Disgaea 6 Complete

Disgaea has been my favorite series ever since playing the original so many years ago. I tried so hard to like this one, but at the end of the day, I just really couldn't. This will be the first in the series that I didn't complete the end game for, I just burned out on it. Lots of people have mentioned the class roster being cut down significantly, but what got me was the cut mechanics, too. No more magi-change, and nothing new to replace it. No more monster weapons, and nothing new to replace it. No more weapon-specific skills, and nothing new to replace it (weapon skills are now tied to class, similar to how monster skills work, which means your characters are drastically limited in what they can do and how they play). If you liked Overload or Revenge or even the Curry Shop from Disgaea 5, they're all gone with nothing new to replace them. The only "new" things D6 adds are: 1) Shared exp/mana. You no longer earn exp or mana when you kill a unit, but all units on the map (or that died, just not anyone in the base panel) receive the same exp/mana. I don't hate this feature at face-value, but you quickly wind up following the pattern of "Pull 9 units out, 1-shot the enemy with your strongest attack guy, repeat forever". This balances the "No weapon skills" change, since otherwise characters like Thieves or Clerics have literally no attacks beyond normal attacks. Despite having room for hundreds of units, this "10 units share exp" really locks that in as your maximum. 2) Juice Shop, where you spend Hel and stored stats to level up specific stats per-unit. This replaces the Shards system from D5. This might be useful to add a new character to your roster later in the game, but otherwise at any given point it's prohibitively expensive. When your characters have thousands and thousands in a particular stat, you'll spend every Hel you have to give a static, non-scaling boost to one stat and that's a fraction of a percent of a bonus. 3) Auto Battle. The elephant in the corner. With the press of a button, the AI takes over and plays for you. You can even set up some fairly detailed "rules" to make your characters fight as you'd like them to. Honestly, I wonder if this system was the reason so many other features were cut, simply because so often it's the most efficient route to let the AI handle a fight, and it's easy for the AI to do that with fewer options. It seems a lot of the game's content was designed with this system in mind; grinding has always been a thing in Disgaea, but now that "Have the AI grind for you" is an option, trying to grind manually is just magnitudes slower and feels like a joke. And because so much has been removed from the battles, it doesn't feel rewarding to do it manually, either. ** SPOILERS ** The storyline by far has been the most uninspired of any Disgaea. The characters that join you have no real motivating reasons to do so, never experience any growth or character change (You get a human king early on that tries to solve all his problems with money; by the end of the game, his "growth" is that he feels bad about it sometimes but still solves all his problems with money). The idea that any of our characters are demons and might act demonly, the fact that it's all set in a series of Netherworlds, are all completely forgotten. One character that joins you has pointy ears, so I believe she's meant to be a demon. The main character has horns, so I believe he's meant to be a demon zombie. As far as actions and emotions and motivations, they're all just humans on a quest to fight the Bad Guy to save the world. They almost have a good thread going with "Despite being a weak zombie, our main character has become powerful through hard work and dedication"... But then at the end tell us "He was born special, he's a rare super demon, this wouldn't be possible for anyone else". Bizarrely, you end every single chapter fighting an "impossible" boss. But as it goes with Disgaea games, the boss is very much fightable, and even without grinding too much to get there. The story handles this by ignoring it and pretending your party got one-shot. Just... Imagine one-shotting a boss, and being greeted by a cutscene of "Argh, I'm so helplessly weak, this thing is a monster, how can we ever fight it?" And then repeating that exact same thing for 10 chapters. ** END SPOILERS ** If this had been one of the one-off spinoffs, I would have been unimpressed. The fact that this is the next main entry into the series at a staggering $70 is an insult to the fans. With so much cut content, with hand-drawn 2D sprites being traded out for money-saving 3D models, this is just not a game I can recommend. Maybe on sale if it's $20 or less and you want to add it to your collection, but otherwise I'd say reading the Disgaea Wiki about this game is more fun than playing this game, and that's free.

