It's a solid entry in the series. The main character Zed stands out from the pack of Disgaea protags in both his personality and design. Most of the other Disgaea leads are born to authority or privilege, but he's just some zombie that wants revenge. A sort of revenant. His determination to get back up no matter how many times he's destroyed fits nicely with the reincarnation mechanics of the Disgaea series.
A lot of systems have been simplified in this, to the point that Disgaea 6 might have made more sense as a side-game. The distinction between monsters and humanoids, present in all the previous games, has been dropped.
The Disgaea games have always been designed to make you feel like you're getting away with something. From game one you were able to bribe or bully the senators that were there to constrain your power, and for several games now there's been a there's been a "cheat shop" that lets you directly manipulate multipliers for money, experience and other rewards.
Disgaea 6 adds to this with the Juice Bar, which allows you to directly purchase mana, experience, weapon and class levels for a character from a collective pool that gradually fills up as you finish battles. It works because it starts off as prohibitively expensive, but the money adds up and soon you notice that you can instantly master a weapon that was previously hovering at around level 8 of 100.
Disgaea is about making numbers larger, but more specifically it's about the slow climbs, plateaus and sudden orders-of-magnitude accelerations designed into it.
The game's other major innovation in making you feel like you're cheating despite playing the game as intended is its new user-programmable autobattle system. If you're not strong enough to clear a level on your first try, there's no need to manually plink away at lesser enemies till you're ready to go again. You can just auto-replay older levels until you're strong enough (or wealthy enough to purchase the strength) to continue.
You don't even have to manually win battles the first time you do them, either. There are a handful that are complex enough to require manual navigation, but it's largely up to you whether you want to focus on preplanning and AI programming or manually guiding your characters in order to do more with less.
This makes the game friendlier to players that may have an RSI, but that doesn't seem to be fully intentional. Other parts of the game fairly encourage repetitive stress, like the character-specific achievements (D-merits) for things that cannot be automated, like using the Juice Bar 255 times.
A lot of systems have been simplified in this, to the point that Disgaea 6 might have made more sense as a side-game. The distinction between monsters and humanoids, present in all the previous games, has been dropped.
The Disgaea games have always been designed to make you feel like you're getting away with something. From game one you were able to bribe or bully the senators that were there to constrain your power, and for several games now there's been a there's been a "cheat shop" that lets you directly manipulate multipliers for money, experience and other rewards.
Disgaea 6 adds to this with the Juice Bar, which allows you to directly purchase mana, experience, weapon and class levels for a character from a collective pool that gradually fills up as you finish battles. It works because it starts off as prohibitively expensive, but the money adds up and soon you notice that you can instantly master a weapon that was previously hovering at around level 8 of 100.
Disgaea is about making numbers larger, but more specifically it's about the slow climbs, plateaus and sudden orders-of-magnitude accelerations designed into it.
The game's other major innovation in making you feel like you're cheating despite playing the game as intended is its new user-programmable autobattle system. If you're not strong enough to clear a level on your first try, there's no need to manually plink away at lesser enemies till you're ready to go again. You can just auto-replay older levels until you're strong enough (or wealthy enough to purchase the strength) to continue.
You don't even have to manually win battles the first time you do them, either. There are a handful that are complex enough to require manual navigation, but it's largely up to you whether you want to focus on preplanning and AI programming or manually guiding your characters in order to do more with less.
This makes the game friendlier to players that may have an RSI, but that doesn't seem to be fully intentional. Other parts of the game fairly encourage repetitive stress, like the character-specific achievements (D-merits) for things that cannot be automated, like using the Juice Bar 255 times.