Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless review

Rise and grind, doods! Disgaea 7 restores the franchise’s grid-based glory.

Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny truly lived up to its feisty subtitle. Notably, the game abandoned its captivating spritework, shifting to three-dimensional, polygonal characters. The visual change forced Switch owners to select between different graphical options- each accompanied by a different sacrifice. The inclusion of auto-battling proved just as baffling. Its presence undermined grinding, which had long been a quintessential constituent for the franchise. Although patches and ports to different platforms improved performance, Disgaea 6’s deviations remained divisive.

Unsurprisingly, critical and commercial reactions were tepid, prompting director Shunsuke Minowa to state that Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless would return to the franchise’s roots. And like an impish influencer asking for another chance, D7 occasionally feels like an apology for an incident that never should have happened in the first place. Peer past a few requisite novelties to Netherworld formula and you’ll find the latest entries will undoubtedly delight Disgaea devotees. Just don’t slip up again, N1.

Another Seemingly Incompatible Cast

Previous entries have strived to recapture the comical chemistry between Hour of Darkness’ Laharl, Etna, and Flonne or the spirited tension created by Cursed Memories’ Adell and Rozalin. Largely, Disgaea works best when its relationships are slightly dysfunctional or extend an eclectic collection of characters with contradictory perspectives.

Pleasingly, that’s the case with Vows of the Virtueless’ Pirilika and Fuji. The former is an affluent otaku who’s come to a part of the Netherworld called Hinomoto, which resembles Tokugawa-era Japan. Beyond a tendency for mixing up idioms, she has a comically misinformed understanding of the region mostly cultivated by the media. Pirilika thinks bushido is still a dominant set of principles. But in reality, the practice has fallen out of favor thanks to a malevolent shogun named Demmodore Opener and his magistrate, who replaced the noble path with a code of destruction.

A Virtuous, Less Lascivious Script

On the other hand, Fuji is a demon who’s deep in debt and is always looking for an easy way to reduce his balance. One of his defining traits is coughing up blood when he inadvertently feels a bit of empathy. Another is a deep-rooted abhorrence of bushido. Unsurprisingly, the two team up to dethrone the possibility literal puppet shogun and restore Hinomoto. Given their conflicting stances on bushido, this makes for plenty of energetic arguments between Pirilika and Fuji.

Disgaea has always excelled at combining a cast of amusing archetypes and letting them intermingle with each other. And while Vows of the Virtueless doesn’t top the repartee found in the first two entries, there are some great interactions among the main cast and with some of the game’s secondary characters. One example: Fuji has a daughter named Ao who longs for his attention. Every time she’s ostracized, she reacts by blowing up a building. Meanwhile, Pirilika resembles the kind of person who assumes that city pop is still playing on contemporary Japanese radio stations. Disgaea 7 has an ample number of targets for skewering and largely hits most of them, which should please audiences who appreciate the series’ in-jokes. That said, the script is playful, but a bit less perverted this time out.

Turn-based Aggression with a Few Additions

While exposition bookends the game’s chapters and provides an impetus for the game’s encounters, combat is where you’ll spend the bulk of your time. If you’ve never played any of the previous Disgaea titles, the game provides a succinct summary of the fundamentals. But you’ll have to experiment to learn and master the nuances, which shouldn’t be too difficult as quite a few strategy-driven titles have borrowed from Nippon Ichi’s basics.

You’re given a bit of freedom during combat deployment, selecting characters in any order. While units follow the traditional cycle of moving and attacking, actions aren’t performed until you select the execute command from game’s menu system. Disgaea devotees will feel light at home, with familiar mechanics like geo panels, throwing characters, and the item world all making a welcome reappearance.

No Justification, Just Jumbification

Pleasingly, the item world dishes out dividends at a faster rate, partially thanks to smaller stages. Also, there’s an extremely welcome new option called item reincarnation. This lets you transform your gear into advanced forms, while preserving any distinctive qualities. There’s plenty of freedom, extending the ability to create weapons that can increase your movement rate or reach- adding another layer of flexibility to an already marvelously malleable system.

The sensation of being able to cheat the system remains as robust as ever. Beyond transmuting your items multiple times and gaining additional qualities each generation, there’s also jumbification. Whenever your party receives damage, you’ll gradually fill a gauge. Once the meter is maxed, you can select a character to grow into a kaiju-sized monstrosity who is so big, they are forced to sit on the sidelines. But from this position, your behemoth can instigate assaults with wide areas of effect or trigger passive boosts that can affect every ally on the field. Yes, it’s even possible to obliterate a troublesome boss during your three-turn episode of jumbification. But it’s also possible for enemies to enlarge as well. Survive one of these unexpected onslaughts from the CPU and you’ll feel like a turn-based prodigy or at least a dedicated min-maxer.

Conclusion

NIS didn’t want to completely remove Disgaea 6’s Demonic Intelligence system, but here auto-battling’s role has been significantly reduced. Now, you’ll have to spend a resource known as poltergas when attempting to level up your party members. Additionally, D7 provides a bit more player control when programming the actions of your team- prioritizing ally units that most need healing or attacking weaker to reduce the number of incoming attacks. And while pre-launch online community is rather modest, the ability to build a custom team, program the behavior of each member, and fight asynchronous opponents offers some intriguing possibilities. Let’s hope the developers are quick to quash any potential cheating, as that could undermine things.

One of Disgaea’s biggest draws is the sense of freedom. Feel like breaking the system to forge a stress-free path through the 30-hour main campaign? Simply loiter in the item world for a few hours to create god-level gear. Looking for a challenge? Beyond managing a rag-tag team of scrappy Prinnies, there’s always the possibility of building a single celestial hostess to scrap toward the generous post-game content. Given that there are now 45 different classes to pick from (the new maiko distracts male characters), there are a multitude of different ways to help Hinomoto. Mostly, you’ll have to do the work on your own this time, which is how Disgaea should be.

Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless was played on PC
with review code provided by the publisher.