Would it be an understatement to say that Disgaea 7 was one of the most influential games of my life? Absolutely not. It's not as big to me as something like Fire Emblem Three Houses, Persona 4 Golden, or Pokemon Gold but it's definitely up there. My interest in the game even followed a very similar path to that of Fire Emblem. Up until a few months ago, I didn't really have an interest in Disgaea. I did buy all of the Switch games to add to my collection with the intent of getting to them eventually, but I never got around to them until the release of 7.

In the middle of September, NIS America sent me a copy of the game to review for the site that I own. I've worked with them a few times before that but this was a few days after I became the owner, so I wanted to make sure that I gave this one my full attention. As a result of that and my actual enjoyment of the game, I ended up playing way more than I was supposed to. The embargo was lifted a week before the game released and by then I had already put more than 100 hours into it. By then it was already my game of the year and I had no intention of stopping anytime soon.

GRAPHICS: 9/10

I was a bit skeptical of the game at first when it comes to the graphics because I heard that the previous game was really bad in this department. Because Disgaea 6 was the first game in the franchise to make the jump to 3D, there were numerous complaints of it having poor visuals and terrible performance on the Switch. It wasn't great that Disgaea 7 came out so soon after either but fortunately 7 was released in a much better state and looks amazing.

The strongest aspect of the graphics is how the environment looks, the visuals are great in both in battle and in your home base. There's a ton of detail, the sprites look great, and the 3D layouts look really good. There's also a lot of color and when you're in battle, many of the attacks and special moves look great. All of the backgrounds and character profiles look fantastic as well.

SOUND: 10/10

The sound aspect of Disgaea 7 is easily my favorite aspect of the game. When it comes to the music, there weren't any tracks that I thought were iconic but nearly all of them were good and the style of many of them matched the tone and environment perfectly. While I thought the soundtrack was good, the voice acting was the aspect that I thought shined the brightest. But before we talk about the voices, we need to talk about the characters themselves.

The characters are some of the best that I've ever seen in gaming alongside the likes of Fire Emblem, Persona, and The Legend of Heroes. All of the characters that were introduced during the first chapters seemed very interesting to me. Their backstories were full of detail and intrigued, and I loved their personalities. Not only that, but I loved the way they spoke, their mannerisms, and how their personalities contradict each other. They aren't even that deep but they're incredibly entertaining, humorous, and lovable. This is why I think that the voices work so well.

The perfect voice actor was chosen for each character. The first three main characters that are introduced are Fuji, Pirilika, and Yeyasu who are voiced by Alejandro Saab, Kristen McGuire, and Zeno Robinson????? The first two are two of my most favorite voices actors of all time but they did such a good job with their performances that I didn't even recognize them. Fuji and Pirilika quickly became two of my most favorite characters on the Switch because the two actors brought them to life and I thought that many of the other actors did a great job as well.

GAMEPLAY: 10/10

To me, the main gameplay is pretty standard and is very similar to your average grid-based RPG like Fire Emblem. What makes it stand out are some of the extra features that the game uses and the special mechanics. The first main mechanic and one of the main staples of the entire series is that you can level up your character to ridiculous levels and deal massive amount of damage with a single hit. The level cap is 9,999 so this allows you to keep grinding a much as you like and makes some battles more fun. There’s also a process called jumbification that’s similar to Dynamaxing in Pokemon but with a lot more strategy involved. These two mechanics make the gameplay way more fun.

The next cool feature is the home base that you operate out of when you aren’t in battle. This made mt think of the monastery in Fire Emblem Three Houses but with many more thing to do and not as much walking. The main thing to do here is the Dimension Guide which is where you can go into battle. You can progress the story here or do old battles as many times as you want. There’s a Juice Bar that let’s you give buffs to characters, an Item Worlder that let’s you do battles to make your items stronger, a mini game that allows you to get random buffs and points to ue for random things, multiple kinds of shops, a recruitment center to build the perfect character, and o much more.

Once you get your character to a high enough level, you can even reset them back to level one and start from scratch so that they’re even more powerful. The core gameplay is simple but there’s so many extra things to do.

STORY: 10/10

The story of Disgaea 7 is pretty good if you ask me. It takes place in A netherworld area called Hinomoto. Pirilika vistis in order to experience their culture but after finding out that the culture has basically died off a very long time ago, she devises a grand plan to bring it back. Fuji, who has his own trouble gets roped in. I already talked about how awesome I think the characters are and that’ one of the reasons why I think the story is so good. Each character has a lot of story and lore attached to them and for the most part it’s all revealed overtime in a really coherent way.

The story also gets incredibly silly right from the start, with the dialogue, character interactions, and their own personalities becoming outrageous at times. This makes the story even better as it makes going through all the walls of text much more fun than it should be. I also really liked how each chapter was broken up into a series of bit sized episodes that had one main battle and a few lines of text. This made going through chapters a lot easier as there wasn’t a bunch of traveling, walls of text, or other things you had to do.

