Get on the funk pants, because it's time to groove to the sweet music my words are going to make in your brain. No. No, Gertrude, I said FUNK pants. Goddamn it, that's going to burn into my retinas forever and ever.

Disgaea 6! I planned on writing a big fun series on it the same way I did Disgaea 4 (and maybe other Disgaea games? I don't remember. Look, I've been on this site a minute and I forget the billion words I've written here). I was going to go chapter by chapter and write a blog for each, same as I did back then, except... I don't want to. The story is bad. And I don't just mean silly bad, like other Disgaea games. I mean, this game actively forgets what the hell it is, and swirls the drain so often on the same plot notes that writing about it makes me yawn. That could also be the cough medicine I confused for my diet Coke.

But I wouldn't be doing my due diligence on the site if your resident Disgaea nutbar didn't give Disgaea 6 some kind of write-up, because it's not a bad game. In fact, it's very good - if you're new to the series. But if you're a fan, well... let's get to that in a mnute. For now... DJ! Is your music machine still hooked up? Great! Play me some funk pants-worthy music!

Nope, Gertrude, it's still FUNK pants. FUNK. Oh sweet Jesus, someone get her off the table.

If you're new to the series, Disgaea 6 is pretty great!

For a new player coming into this series, Disgaea 6 is a fine jumping-off point. It doesn't have the depth or the character of 5 (or the reduced price when it comes up on sale, for that matter). But it is a completely accessible, new-player-friendly package that gives you the basics of a Disgaea game.

So if you are new, what is Disgaea? Well, it's a turn-based isometric strategy RPG, not entirely dissimilar in its combat to something like Final Fantasy Tactics, which might be a bad comparison, considering the last time we saw a FFT game, the mortgage crisis was about to teabag the country and fart in our faces for dessert. Some of you were probably still learning to use the potty while wondering why daddy and mommy were making voodoo dolls of the people in charge and trying to convince Cthulhu to take anyone guilty into the sweet annihilating embrace of its maw.

Disgaea is very hard to describe, because there are roughly a thousand mechanics at play, but at its core, it's a very simple RPG system. You bring out a squad of up to ten characters onto a grid-centric level, then take turns using attacks and special abilities like any other tradtional turn-based RPG to clear those maps of bad guys. Your characters level up and learn new abilities. When you're not battling through chapters of a very basic story, you muck about in a home base with things like buying new equipment and accepting new quests. Those "quests" are smaller, bite sized goals you can knock out along the way and earn some nice bonuses, like the game's various currencies or new abilities or even new classes.

You can, for all intents and purposes, create as many characters as you like, then if you want to give those characters new roles, you can "reincarnate" them into a new form. New to Disgaea 6 are a bunch of fresh new bonuses for reincarnating, adding a lot of fun to creating a mix of characters. You start from level one, but you're more powerful and you keep pushing forward.

In that way, Disgaea has always appealed to me. You can always make forward progress with enough blunt force. Can't beat a level? Replay an older one a few times and your characters may be overpowered enough to blow right through the one giving you trouble. You can also do things like level up your equipment by traveling into what's called the Item World, which is essentially hundreds of randomly generated levels you can blow through to level up a weapon or armor piece's stats.

Those are pretty much the basics. The appeal of the story up until this game has been the weirdness of it. You're playing denizens of hell, or a silly anime version of it, anyways. Disgaea characters tend to be morally loose, but generally aim towards doing the right thing. Disgaea 6 unfortunately ditches a lot of the weirdness in favor of a ho-hum story about a zombie seeking to stop the reign of terror caused by Gods of Destruction, an enemy so overused in this game you'll start to get bored by about the thousandth time you've killed one. Fortunately, all the story elements can be easily skipped, leaving the gooey gaming goodness that is a mainstay in the franchise.