1) This game is not worth, in any way, the ridiculous price tag that has been put on it. It's a one and a half year old Switch game that has been ported over to PC. The high price is just there to gouge loyal fans of the franchise, before undoubtedly going on regular deep discount sale in a few months time. The previous iteration, Disgaea 5, was released at less than half the price, and is currently on 70% sale discount at the time of writing. 2) On top of this, a single player, £65/$70 game with in game purchases? Either this is some sort of joke which I don't quite get, or Nippon Ichi Software REALLY hate every single person buying this game, and want to do anything they can to just gouge even more money out of it's loyal fan base. 3) The one thing this game has done right, is with PC optimisation. The options are full of graphical settings to improve the PC visual experience. But saying that, given that this series was never a AAA graphical masterpiece in the first place, I can't say any of these improvements were vital. 4) The game itself is a step down from Disgaea 5. They've added a few useful QOL changes, and a couple of neat content additions, but taken out a lot more than they've put in. Overall, if you're the sort of person, like me, who enjoys the franchise so much that you ended up paying this ridiculous sum for the game, then there's nothing a review could say to put you off doing so. But to everyone else, wait. This game is fine, but needs to go at least 50% off to be actually worth the purchase price. If you don't own Disgaea 5 already, buy that instead.

Note: I got 160+ hours on Disgaea 6 for the switch, so I've explored the majority of the game. Alongside platting Disgaea 1, Disgaea 2, Disgaea 4 & Disgaea 5 which has given me time to get adjusted to practically all the mechanics offered in the Disgaea series. This is probably the only Disgaea game I can not recommend, there's a few reasons for it. 1st being the auto battle mechanic, I am not against it but am against the way they implemented it into this game. Normal story mode you can progress without, but you do need to use it for post game otherwise the progress becomes so unbearingly slow that you'll get burned out. I hypothesise that the developers tried to extend the grind out with auto battle in mind to try and reach the 100s of hours playtime counter. But this comes at the cost of the people who like to play the game manually. If you dislike auto battle mechanic, then I highly encourage you to miss out on this entry. Primal Liquid (Disgaea YouTuber) left his switch on for 3 weeks (Demo) + 1 month (Full game) 24/7 to complete all of the post game under auto grinding constantly. This amounts to over 1,000 hours which is beyond unacceptable for the amount of end-game content offered (It's pretty bare bones). Keep in mind this is with auto battle constantly enabled, you'd be looking at more playtime then this if you were to play exclusively manually. This is the biggest issue with Disgaea 6. Since this is an auto battle game after story mode, it's hard to give a justification for a £65/$70 price tag. Especially for a mixed review game (At the time of writing). In comparison to previous Disgaea games, this entry is lacking. Mechanics such as weapon skills, magichange, toss & receive etc. are removed. This kills a ton of variability in terms of how you can approach battles, it's pretty 1 dimensional now in terms of how you can approach fights. The mechanics/features that are missing stack up, Disgaea 5 a £30 game has much more features/mechanics then Disgaea 6, a £65 game. Even if you're a new player who won't miss these features since you've never experienced them, you will probably feel like at times that Disgaea 6 feels a little bare bones in terms of what it offers. You're justified in thinking that way, especially since this game is more expensive then games such as Elden Ring & Persona 5 Royal which smash this game out in the ball park in terms of content that is offered. The only DLC included in Disgaea 6 is reskinned characters/weapons with some new skills/passive skills, not enough to justify a next gen price. Especially since you won't even be looking at these characters' skill animations after a certain point due to constantly using auto battle. Most games charge £40-£50 for a complete edition, not stack the price up post release. The reception for Disgaea 6 was already bad to begin with, but over charging for this game as well is the equivalent of just spitting on the grave. I encourage you to pick up Disgaea 4 or Disgaea 5, I feel like Disgaea 5 is the most casual friendly while actually being a decent Disgaea game. Disgaea 6 removed so much stuff in terms of what makes it Disgaea that this entry kind of doesn't feel like Disgaea, but just a generic auto battle game.