This probably ends up being one of the most wholesome of the Disgaea games and I dig that a lot actually?

Disgaea 1 / 1 PC: A classic, the definer for the franchise with a goofy, fun aesthetic and playfully dark. I’ll always like this one, but it’s not my favorite because the Qualiy of Life changes of later games blows this out of the water.

Disgaea 2: It’s OK. I just don’t care for most of the new characters and don’t remember the plot at all.

Disgaea 3: The school setting and “deliquent” thing ruined this one for me. I skipped most of the story past chapter 4, but I think this was the first one where I got a level 9999 Nekomata.

Soul Nomad: Not actually a Disgaea game at all and plays quite differently in terms of combat, but honestly I wanted to mention this somewhere because I freaking ADORE what Soul Nomad does with its story and alternate story branches.

Disgaea 4: I didn’t even finish this one, though I thought the characters were way more interesting than 3. The Sardine obsession didn’t really hit right for me though.

Disgaea 1 D2: Never played this one. Wish I had.

Disgaea 5 Complete: Up until now if you asked me which Disgaea game to start with, I’d have said this one. Some of the best quality of life features of the entire franchise, a story that isn’t offputting but also isn’t entirely too self-serious either. I liked that Seraphina has the option to switch into a bunny suit right from the start, and there were just a looooot of characters I enjoyed playing as in this game. This was the first Disgaea where I went all the way to defeat Baal and most of the post game (I did not do Carnage Baal, screw that). Buuuut it does have one bugged Damage achievement on Steam, so this game is not marked as 100% complete in my library and that annoys me.

Disgaea 6: The gameplay is fine, and honestly I liked what they were trying to do with the new mechanics and 3D graphics, but this game is oddly taxing on graphics hardware for how simple the graphics are and Nekomatas are no longer playable. The auto-battle option is divisive, and the stat-inflation makes it a bit harder to keep track of the actual progress towards post-game completion. The story is barely worth watching, it’s just. ehhhh, Clearly experimental, and I like the twist near the midpoint of the game, but most of the characters are pretty dull in how they’re handled. And it’s a personal pet peeve to have characters romantically fawning over each-other as a focal plot point, so Seraphina’s insistence on controlling all men was exhausting.

Disgaea 7: I freaking adore this game. All of the Quality of Life of Disgaea 5, even a bit of extra relief from grinding by taking a very small amount of the auto-battle options from Disgaea 6 and turning it into a consumable resource to mitigate tedium rather than replacing the motivation to try manually playing through stages at all. The most convoluted parts of Disgaea 5 have either been simplified or replaced with some of the mechanics from prior games

• Capture works through the Base Panel method like the older games rather than Capture skills.
• Jumbication allows any character to use large AoEs and quickly attack anywhere on the map without having to do lots of tidious extra moves when working through item world.
• Item World as a whole has been hyper condensed down to 10 – 40 floors based on rarity instead of 100-300, enemy level and item stat growth scales much faster in the item world so it’s great for leveling, you can steal multiples of an item from Item Gods if you Gency Exit out without finishing the map and re-enter for another attempt, item duping is a lot quicker when it succeeds/fails, and ITEMS CAN REINCARNATE NOW WTF)
• Curry mechanic from Disgaea 5 has been replaced with a medicine type mechanic that doesn’t require buying tons of junk items to dump into the stack. This is waaaay easier to understand and utilize and quite powerful in midgame.
• The ability to change class mid-level is unlocked around chapter 3 or 4, so if you’re planning on using class stars to pump up the character stats from reincarnation, you can start cycling through them way earlier than would be reasonable in Disgaea 5, and you can get total item world DESTROYER of a character before even getting half way through the story (this isn’t optimal of course, because you don’t have the full cheat shop bonus points unlocked so early, and there’s only so far you can go in Item World pre-Carnage, but still!! I got two TWO MILLION in SPD and HIT before finishing chapter 5 through intentional use of the stat growth evilities and less than 5 reincarnations.)

Also story wise I like this one a looooooot more than any of the prior ones. The main character is kind of an otaku nerd lady who’s a bit of a well meaning ditz, and the other character starts off seeming like they’re going to play the “demons are supposed to be evil” card like Laharl or Killia, but then he’s totally something else? Like, by the time the game transitioned from “silly goofy joke mode” to “dark plot mode” I had already bought into most of these characters and formed opinions about them and then the story was _really_ toying with my expectations. Had more than one point where the game caught me with a curveball of a well-thought-out set of cause and effect that I *should* have foreseen, but didn’t because I was so used to the “just roll with it” goofs prior. And some of the questions and issues presented really don’t have any clean or perfect answers. It makes me think. It makes me think about the characters as people, to consider my own opinions and those of other people I know, and what our views and how much our opinions on the world actually align with the reality. I like that.

I’m only on Chapter 10, and I know there are 17 Chapters and Carnage. But yeah like, 5 chapters in I felt positive about the game, but at Chapter 10 I feel very sure this is my favorite freaking Disgaea game so far.

Also the main two characters aren’t horny for each-other or trying to romance it up, which is a plus in my book. I relate to Pirilika’s goofs a lot. Right down to botched idoms, catgirl aesthetics, and naming things based on similar sounds rather than the actual name. It hits juuuuuust right with my sensibilities.

OMG SUSHY

(yes I know it’s dumb that they keep mispronouncing sushi but lmao it cracks me up)

Also I like how even random fodder enemy names tends to line up with my silly penchant for naming things after technical concepts.

OH ALSO, DO YOU REMEMBER THAT “HISTORY OF JAPAN” VIDEO BY BILL WURTZ? I KNOW YOU DO.

oh also Ceefore pretty blatantly has some kind of explosion fetish going on which conveniently overlaps with my balloon nonsense. I promise you this will turn into fanart eventually.

Also I know I have some friends who were really into that one particular Mahjong anime / manga series.

Also there’s some BANGER rock music in here 🎸🎸🎸

Anyway I was going to play more Disgaea 7 but somehow it took me long enough to write this that my breakfast is ready. So I’m gonna go eat and then resume playing Disgaea 7 until I decide to make myself do Twitch Stream art requests or something