens the Disgaea universe. For most Disgaea games, the cringy story was my biggest complaint, and it was a significant QoL feature to be able skip it, and get to the sweet, tasty level-grinding.

However, in Disgaea 6, the story is actually clever. At the outset of the game, Zed and his dog Cerberus storm the Darkest Assembly, which is holding a meeting to determine what to do about the God of Destruction. Once in the chamber, Zed delivers a startling announcement: He has already defeated the God of Destruction. Then begins Zed’s story to a skeptical assembly, with the first ten chapters being a recount of the events that led to the outcome.

The characters in the story are largely media parodies with obvious shortcomings, which include a wealthy king, a Disney-eque princess, a super-sentai heroine, and an elderly woman turned mahou shoujo. If you don’t know what some of those words mean, that might be normal.

The first few chapters introduce the characters, one-at-a-time, while the next few focuses more on their development. After that, buckle up, because the last few chapters are heavy on the twists and gets quite unpredictable. I think the story was worth sitting through once, but for those who really insist, the option is there to skip. If they don’t know what they’re missing, it’s not much of a tragedy to them, is it?

Disgaea 6 introduces a new feature: the option to fast-forward through battles, with an auto-battle feature that allows the computer to select your character’s moves, and an auto-replay feature that allows you to repeatedly replay a level, which combines pretty well with the auto-battle feature. This, combined with skipping attack animations, streamlines the repetitive grinding that Disgaea is known for.

What’s more, the fast-forward feature can be upgraded as an in-game reward, and can unlock the ability to speed through battles at rates as high as 16x and 32x, and ultimately, the option to skip ally and enemy effects altogether. This allows for streamlined automated grinding when setups are ideal.

But suppose you don’t like the battle plan that the computer chooses for you. There is a D.I. feature that allows you to select a characters plan in battle when controlled by the computer, which can be customized by assembling flowcharts which can plan out how a character moves, influence what they attack, and even what specific attacks they use. As the player plays through the game, more options can be unlocked in batches.

How well developed the options for automated play are goes to show just how heavily they were to intended to factor into gameplay. Without them, leveling up for post-game content would take a dishearteningly long time (even by Disgaea standards). If you’re the kind of guy who balks at cell-phone games with options like stage-skip tickets, then you’re likely to interpret Disgaea’s auto-play features as symptomatic of a trend in video games. But then, if you’re prone to taking things like that at face value, you’re not likely to appreciate the Disgaea series for the deconstruction of the SRPG genre that it is.

There is one slight drawback to the auto-play features, and that’s that because I’m not spending as much time selecting characters, moving them, and selecting their moves, I wouldn’t be developing the same appreciation I would for those characters as I would be if I were doing more of it. Some players might answer the complaints with the auto-play features by pointing out that they’re optional. Even if that’s the case, if it’s the most practical option that offers the most returns for one’s time, it’s the most sensible choice when one is playing a game of strategy.

And as I see it, the auto-play options are a welcome addition. Even if they seem suspiciously like a scheme to artificially drive up playtime through players that leave their Switches on overnight.

There are a few changes that returning players are going to notice. One of which is that the option to magi-change is out. That might seem like a tragedy to players that liked magi-change, but to be honest, I haven’t been doing much of it in most Disgaea games that featured it. In Disgaea 5, I had Usalia magi-change onto another character to help them level, but that might have been the extent of it.

Magi-change was not really a big deal in spite of all the fluff surrounding it, so it was a natural choice for deciding what’s vestigial.

But did NIS really have to leave the Skull class out of Disgaea 6? That was one of my favorites, and what’s more, it’s absence is all the more conspicuous with the fact that the Skull has been a series staple since Disgaea 1. What’s more, the Nekomata is out, and so are the Sabrecats. And the Kunoichi. And there’s more, too. But if generic characters weren’t a big deal for you, you might not much notice or care.

Also, weapon-specific techniques have been dropped in favor of class-specific techniques. It’s not really a big deal, as players previously tended toward weapons with techniques that expedited grinding (the 3×3 techniques, usually), which would have been rendered superfluous with the auto-play features, and a new EXP and mana system that distributes what’s earned among participants in a battle, whether they fall or not. Speaking of weapons, there are no more monster-specific weapons, and they are able to equip humanoid weapons. That’s a positive change, as I see it.

The option to interrogate captured enemies is out. That’s just fine, because that was kinda awkward in Disgaea 5. What’s more, the curry mechanic in Disgaea 5 didn’t make a comeback. That’s fine too, considering that it seemed more thematically relevant in that game, anyway.

And that’s what’s great about how Disgaea 6 causes the series to evolve: what’s dropped didn’t quite expedite the experience, which makes them a little hard to miss. Still, what players liked before, they might miss, so would it be too much to ask to add some missing classes in a future update?

There is a new Juice Bar facility, which greatly expedites the process of stat growth and class mastery. Mastering classes and collecting extracts was a huge chore in Disgaea 5, so seeing the Juice Bar is a welcome change. If collecting shards made a comeback, they’d have been rendered superfluous. But the rage meter didn’t return from Disgaea 5, which was connected to how to collect shards in that game. In spite of the bigger numbers, Disgaea seems to be somewhat simplifying, and in ways I consider mostly welcome.

