REVIEW: Disgaea 6 Complete


Title	Disgaea 6 Complete
Developer	Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher	NIS America
Release Date	January 28th, 2021 (Switch) June 28th, 2022 (PC, PS4, PS5)
Genre	Strategy
Platform	PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch
Age Rating	Teen
Official Website

I didn’t get a chance to check out Disgaea 6 when it released on the Nintendo Switch a while back, so I was pretty excited to get my hands on the new PC release on Steam. This version had performance and graphical improvements, as well as all the DLC from the previous release. I knew they had changed things up a bit this time around, so let’s see if this old hand at this fantastic series approves of these.

The story here follows a young zombie named Zed. He is traveling to different Netherworlds in search of the God of Destruction that ruined his meager, but peaceful, life with his little sister, Bieko. Zed will have to become more powerful to achieve his goals, but he is one headstrong zombie. Along his journey he will encounter a group of unique and talented allies that will help him on his quest. Will he be able to defeat the God of Destruction once and for all? Time will tell!

While this cast didn’t reach the heights of some of the previous franchise entries, I felt like this was a solid crew. Zed was like Laharl in some respects. He was very stubborn and always pushed forward with his goals with reckless abandon. His interactions with the loved crazed Princess Melodia really made me think about Laharl and Flonne from years ago. Other characters here include King Misdor, who thinks money can solve any problem, Piyori, one of the famous Prism Rangers, and the very old Witch of the Abyss herself, Majolene. She looks very young in her magical girl outfit obtained through a big mishap, but she is a very old soul. This, of course, is all topped with you meeting up with the three that are still my favorite Disgaea characters of all time: Laharl, Flonne and Etna.

Graphically, the PC release of Disgaea 6 Complete looks amazing. The new 3D art style really shines with tons of details at the higher resolutions this version provides. I wasn’t really sure I would like this new style going into this, but after seeing my favorites, like Raspberyl and Flonne, look amazing, by the end I loved it. You can, of course, tweak a lot of settings including some scaling options to get this running on rigs with lower specs, as well. I was able to keep a frame rate of 144 FPS most of the time, the hub world had this strange bug where it would seem to lock things at 74 FPS for some odd reason, but it was so smooth that I’d have never noticed without a frame counter on.

The Disgaea series has always offered some great music, and this entry is no exception. The fun whimsical style remains here, and that is really what sets this apart from other SRPGs that use more serious tracks. That’s not to say there aren’t some heartfelt tracks in here for the somber moments in the story, the team did a wonderful job on those as well. This is one of the few series I usually enjoy both the Japanese and English voice casts for the characters, and the same held true this time around. Both casts do a wonderful job giving these characters a lot of personality, so this really comes down to which one you prefer in the end.

The gameplay is where some questionable choices were made. The core system is still in place here. You do battle on the famous grid-based combat system with standard normal Geo Symbols, and everything works just like previous entries. The problem I have here is while NIS was trying to make the game more accessible, they made it way too easy. They did this in a number of ways, but I’m going to cover what I feel like are the worst offenders here. The first, is experience is given to every member that participates in battle. This in itself wouldn’t be a huge problem, but the amount of EXP given per battle is just insane, even without the boost tickets. It’s easy to gain 100’s of levels on a single dive in item world if you crank up the enemy level without breaking a sweat. The insanity grows even more if you decided to purchase the boost tickets. You can gain well over 1000 levels in a single battle. This makes it easy to Super Reincarnate all of your favorite fighters, giving them completely broken stats that can get pumped up even more with the Juice Bar. Here, you can spend extracts and HL to boost up basically any stat a character has. You can boost weapon proficiency, Mana, upgrade their class quicker, and more. You earn an insane amount of these extracts just doing the in-game quests, and while HL does hold this back some from going completely off the rails, you can gain that pretty quickly as well using the Cheat Shop.

Taking those two things into account and adding in the squads features, auto battle and a few other tweaks they have made, you get the idea of how much easier they have made this one. I never hit any sort of resistance on any map until I started doing some of the post game challenges. I could’ve cranked the difficulty up on hard I suppose and made this a bit better, but honestly, I just feel like a lot of this defeated the purpose of the older games. They were in fact grindy, but they challenged you to find better ways to do it, so you could beat the system. There was no need for that here, since this was turned in your favor from the start.

Even with the issues I had with the difficulty here, Disgaea 6 Complete is still a fun entry in the series. It’s got a good cast of characters and the same basic gameplay we all know and love. I love the new 3D character models, and I hope they continue using those in the series going forward. I played about 60 hours and got four of the endings before I decided to write this review, so there is plenty of gameplay here to be had for those that want to break this, already easy game, wide open. I feel like the pricing on this one is a bit much at $69.99. I get that it comes with all the DLC, but this is basically a 10 buck surcharge for a better port in the end. If you’re a fan of the Disgaea series, you will certainly have some fun here, but when you compare it to the others, it will feel lackluster. If you were turned off by the grinding in the old games, you may want to give this one a shot, since it is much easier.