These are all the steps that the team has taken so that the saga does not stagnate.
The president of Nippon Ichi has spoken to Famitsu about the latest installment of the Disgaea saga, one of the most successful SRPGs of recent times, with a formula that tries to evolve within a very defined scheme, in a constant balance between maintaining the essence for a very specific fan and not always offering the same, while trying to attract new players – which is not easy for such a specific game. Therefore, Sohei Niikawa’s priority is to avoid getting stuck and fans losing interest in the series.
The most obvious change is in the graphics engine, in which the classic sprites are replaced by a 3D engine with Cel-Shading, as almost all the studies currently carrying out JRPG, with some exceptions. On the one hand, it is still a small tragedy for Sprite lovers, since Disgaea was one of the few who held that flag, but it cannot be denied either that the saga sinned a bit by reusing characters and creatures and that using the 3D will give you more flexibility to create eye-catching combat animations.
Quadrillion points of damage
Another of the renewed aspects is to increase to the beast the already huge range of power ranges of the game, one of the best known emblems of the saga. If one of the great objectives in past games was to reach level 9999, now we will start at that level and we will have a maximum level of 99,999,999, with enemies in the quadrillion range (on the English short scale, which implies life bars 16 digits). To scale this nonsense, we will level up much faster and the damage from hits and powers will increase proportionally.
One of the team’s goals is to ensure that Disgaea doesn’t necessarily have to be a game that requires hours of dedication to be enjoyed. If you want to play in a “power player” plan, you can do it, but you also want the player to feel that they are progressing and advancing satisfactorily if they do not have time to dedicate many hours in a row. In that sense, the title will offer a multitude of facilities: increased speed, automatic play and a customizable system for AI should make the title compatible with various schedules and lifestyles. In addition, the mechanics by which we will be a little more and more powerful each time we fall in combat, will allow us a constant progression and not feel that we have lost hours for taking a wrong step, a mechanic that reminds us of that of the tall roguelike and to another game from Nippon Ichi, the great ZHP for PSP.
In closing, Niikawa comments that pre-production of the game started in 2018 but that development began in the second half of 2019. At that time the PS5 specifications were unknown, so it was decided on the current generation. Currently the project is 90% complete and the launch target is set for January 28, 2020 simultaneously on PS4 and Switch, in Japan. In the West, the launch will occur exclusively for Switch in summer 2021.