That said, there are some problems, especially mechanically. For some bizarre reason, NISA decided to go a different route than the perfectly fine 2D-esque art from the PS3/PS4 era of Disgaea games and go instead for a chibi-look during combat and cutscenes that reminds me of the worst of the PS1 and DS era of chibi-everything RPGs. It's cool they're trying something new, but it is, frankly, a bad decision and a severe downgrade that also appears to come at the cost of many lost class types and special attacks. The stripped-down nature of Disgaea 6 shouldn't affect you if you're new to the series, but if you're not...

But if you're not, what the fuck happened to everything?

Okay, this section assumes you've got some experience with the series, or else I'd be here all week trying to explain the mechanics I'm about to grump about.

First off, here's some positives. Disgaea 6 is all about streamlining. I wasn't sure I was going to like the option to autoplay and autorepeat levels, but honestly, it takes a lot of the tedium out of the post-game and lets me grind while I'm working out or cooking. That's cool as hell. I'm also a huge fan of the reincarnation system, which essentially dilutes down the Chara World stuff that allowed you to give your characters new abilities into a more accessible system. Sharing experience between characters on a map regardless of if they've died or not is also great for power leveling a whole group of weaker characters, incentivizing me to use more of them this game than I would normally.

I like the Juice Bar in theory. This is a new mechanic that allows you to boost your stats (or juice them, get it?), your class levels (regardless of your current class), or your weapon masteries. It's a neat idea bogged down by the weight of another currency, and one with something of an obtuse nature. The karma and juice bar currencies are unnecessary, and with the juice bar, it's particularly egregious since you're also using the game's currency HL. That's right - you have to have two currencies to buy one thing. And the question is, why? What about the juice bar currency is fun? What does it add to the game except more irritation?

And that question, unfortunately, extends to the graphical "upgrade" I mentioned earlier. The chibi-style adds nothing to Disgaea 6, and winds up tanking my Switch if I leave the animations on. By the way, do yourself a favor and turn the visual settings to the middle, because the Switch clearly can't handle PS3-ish graphics for whatever reason - and right now, the game is exclusive. I have zero doubt it will be ported to PC, and that's the version I'd wait for if you do end up playing it. But I question why you would, especially with so much gone.

Gone are lifted attacks, the playful, silly, and mostly unnecessary abilities you could use when carrying several of your characters. Gone is monster fusing, and for that matter, half the monster classes. Gone are half the abilities, leaving a bare-bones yawn-fest of basics that, again, can't get too splashy because Nintendo powered their console with a fucking potato. Gone are the intricacies of the geo panel system, leaving the Item World feeling barren and boring. Gone too is the Item World piracy which... yeah, okay, I never really understood that aspect in the first place and it deserved to go, but it's still another in a laundry list of mechanics gone MIA.

Gone too, and this is the worst cut of all, is the charm and personality. I don't claim to like Disgaea for the story. In fact, after I play through each one the first time, I generally hammer that skip button like I do the like and subscribe button on every Demi Rose Youtube video. But this story is particularly bad in that there's no heart left. The hell trappings are gutted almost to an entirety, save for one overlord character written to an anime-trope T. The story is slavishly devoted to regurgitating plot ideas it JUST told you, circling through character stories every three or four chapters on the nose while also recycling their particular environments. I'm taking a guess here, but I doubt this is due to development time and more to do with the console they were unlucky enough to hitch their financial wagon to. A few more systems on top of what the Switch has to chug through, and I'm sure there would be smoke coming from its pores.

As it stands, I just can't see recommending this over Disgaea 5. D5 might not offer the same power leveling and character customization options, but it's much more of a complete package. Disgaea 6 feels like what it is, a half-cooked half-measure of a game that does just enough to sell itself as a strategy RPG but never quite lives up to being better than its predecessors.

I'm disappointed in Disgea 6 then, even as I'm having a ball power leveling and trying to get to that level 999,999,999 cap. It's a strange game because I genuinely do like it. It gets the gameplay right, and it makes the hook far more accessible by giving you tons of options to overpower your characters. But for whatever the reason, NISA opted to chop everything down to the bone, forgetting that those arteries connect to the game's heart. That's a damn shame.