For instance, in Fire Emblem, one chapter is just one chapter. You get a lot of text, you do a lot of exploring, and you do your main battle. The amount of reading in one chapter could easily take 15 to 20 minutes before you even get to the main battle and then more reading after. That’s not bad but in DIsgaea 7 it’s broken down so that you’re doing much less reading at a time but you’re still getting the same amount of total reading.

ADDICTIVENESS: 9/10

I can't say that you'll have an interest in playing the full game over for a second time but there are many repetitive aspects of the game and if you enjoy those, you'll keep going back for more and won't have a problem. For example, there was a point where Fuji was at around level 300 and I wanted to reset his level back to level one so that I could make him even stronger. I had to go back and do a lot of old battles over and over again so that I could bring his levels back up. It took me more than an hour to do so but because the grinding mechanism is different than other games and there's a cool loot system for completing battles, I had fun leveling him up again.

At its core, Disgaea 7 is a game about grinding. Yeah, if you don't like that, then it will become a daunting process but the game makes it fun enough that you don't really care as much. If you're having fun, You're going to end up picking the same five battles and doing them over hundreds of times each. This is a game that essentially forces you to do a lot of grinding but it makes it really fun, I even had a lot of fun doing other things like constantly going back to random battles so that I could use the gacha system in the hospital.

Personally, I would waste as much as five hours in between doing things like grinding, character creating, upgrading items, or other tasks in between main chapter battles. Not only that but you might want to spend some time now and then revisiting old story moments for the characters and humor. It's never a boring game and there's a lot for you to revisit.

DEPTH: 10/10

There's just so much when it comes to depth. First you have the insane level cap. Just getting a character to level 9,999 is impressive in it's own right but in order to make your character as strong as possible, you need to reset their level back to 1 multiple times. So the total number of levels that each character can obtain is infinite. The character recruitment mechanic also adds a ton because you can create new characters any way you want from a bunch of different classes and stat options. Just creating one character can go a long way but you get the potion to create as many as you want in any way you want.

Then you have the battles themselves which add even more. There's more than 40 unique main story battles for you to go through and each one can be replayed as many times as you like. Then you have the item worlder battles which are tougher and take longer than your average battles. The last main aspect of depth is the dark assembly which can give you all sorts of temporary and permanent buffs. These are very simple minigames but you're going to do them dozens of not hundreds of times.

There's also a ranked mode where you can compete with other real players, a ton of story stuff, and so much more. Disgaea 7 can definitely be daunting to some players but there's just so much to do. I've put in around 165 hours so far and haven't even gotten any of my characters to level 1,000 let alone anywhere near the level cap. The game also has a pretty hefty expansion pass that adds even more story and characters for a pretty decent price. You're never going to run out of things to do.

DIFFICULTY: 1

The game is beyond easy. If you put effort into grinding, then this could easily become the easiest game that you'll ever play. The fact that you have an insanely high level cap proves that you can spend some time building your team and then just destroy everything. It will take some time to set everything up but once you do, you'll be unstoppable. If you reach a point where the battles are too hard, all you have to do is reset the level of a character and then do a few old battles to bring them back up to the same level. It would only take a little time to do this and you'll have a team that's the same level as before, but they'll be so much stronger.

Plus each of these battles will get you a ton of money, weapons, and juice bar items that can go a really long way once you've started collecting a lot of them. The auto battle system is also something that makes the game really easy but it's hard to collect enough turns to make it worthwhile. For every battle that you do, you get one auto battle turn. What I was doing was spamming battles that can be completed in one turn. After playing for like 7 to 10 hours, this became the final battle of chapter 3. I was so strong at that point that I just had to move fuji once and then attack once to win.

Once I collected enough auto battle turns, I would do the same battle over and over in auto battle mode. I still had to spam the button to start and end the battle but I was able to do two or three battles per minute while doing something else like watching TV. 30 minutes of casually doing this while doing something else earned me a ton of money, exp, and items. If you reset the level of your character, you just need to do auto battles a handful of times and they'll be stronger than ever in no time. There were only two areas in the game that were hard and those were the item worlder and the dark assembly but these mostly need to be saved for later in the game. Overall, Disgaea 7 is incredibly easy if you want it to be.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Personally Disgaea 7 quickly became one of my most favorite games of all time because of a mix of gameplay, characters, and humor. It's also a huge step up from what Disgaea 6 was which means that this iteration for the franchise is a huge return to form and massive win for the developers. People who are already fans of the series will get a lot of enjoyment out of the game and can easily cause people to spend a hundred hours or more. Disgaea 7 gets a 9.7 out of 10 from me.