If I asked you to close your eyes and picture a Disgaea game, what images come to mind? Ludicrously high damage number pop-ups? Oodles of customisation menus? A penguin-esque creature enthusiastically exclaiming “DOOD!” perhaps?
Any of those answers would be fitting, but chances are you’d also envision some permutation of characters spread out across an isometric map filled with enemies, treasure chests, and colored movement tiles. Disgaea is a strategy RPG series after all, and it has historically stayed close to those roots.
That makes Disgaea Mayhem, a fresh spin-off entry, quite the anomaly. It may walk and talk like Disgaea, but just beneath the surface lies a very different core experience. Critically, Mayhem does away with tactical, turn-based battles in favour of a new, real-time action combat system à la Dynasty Warriors. It’s undeniably a gamble — one that, while ultimately inoffensive, doesn’t pay off as much as you might hope.
Mayhem follows two leads: the gruff mercenary N.A. (yes, that is actually his name) and the cheery princess Tichelle, who rules the Netherworld of Super Duper — a magical land in which all of the denizens are utterly obsessed with flan. Having inherited the throne from her recently deceased father, Tichelle hires N.A. to quell a rebellion made up of several former subjects. You carry out this mission as the game progresses, blasting through hordes of enemies and bosses in the name of restoring peace to the kingdom.
Eschewing the strategic, puzzle-y battles of traditional Disgaea may sound like sacrilege, but it’s a surprisingly logical genre shift in practice. Wiping out massive groups of enemies with the tap of a couple of buttons feels right at home next to Disgaea’s long-running gimmick of raising character stats to unfathomable heights and dishing out devastating attacks for millions of damage points.
Having direct control over your character also presents a unique opportunity to engage with all of Disgaea’s classic weapon classes in a far more tactile manner. In this sense, Mayhem actually has quite a bit going for it — so what’s the problem?
Arguably the biggest sin to contend with is that Mayhem’s new combat system doesn’t hold a candle to the mechanical depth and variety afforded by Disgaea’s traditional tactical gameplay. Rather than strategising with a full party of heroes, N.A. is the only character you can play as. While you have the ability to customise his playstyle through different weapon classes and assignable special moves, this makes moment-to-moment gameplay a far more simplistic affair.
For most of Mayhem’s runtime, you’ll be dodging, shielding, and spamming combos and special attacks without much variation. Combat and movement controls are appropriately fluid and responsive (cheers for a generally smooth 60fps experience on Switch 2 in Performance Mode), but you’ll be performing the same basic actions a lot — and the actual combat isn’t weighty enough to feel all that satisfying.
Don’t expect much of a challenge either. Most of your opposition is low-level enemy fodder that mindlessly swarms around you in packs and goes down in just a few hits, launching pitiful attacks with little impact as they wait for their turn to get pummeled into oblivion. Repetitiveness is a criticism often leveled at Musou-style games, but it feels particularly egregious here. Nearly every level in the game’s campaign plays out the exact same way with the same objective: wipe out a few waves of monsters before a battle with a slightly more difficult boss or mini-boss. With bog-standard action combat as the order of the day, it gets boring pretty quickly.
It certainly doesn’t help matters that the game’s maps are barren and samey. Aside from varied set dressing for each story chapter, all of the stages are virtually interchangeable with no major environmental gimmicks or twists. Some maps are quite sizeable, but there are no collectibles or exploration incentives to speak of. In practice, you just run around each map until you reach an area where enemies have arbitrarily spawned, dispatch them, run to the next spawn area — rinse and repeat.
The game does at least try to break through all this monotony with some extra mechanical flourishes. Just like in the main series, you can recruit all manner of monsters and customise them as you see fit. You can choose one of these computer-controlled recruits at a time to accompany you in the field and fight alongside you. What’s more, you can Magichange your buddy into a special, unique weapon for a limited time, allowing you to use unique moves and special finishers that sport Disgaea’s trademark wacky flair.
Managing and strengthening your partners is a nice little twist to what is otherwise a fairly mediocre combat system. Though, perhaps allowing you to actively swap control between N.A. and your monster buddies would have allowed for more varied moment-to-moment action.
Mayhem’s narrative dressing feels similarly underbaked. I wouldn’t call Disgaea plots deep or substantial even on the best of days, but Mayhem reaches a level of nonsensical fluff that’s hard to swallow.
N.A. and Tichelle feel like worse versions of Fuji and Pirilika from Disgaea 7, occupying the exact same archetypes and tropes. The rest of the cast is made up of throwaway characters, most of whom make an appearance in a cutscene or two before disappearing entirely.
The franchise’s usual voice-acted, visual novel-style cutscenes are largely reserved for the final boss stage of each episode and the transition to the next episode. Even the start of the game lacks an opening cutscene, as you’re unceremoniously plunked into the tutorial level right after hitting ‘Start.’ It all just feels oddly sparse — not that I’m craving more of this particular narrative.
Whenever they do pop up, cutscenes drag as characters talk in circles and wax poetic about how much they love flan. The unabashed commitment to a flan-centric narrative is admittedly charming and silly at first. By the time the credits roll, however, the bit has well and truly overstayed its welcome.
That’s really saying something, because Mayhem does not stick around for long. My playthrough of the main story clocked in at just under five hours — a far cry from the meatier campaigns of the mainline entries. That’s on account of most stages taking only two to three minutes to complete and a noticeable dearth of side content to engage with.
If there’s one thing that is genuinely admirable about Disgaea Mayhem, it’s the game’s seamless migration of the mainline games’ trademark systems. Combat may be different, but this is still a Disgaea game through and through. You can enhance weapons through the Item World, vote on bills at the Dark Assembly for all sorts of perks and unlockables, or fiddle around with in-game cheats to tweak reward values and other parameters.
Want to sacrifice your item and money pick-up rates to double your experience gain rate? You can do that. Want to make enemies ludicrously strong while making N.A. as sluggish to control as humanly possible? You can also do that. Hey, it’s your life.
Part of what sets Disgaea apart from its contemporaries is how malleable its many RPG systems are. You can customise everything to your heart’s content to fit your preferred playstyle and, if you so desire, exploit any of the thousands of ways to break the game’s mechanics in half and dominate the field. That freedom of choice is still present and accounted for in Mayhem and as enjoyable as ever. It’s just a shame that all of this customisability is in service of a core experience that doesn’t match the series’ usual heights.
Playing Disgaea Mayhem almost feels like peeking into an alternate universe where NIS’ flagship series began life as an action RPG, rather than a tactical one. Plenty of the franchise’s iconic, over-the-top RPG systems are present and accounted for, and they graft surprisingly well onto Mayhem’s core hack-and-slash loop.
The problem is that said loop isn’t fleshed out nearly enough, with shallow and repetitive combat that loses its lustre quickly. Couple that with a forgettable story and a bizarrely short runtime, and Disgaea Mayhem barely ends up making much of an impression at all. It’s an interesting novelty, but I’m fine staying in the timeline where Disgaea keeps tactical battles as its bread and butter.
