Disgaea 7: Vow of the Virtueless
Disgaea is a series I am very fond of, and I’ve played through each entry, most numerous times. There’s a certain addictive quality to the SRPG gameplay that I just can’t seem to find elsewhere. I still find it rather insane that I played the original Disgaea over 19 years ago at this point, this series is making me feel old!
So, how does Disgaea 7: Vow of the Virtueless stack up? Is it any good? Does it perform better than Disgaea 6? I intend to fill you in on all these questions from a series veteran’s perspective, but first I must briefly touch on the Story.
Story
Disgaea 7 is based in the realm of Hinamoto, a demonic netherworld heavily based on feudal Japan. Here we meet Fuji, a demon and a skilled swordsman for hire, he’s keen to pay off a large debt he has accrued. Luckily, Fuji meets Piralika, a deep-pocketed and self-proclaimed Hinamoto Otaku who is obsessed with Hinamoto traditions and culture and agrees to hire Fuji as a bodyguard.
Being incredibly wealthy, Piralika has her own Nethership, which serves as the game’s main hub area while allowing travel to various maps. You’ll be spending a lot of time here so make yourself at home!
I won’t spoil much more of the story but it’s safe to say you’ll meet plenty of zany characters along the way, each with their motivations, but like all Disgaea games they don’t take themselves too seriously and often you’ll find them worming their way into your party one way or another.
Gameplay
The gameplay is truly where Disgaea 7 shines. Being a strategy RPG, battles take place on grid-based maps with each unit moving across the map and attacking. Each battle is turned-based and there’s almost a puzzle-like element to how you position your characters in terms of damage dealing ability etc. The aim of each map is to usually wipe out all opposing forces or tackle a boss enemy.
The main campaign has Fuji & Co. searching for infernal Treasures across 15 different chapters, each with its own subset of maps to progress through. At the end of each chapter, you’ll usually end up fighting a boss character who is much more powerful than the standard enemies and you can always re-enter previously completed levels if you feel you need to grind up your unit levels if you are having a tough time.
A unique feature of Disgaea 7 is the ability to ‘Jumbify’ your characters making them hulking Kaiju-esque beings able to deal massive amounts of damage and launch attacks against Jumbified enemies. While Jumbification is a nice addition, I did find it weirdly seems underutilized with our Jumbo units only having access to a single special attack. The amount of time it would take the animation to play out was greater than my over-levelled late-game units being able to one-shot any Jumbified enemies so the whole system came off as a little pointless if I’m being honest, cool to look at though!
The core story takes around 20 hours to see the credits roll, but this did include some time spent power-levelling and completing side quests. 20 hours may seem a little on the short side and you’ll be pleased to know that the main storyline serves as somewhat of a tutorial with the really challenging maps and quests taking place in Disgaea 7’s generous postlude content.
At its core, Disgaea 7 is a game all about systems and how you manage them, there are so many systems it can be a little intimidating, but like all Disgaea games, the real aim is seeing your character’s stats increase and enjoying the rush of over-leveling your units and their stats. Re-entering an old level that used to give you a lot of trouble and one-shotting the enemy is a joy that only the Disgaea series can provide.
Disgaea 7 reverts the inflated stats introduced in Disgaea 6 and resets the level cap to an already impressive 9999. For a series already known for its ridiculously high stats (level 99,999), Disgaea 6 bloated numbers made a lot of its stats seem to lose meaning and thankfully NIS has reverted to the more ‘normal’ numbers we are used to from the rest of the series.
While I appreciate NIS trying something new with larger stats, the 9999 level cap feels much more manageable and the return of the juice bar mechanic from Disgaea 6 saves you a lot of time in grinding up stats. All excess EXP is sent directly to the Juice Bar and can be used for levelling other units.
The series staple Character reincarnation returns in Disgaea 7 which allows you to reset your units back to level 1 while retaining a portion of their stats. Reincarnation becomes essential if you plan to tackle any of the postgame maps, luckily the Juice Bar makes levelling characters back to level 9999 a breeze.
The Netherworld hospital has been redesigned and you are no longer awarded prizes for the amount of times you pay to be healed, instead, you are now awarded ‘RP’ which can be spent at the Evil Gacha. The Evil Gacha can be attempted unlimited times if you have enough RP with each level awarding different weapons, skill scrolls and stat-boosting extracts for the Juice Bar.
