Release Date: Out Now
Genre: Role Playing Game (RPG) / Strategy
Publisher: NIS America, Inc.
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software, Inc.
| Game Overview |
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The sixth home console entry to the legendary Disgaea series tells a tale of revenge, and of rebellion. As a new and terrible Overlord named Void Dark seeks to enslave the countless Netherworlds, one young demon has stood to end his reign—Killia. In Disgaea 5, lead Killia and his tenacious army of rebels on their dark and dangerous path to vengeance. Filled with more over-the-top action and hilarious writing than ever before, Disgaea 5’s damage numbers are surely headed for the record books.
| Game Detail |
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- Alliance Attacks
- Recruitment
A familiar feature for Disgaea faithful, this system lets you choose from over 40 races and jobs, and identify new party members with the exact traits you desire.
- Revenge Mode
A game about vengeance wouldn’t be complete without a character stat boosting system based on revenge, would it? The Revenge Mode empowers your characters with bonus stats when they’ve become fed up of their allies being beat on.
- Explore the Netherworlds
While previous games in the series have shown a glimpse of the darkness that is the Netherworlds, Disgaea 5 takes you to a myriad of those dark lands.
- Definitely over 9,000
In true Disgaea fashion, Disgaea 5 harnesses the power of the PlayStation®4 to deliver battles with a ridiculous number of enemies and outrageous damage.
| Game Review |
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If you haven’t played a Disgaea game in a while, don’t worry: it’s still the addictive time sink of an RPG it’s always been. As ever, you can tweak your many party members and their gear in an overwhelming number of ways, and pretty much all those ways involve a time and/or resource investment. Just when I’d thought I was happy with where a given character was, I’d decide to re-roll them in order to boost their leveling progress (called reincarnating), level some new gear, and slap some new passive abilities on them to squeeze out just a few extra drops of power. This what I’ve always loved most about Disgaea - there’s practically no limit to what you can do if you have the patience and conceptual understanding to do it.
Disgaea 5 expands these possibilities even further with some new monster types and character classes, not the least of which is the Maid, a class dedicated to making efficient use of consumable items. In the past, having a character spend their one action per turn on a healing or attack item felt like a waste given the other options at their disposal. The Maid smartly solves this with a passive traits that allows her to use an item in addition to her standard action, and she can eventually earn other traits that greatly increase the range and effectiveness of items as well. This effectively transforms what used to be an uninteresting resource into something that can be the difference between life and death
- Darkness - My Old Friend
It’s okay that Disgaea 5 doesn’t take any huge risks with its tried-and-true formula, but I do wish the series would hold on to ideas that work and iterate on them rather than always toss them for something new. For instance, Disgaea D2’s monster mount system added an excellent new layer to the relationship between human and monster units, but it’s been scrapped for the older Magichange system, which while novel, doesn’t provide the same functionality and feels like a step sideways. Magichange isn’t bad or anything, but it’s effects are temporary, and require you to redeploy the monster unit afterwards, making it less flexible.
This is the first Disgaea for the PlayStation 4 and though it doesn’t take huge advantage of the added power, Disgaea 5 is the sharpest, cleanest looking one yet. All the jagged edges on the sprite characters are gone, and the special effects on big spells and attacks run hitch-free. Beyond the technical improvements though, Disgaea 5’s use of color is worth commending. This series has always been a colorful affair, but there’s a really great balance of warm and cool colors, and some nice gradients between the two here. It’s subtle, but it helps Disgaea 5 look markedly better than its most recent predecessor.
- New Bells and Whistles
New classes aside, Disgaea 5 supplements its familiar core with even more extra layers than just about any entry in the series, though not all of it necessarily succeeds. Some of the winners include a map editor that allows you to create and share your own custom maps, the ability to assign your characters a subclass, and the new Squad system, which allows you to group party members together in order to gain unique bonuses and abilities.
For example, characters thrown into the Giant Killer Squad will be giant-sized for their first three turns in battle, and members of the Foot Soldier Squad get stat bonuses based on how many people have been enlisted to their ranks. Though that’s a lot to manage, it provides a welcome incentive to hire and level as many characters as you can to to take full advantage of what squads have to offer.
Even the less successful ones, like the new Interrogation or Quest systems add some new flavor, despite feeling slightly extraneous and fiddly to manage. Accepting quests gives you near-term goals to shoot for in order to unlock new classes or earn rare items, but there’s no way to check on them unless you go back to the quest NPC in the hub world. Interrogation bends captured enemy units to your will, but the actual benefits seem a bit light given the trouble of capturing them versus killing them. Disgaea’s structure is such that you don’t need to make use of every system and mechanic available to you in order to succeed, so it never feels like an obstacle to progress.
