Disgaea 6

Disgaea 6 is the sixth entry of the Disgaea series. This game is the first using 3D graphics and while the art looks really nice and the character designs are great, the game actually looks dated. The is a number of technical issues this game has on the Switch. In fact, the 3D graphics made the game laggy on the Switch. I cannot comment on how the game plays on the PC or PS5. Persona 5 Strikers on the Switch and SMT Nocturne ran lot better. The former is a current gen while the latter was a retro game that even then, on the PS2 you can assume how well it would run well. I know Disgaea always had flashy visuals but with the 3D design, it honestly was an eye strain to look at. This is just really inexcusable.

The story was more or less the same as Disgaea 1 and is set in the netherworld like the previous games. A power-hungry character wants to overthrow God and that’s it. The characters aren’t really that interesting as its more or less the same types you see in the typical Disgaea game. Zed, the protagonist has the ability to reincarnate so he can get more powerful by going back to 0 but the more he does it the more powerful he gets.

Combat is the same as before with grid turn based battles and its occasional use of annoying geoblocks with unfair bonuses but it's also the most damage you can deal in video game history, most would be 9999 or 999 points but its 10 quadrillion in this game. There are lots of character classes to choose from with some new ones. Aside from repeating bosses, some maps were repeating and this all seemed like filler.

You can take on quests but its honestly just kill the enemy and find item. It is minimal effort and boring generic stuff. Even getting Vincent Valentine in Final Fantasy 7 while notoriously challenging, it still had lot more purpose and a lot more fun than taking part in the side quests here.

The senate returns where you can try and get a group vote by force or by democracy to get bonuses in your favor. One such feature I noticed was vote to get 4x speed as you can speed up combat in the game. Bravely Default has that feature but you did not need to vote to get that. I felt that was really strange and at Kingdom Hearts early 2000s level of strange gameplay designs. I really do not get having to level up just to get a gameplay feature that should have been available in the first place. You can bribe the Senate as in previous games.

You can replay levels you went through for filling up the bonus meter and for prizes. There is a new auto battle feature which can be useful if you want to breeze through the game. Another way you can breeze through is the juice bar where you can level up with the xp juice points you find to increase your characters stats. You can also find stat points extracts to boost their skills and of course upgrade character special abilities by collecting mana.

At least the weapons store wasn’t randomized like last games where you had to keep coming back just to get the best stuff. It functions the same way, get items and the more you buy the better quality the stuff is available. Weapon mastery returns long with skill mastery as the more you use a weapon the better you are at it to deal more damage and skills to enemies. You get prizes from the medical place and you get healed instead of just having to pay for it each time you use it.

The user interface and controls were straightforward and the voice acting was serviceable. The musical score was alright as well.

Retrying missions if you die instead of going back to the start screen was nice. There was a lot of limited stuff and missing features from past games mainly for the streamlining of the series and in the long term it did more harm than good. The classes were not as big as it was in the last game. Magichange was one feature that was not in this game.

One of the hugest complaints I got is the overblown stats. You feel invicible with all that hig level but it would be suicide to go through the game with that amount of stats as you really need to grind a lot than just rush in.

It gets 3 out of 5 stars.

Honestly 3D isn’t NIS games forte as I noticed in other games like Witches Knight and Mugen they cause lots of technical issues. They should take a break from the series now and focus on bringing back Rhapsody, a musical adventure as it would certainly be interesting to see Shojo fairy tale JRPGSs take the spotlight.