Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny

One of the first things you’ll notice is that Disgaea 6 doesn’t look as good as one would expect from a modern title. If you’re new to the sage, then you need to know that this is the first time we see 3D models in a Disgaea game, and although it could have been worse, it just doesn’t feel right. Sometimes the animations feel awkward and the character models sometimes make it difficult to look around and create a strategy or move to the right cell. Although it comes with a “Performance Mode,” sacrificing the graphics quality that much doesn’t sound like a good trade-off, and “Graphics Mode” just makes the game almost unplayable with such loss of fps. How do you want your game, ugly or slow as hell?

All that being said, we have always had a thing for Disgaea’s character design, so hopefully, Disgaea 7 will look better and bring justice to every hero and villain.

Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny tells the story of Zed, a young zombie bent on defeating “The strongest God of Destruction” (he is mentioned that way several times, although his real name is simply God of Destruction). Oh, but this undead fighter is not alone—an ancient sage whose brain was transplanted into the body of a zombie dog, now known as Cerberus, accompanies him.

The game begins with a tutorial showing Zed—whose level is unknown—easily sweeping up maximum-level enemies and interrupting the Dark Assembly. There, our heroes are stopped by Ivar, the Overlord, who doesn’t believe Zed could defeat the God of Destruction… so Zed starts narrating the events leading to such a feat to everyone in the Dark Assembly.

We mentioned before that Disgaea 6 is a turn-based tactics RPG, but one of the game’s premises is dying to come back stronger (thanks to the Super Reincarnation technique). Of course, Zed may be the protagonist but he’ll make several friends along the way, all of them with different jobs and useful techniques. It’s worth noting that Disgaea 6 introduces 4 new jobs: evil eye, pincer shell, mecha girl, and psychic, for a total of 22 available classes.

As for the gameplay—in case you have never played a Tactics game—you manage a team of heroes and move them across a grid, taking turns to defeat other enemies scattered around the map. The difference with other similar titles is how silly it all looks, with characters boasting life bars with millions of HP at level 1, for example. Inflated numbers are the norm in Disgaea 6, so you better get used to it!

Assigning a character class is not the only important thing if you want to min-max your characters. There are several mechanics and sub-mechanics to think about, like improving your stats for better synergy, getting the best out of the Weapon Mastery and Class Proficiency systems, farming Innocents (creatures that inhabit your weapons and armors, making them stronger), etc. All this means you can take the game as a casual SRPG, giving it an end once you finish the main story, but you can also take it as an opportunity to farm the hell out of it and try harder challenges. After all, who doesn’t like dealing 9,999,999,999,999,999 damage in a single attack like a true God of Destruction would?

Manually, it would take you months or even years to get to the true endgame, but thanks to the auto-play feature and the Dark Intelligence system, you can achieve everything you want to achieve while AFK… or AFJC, away from Joy-Cons, to be more precise.

Dark Intelligence allows you to put all your units in automatic mode, customizing the AI to your liking and giving your characters special orders depending on the enemies and scenarios they face. It works similar to programming, using the IF and ELSE commands, managing your team and giving them specific tasks if a preset condition is met or not.

Will you be able to reach level 99,999,999? We’re getting closer every day!

For all those willing to give this epic yet silly adventure a try, Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny is already available, exclusively on the Nintendo Swicth.