When it comes to the new graphical style, I’m almost indifferent. It’s easy to notice the change at first, especially when the sprite art was what gave the series much of its charm. However, the cel-shaded polygonal models do look pretty decent. Personally, I suspect I’d be getting a little greedy if I were to ask that the chibi-style grid models had outlines, considering that players might have to be picky when it comes to the graphical performance options as it is. The more proportional anime-style models used in the attack animations do have outlines, which makes their absence elsewhere more apparent.

Nippon Ichi Software America, the company that localized Disgaea 6, usually does an excellent job when it comes to voice talent, and Disgaea 6 is no exception. The voices go to the characters perfectly. There are some scenes that don’t have voice acting, which isn’t a big deal. However, there are scenes in a postgame story where the voice audio ends abruptly near the end of the lines, which makes it seem like those scenes were done in a hurry, or weren’t edited by a professional. I’m not upset about it, but that’s something to be more careful about in future installments.

It’s obvious from early on that the level and stat scaling works differently in this game. Characters gain more levels at a time in fewer battles, and the stats like HP, INT, and RES increase more at a time. This allows players to more quickly reach the mind-bogglingly high stats which have long been a staple in the Disgaea series. It would appear as though the challenge level scales consistently through the main story, which would mean that the challenge level would remain comparable even though the numbers are higher.

As much as I’d like to have more to say about that, I got the demo before the game was released, and I went ahead and set the auto-play to get some super-powerful characters. I already had level 9999 characters at the point that the game was released, so the story itself was mainly like a visual novel interspersed with auto-playable stages that don’t pose a challenge.

I know it’s optional, but it’s also practical. Going to bed and waking up to a bunch of level 9999 characters has just become a valid playstyle.

By the way, the level cap can be increased in the postgame, so level 9999 is no longer the final level cap. What’s more, there’s also an additional play mode to supplement the Carnage area that challenged determined players in previous Disgaea games. The new area might be considered a selling point for Disgaea veterans.

To wind down this review, I’d like to give my impression on the new characters. No spoilers.

• Zed – I like the new main character, in spite of my old dislike for zombies (or “bullet-magnets”, if you prefer). I wonder whether the writer for Disgaea 6 also wrote the story for Zettai Hero Project, because I notice similarities.
• Cerberus – I like the irony of a zombie boy with a zombie dog that is more knowledgeable than the boy himself.
• Misedor – He doesn’t seem to develop as much as other characters, but he does have at least a couple only-sane-man moments.
• Melodia – Here’s the character that annoyed me more than the rest. It’s almost as though the skip button was made just for her dialogue.
• Piyori – A justice-obsessed power ranger that becomes corrupted by a flawed main character is quite a Disgaea thing.
• Majolene – She takes issue with her transformation because she takes herself way too seriously. She has tragedy in her past, and when it comes up, it hits differently.
• Ivar – It’s hard to talk about his deal without a spoiler. He turns out different from what one might expect.
• Beiko – Ten pounds of adorable in a five-pound sack.
• The Last Boss – A deceiver and schemer par excellence, and sympathetic, too. The outcome for this character was very appropriate.

DLC Corner

Disgaea 6 has a DLC package, and I sprang for the season pass. Much of the DLC content is free, such as a package of 4 characters for those who preordered the game, and the collection of 5 Hololive characters which can be downloaded from the eShop. I don’t know what the significance of the Hololive characters would be, but there doesn’t seem to be much reason to turn down what’s free.

There’s an assembly of goodies in the DLC package, such as additional palettes for certain characters, and special gear for them which is more gimmick than endgame gear.

There was also supposed to be a big pile of 100 Boost Tickets, but for some reason, I didn’t receive them. I wasn’t the only player that had this problem, so hopefully NISA will address the issue soon. The Boost Tickets also seemed to be missing from the Starter Support Set.

For me, the big draw from the DLC was the characters, which seems to focus on previous Disgaea games. As of this writing, Mao and Rasberyl are already available, with Valvatorez and Pleinair coming next week, Fuka and Desco come two weeks after that, and in another two weeks the season concludes with Killia and Usalia from Disgaea 5, along with a completion bonus package which includes more colors for certain DLC characters.

There’s also a relatively-inexpensive Innocents package, which contains exclusive gear that have innocents attached. The description tells you what the innocents do, but not their level. They’re all at 100, and there’s 3 of the ones that influence critical hits, each at 100.

Does a person need all the DLC to fully enjoy the game? Not strictly. The heavy focus on characters from other Disgaea games lends itself to appeal more to fans of the series. None of the paid characters seems to break the game so far, so if you have to miss out on paid DLC characters, it’s not the end of the universe.

If you like Disgaea, you probably also like numbers. So here: 8 out of 10. That’s the score Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny gets.

Disgaea 6 is unbalanced, grind-heavy, and doesn’t seem to take itself seriously. And some people like it that way.