I've been catching up with the happenings of the Netherworld and its residents – and especially Prinnies, the souls of humans atoning for their sins in plush penguin bodies. And we've reached the 6th entry in the series: Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny (obviously from Nippon Ichi Software and localised by NIS America).
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The version I've diving in today is Disgaea 6 Complete, the later compilation re-release of the game for multiple platforms and bundled with all its DLC. More about these multiple releases later, as its a thing of its own.
As usual, Disgaea 6 is its own story, this time starring a zombie boy Zed and his companion, a zombie mutt Cerberus. An unstoppable God of Destruction has appeared in the Netherworld and it will destroy everything in its path – and Zed is dedicated to defeat it. But see, though Zed is just a zombie, the 2nd lowest rank of demons, he has a secret weapon; a spell of Super Reincarnation.
In Disgaea lore, reincarnating means after death a soul is cleansed by atonement and recycled for new life without any memories of its past. Super Reincarnation keeps the person intact as is. Not only that, the reincarnation happens in a place and time most optimal for making either the spells target – Zed – grow in power.
In other words, Zed keeps on dying and dying, coming back stronger every time. By the game's start he has already died thousands of times, inching ever so much closer to the defeat of the God of Destruction. And powering Zed is his love for his little zombie sister Bieko.
Of course, this being Disgaea, Zed accumulates a veritable army of friends across reincarnating all over the universe, from a super-rich human king Misedor to a musical world's princess Melodia. Some of the characters are quite out there and I won't spoil them.
There are some quite big changes in Disgaea 6. The most obvious is clear from the very beginning; instead of sprite based 2.5D presentation, the series goes full 3D. And the transition is, in terms of presentation, super-smooth. Heck, the cell-shaded art looks crispy enough that sometimes they blend almost seamlessly with the talking character stills used for dialogue.
There are several side-effects from going 3D and I'll write more on that further down the post, but mostly I'd say they've done a banger job.
The other thing you'll notice immediately is the character levelling change-up; it's boosted to overdrive. In Disgaea 5, by the end of the main campaign, my main cast was around level 120, give or take 20 levels. In Disgaea 6, some characters in my squad – in particularly the support healers – were at the initial maximum of Level 9999!
This bleeds to all other aspects as well, as you'll soon find yourself doing absolutely nuts amounts of damage. In fact, the in-game damage numbers don't even show the full values, but opting for saying '20k' and '9mil'.
Not going to lie, it took a while to get my head around, trying to understand how much is 'much' with crazy numbers like this.
But what about the Prinnies? Like everyone else, they've gotten a full 3D makeover that captures them pixel-perfectly. Most of their iconic attacks are here too.
Prinnies aren't much of the story's focus, but the very first vassal Zed acquires is a Prinny. In the between-missions dialogue events the relation between the Prinnies and Zed is touched upon and it is an interesting dynamic. They do have a lot of common ground, as where zombies are the 2nd worst-treated of demons, Prinnies are the number one.
I can't feature the game without, sadly, mentioning the Big Controversy surrounding how the game launched originally. It made Disgaea 6 a needlessly divisive among fans to this day.
In the beginning I mentioned that 'Complete' version was multiplatform – and that's because the original was exclusive to Switch... but only in the west. This wasn't exactly a good move for two reasons.
First, in terms of processing power, Switch looses to most modern smartphones and as it turns out, the first high-def 3D entry of the series doesn't run that great on it. And that's after taking into account that Disgaea was always PlayStation exclusive franchise until part 6, basically pissing in the cereal of the entire western fanbase who – obviously – mainlined on Sony systems.
Fun fact, the original release of Disgaea 6 – and the re-release of the Prinny solo games for it – were the only reason I got a Switch in the first place. The latter are also the only reason I still have my Switch, I need my Prinny fix.
Many fans seemed to also be very disappointed in the streamlining and lack of some of the advanced features seen in the previous entries. However...
Now, this might sound like heresy to some series fans, but I don't mind most of the streamlining done. Not all of it hits perfectly, but many either make sense or are understandable – whilst the core gameplay remains as solid as ever.
For starters, having to cull down on special moves, characters etc. was unavoidable if the series ever was going to move to 3D. The past games had used the same engine and art assets for all this time, allowing them to keep adding to the roster of both. With going 3D, NIS had to start over and they are not a giant megacorporation with infinite coffers.
I'm honestly amazed how many of the classic units are there, how well they translate into 3D and accurate and dynamic their signature specials are. The only thing I miss are those zany combo attack animations, but everything else works so well I can't bring myself to complain.
As for the 'making sense' part, I for one love how the Netherworld Hospital is now automatic, having become a 'prize collection' system instead. Not having to separately go to the hospital between every mission is a truest time-saver. I also like how the research system isn't its own thing, but now about the Item World instead. It ties nicely to the gameplay and gives more options for upgrading gear.
Controversially, I can also understand the idea of wanting to bring the accumulated feature set back a bit. I played these games in chronological order like most fans, so I got to know the features game by game. However, Disgaea's stories aren't connected meant to be able to be jumped to without prior knowledge and it must've made 'onboarding' a nightmare with systems growing ever more complex.
Don't let the controversial original release of the game turn you away, grab the Complete version for the system-of-your-choice and have a blast. It may not be as big and bursting from seams with features as Disgaea 5, but it still has the series heart in the right place. Not to mention fun characters that grow on you.
And by the way, if you're reading Nippon Ichi: I lost to these guys on purpose. Now give us Prinny 3, doods!
