Almost three years on from its original release, the ultimate version of Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless is coming to the Switch 2, bringing with it all of the previous paid DLC, alongside a new story “The Nethertime Support Force”, new gameplay features (the ability to remove stat caps) and free access to the previously MC-exclusive Hell Mode. Considering that we awarded the base game a stunning 9/10, surely that makes Disgaea 7 Complete an even more essential purchase for Switch 2 owners?
But what even is Disgaea? Simply put, it’s a quirky tactical RPG along the lines of a Final Fantasy Tactics or Fire Emblem, but with everything turned up to 11. Everything comes with flashy animations, everyone speaks by shouting, the story is fast-paced nonsense and it’s all rather easy to get swept up in what’s going on.
Disgaea 7 is a wild ride on the demon side. Why demons? Because everyone you come across in this hell-adjacent Netherworld is a demon. Your main characters are Fuji, a self-centred demon who wants power and is allergic to empathy, and Pirilika, a spoiled rich kid on holiday looking for bushido in the world of Hinamoto. As you might expect, there’s no bushido, there’s no warriors, just a bunch of poor and pissed off demons. Chaos (and plenty of tactical battles) ensues.
The problem is that this combat is both incredibly deep and utterly impenetrable to new players, with tutorial screens frequently being 12–15 pages long. As someone that reads and writes for a living, my god was I getting bored of the endless, poorly formatted tutorial pages, with sentences and paragraphs splitting over multiple screens. At a base level, the combat is pretty fun, but when you start adding in the more complicated mechanics, the bajillion classes which aren’t explained, the lack of an ability to optimise equipment and no video or playable tutorials to explain anything that’s going on, you rapidly run into problems.
If you’re new to the franchise, you’ll find it’s like the move Titanic, in that it starts getting good around 3 hours in. After this point, you should have wrapped your head around the game and its mechanics, but it’s up to you if you want to commit to that level of time investment.
Putting new players to one side, there’s a lot here for franchise veterans to love, including all of the old DLC and a brand new post-game chapter letting you venture into the Netherworlds of past Disgaea games. On top of this, there’s a new playable character and, once you unlock it in the Dark Assembly, uncapped stats to help you build your party to utter (and absurd) perfection.
Speaking of which, the Dark Assembly will also let you unlock Hell Mode for all of your characters — something previously limited to the main characters — once you clear the main story. This obviously doesn’t affect the gameplay for the vast majority of the game, but it’s a nice post-game quality of life upgrade.
And for those of you who are simply masochists, there’s an all-new superboss to look forward to. Remember those end-game stat cap removals we just spoke about? They’re going to be essential if you want to stand a chance here.