The Evil Gacha is a welcome inclusion and you can gain some really nice equipment from it with bonus abilities such as additional EXP gain or Stat growth. At the later levels, you can even farm some very high-tier weapons and armour that are enough to see you through the post-game.
Speaking of weapons and gear, the Item world makes a return. For the uninitiated, not only can your characters reach stupidly high levels, but so can your items. Each item has a randomly generated dungeon within it which thankfully has a paired back max of 30 levels.
I think this is a great change as going through hundreds of levels in the previous Disgaea games was boring and a little tedious.
Upon completion, your item will level up and become more powerful and you’ll even be able to steal higher-ranked versions of the same item although the current item will level up its stats upon exiting the Item World either way.
Auto-battle returns from Disgaea 6 but thankfully is now not mandatory for grinding high-level stats. To stop Auto-Battle abuse NIS has introduced a consumable item called Poltergas, this will allow your units to Auto-battle one map and will spent upon completion. We can have a maximum of 300 Poltergas so you can’t just leave your system on and endlessly have your characters grind themselves while you browse YouTube or Netflix.
To facilitate Auto-battling, Demon Intelligence (or DI) makes its return and remains largely untouched from the previous game. Demon Intelligence is essentially a flow chart with a lot of if statements and variables where you can configure the AI of each of your units. It’s quite time-consuming to set up but very rewarding once you get it right.
Disgaea 7 even tests your mastery of Demon Intelligence in the form of Demon Shogi, a set of challenge stages that require you to program some generic units to win against an enemy team making for a fun little side quest.
Between chapters, you can use the Nethership to visit the various worlds you’ve previously travelled to via the Sightseeing mechanic. Each world has a small map you can wander around, find treasure chests, vendors and even optional battles that will unlock additional colours for your generic units.
After clearing Disgaea 7’s main campaign you’ll have the ability to unlock the Carnage Dimension, a set of ultra-tough maps for players who want to take their stats to the next level. Unlike previous Disgaea games, you don’t have a Carnage version of every map, just a single one for each chapter. Finish these up and you’ll be able to take on the Ultimate Overlord Baal. Carnage Baal is no Joke and even with almost max stats on numerous characters I had a hard time beating him although it was very rewarding when he eventually went down.
One slight disappointment I think I should mention is the variety in classes, a lot of the generic classes now feature male and female counterparts which is great, but apart from one or two abilities they are pretty much identical. This leaves only 3 new unique generic classes to unlock which I think might be the least amount in any Disgaea game. I know there’s going to be a healthy amount of DLC units to purchase but it would have been nice to have a few more unique generic units to choose from. A very minor gripe, but a gripe nonetheless.
In terms of performance, I am pleasantly surprised with just how well Disgaea 7 runs. One of the main issues I had with Disgaea 6 was the slightly shoddy performance and soft-looking visuals, especially dominant in the Nintendo Switch version, but I’m pleased to say that I had a solid 60fps throughout my 60+ hour playthrough which was mainly spent on the Steam Deck.
Being the second ‘3D’ entry to the series, Disgaea 7 improves greatly on the performance of Disgaea 6, however, I did still experience one issue where I had some visual glitches on one map which corrected itself after clearing it and there was one other time where I had a hard crash (luckily auto-save was enabled). All in all, I’d say from a technical perspective Disgaea 7 is very well made.
I’ve taken the time to test out the Nintendo Switch version which comes with a graphical fidelity and a performance mode that can be selected from the options. Personally, I couldn’t see any real difference between to two so I would suggest sticking with the performance mode. Compared to playing on PC / Steam Deck the Nintendo Switch version of Disgaea 7 looks noticeably ‘softer’ in image quality, but nowhere near as soft an image that was present in Disgaea 6.
Conclusion
Disgaea 7 returns to the ‘classic’ formula that we know and love. It takes the engine and art style of Disgaea 6 and uses it to make something a lot more competent. While I really enjoyed Disgaea 6, Disgaea 7 is a much better game in general comparable to even my favourite in the series Disgaea 4.
Everything feels streamlined from the way you level your characters, to how Evilities are passed between party members. NIS really nailed it this time around. I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Disgaea 7 as there really is a ton of fun to be had here. Here’s hoping NIS replicates these changes for the inevitable Disgaea 8!
9
Steam review code kindly provided by NIS America