There are a few reasons why I’m jumping over three very worthy sequels to look at 2015’s Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance for this final Disgaea post. One is that I just really like Disgaea 5. Another is that I’ve played it recently and have it fresh in my mind, avoiding the need to go back and review much of the game’s content to write about it in a meaningful way.
However, the most important reason I decided to pick up D5 for a closer look is its strong contrast with the first game in terms of their characters and stories. Both include a lot of wacky, bizarre humor along with a fair dose of drama. Disgaea 5 turns that contrast between over-the-top humor and drama way up, however. It turns the contrast up so high that some people may accuse it of having a problem with wild and inappropriate tonal shifts.
Yeah, this girl might be wearing goofy-looking bunny ears and a bow tie but this is a serious scene, damn it.
I wouldn’t agree with that. Not so much, anyway. I do think Disgaea 5 lays on the drama thick, much thicker than Disgaea 1 did, and that it swings pretty quickly from light comedy to heavy drama and back. Part of this heavier drama stems from the fact that the villains in this story really are serious villains who do bad things, unlike D1‘s villains who were more malicious, incompetent assholes than actual threats. It can make it difficult to pour wacky comedy into this mix and have it work.
But Disgaea 5 does work. I have one issue with it, especially when I contrast it with Disgaea 1. But we’ll get to that stupid insignificant nitpick soon enough, and it really is insignificant. To the subject at hand now: what the hell is going on in this game?
The story of Disgaea 5 begins in the middle of a war. The opening scene takes place quite literally in the middle of it on a battlefield, where two armies of demons are standing off. If you were new to the series when you picked this game up, the phrase “demon armies fighting a battle” might conjure an image of Lord of the Rings-style masses of scary-looking orcs, but of course these armies are made of the same somewhat cartoony anime-ized units you’ve been able to recruit starting from D1. To add to that disconnect, the demon overlord acting as commander of the attacking army, Seraphina, is a young woman who’s dressed in the exact opposite of what would be appropriate for a battlefield — she rather looks like she’s ready to go out clubbing. She does have a pistol at her side, but that’s the only sign that she’s a combatant, and she doesn’t seem all that willing to do any fighting herself.
Seraphina’s soldiers (Prinnies, those same penguin-looking guys from Disgaea 1) are doing their best to attack the enemy, but they’re losing the fight badly. Just before the other side is about to break through their line and overrun them, however, a mysterious, very edgy-looking stranger shows up out of nowhere and sits down right in the middle of the battlefield. This guy then pulls out a bowl of food and starts eating. Seraphina asks him what he’s thinking having lunch so calmly between two fighting armies. Instead of giving her a straight answer, he finishes his meal and then kills the enemy’s entire company with his powerful techniques. Introducing himself as Killia, the stranger then starts to leave, off to find another battle.
Seraphina is extremely impressed with Killia’s talent at killing (perhaps that’s why he was named Killia?) So when he tries to take off, she holds him at gunpoint and tells him he’s now her servant. So much for doing good deeds for strangers. In his now-exhausted state he can’t resist her, so Killia reluctantly follows Seraphina back to her place, a “pocket Netherworld” that looks a lot like a space station-based combination shopping mall/casino. Seraphina tells Killia to make himself at home. And despite Killia’s eagerness to get away (and his annoyance with Seraphina’s constant insistence that he’s fallen in love with her, because why else would he have saved her life) he does just that, becoming the new general of Seraphina’s forces and letting her take a hands-off management role that suits her character better. Killia, for his part, shocks every other demon he meets with his politeness and his readiness to apologize when he feels he’s wronged or offended someone — a real oddity for a demon it seems, and especially for one so powerful.
Oh yeah, Seraphina also does that weird “oh-hohohoho” anime lady laugh. Get used to that.
It turns out that Killia’s sudden appearance was a very lucky thing. The chief of that enemy army, the self-proclaimed demon emperor Void Dark, is extremely powerful, both in terms of his personal power and the size of his forces. At the opening of Disgaea 5, this Void Dark is in the process of conquering all the various Netherworlds (there are multiple Netherworlds now that the game treats sort of like different planets, a difference from the early titles.) He also has no problem with killing his enemies on the spot, or even with killing his own men if they displease him. “Chief Secretary to Void Dark” may be the most dangerous job in this universe for how often he cycles through them, and I don’t mean they’re just laid off. Captured demon overlords are also at risk, since Void enjoys showing off how powerful he is by fighting them himself.
He seems to genuinely enjoy being an evil asshole. It’s nice to see a guy with such passion for his work.
Seraphina has been doing her best to fight this demonic Genghis Khan vampire-looking guy, but on her own she couldn’t do much. Now with Killia press-ganged into her army, she can effectively fight the jerk and start building a coalition of demon overlords against him. It helps that Killia seems to hate Void Dark for some reason that he won’t talk about. Killia’s hatred for Void Dark comes off as a lot more personal than everyone else’s, in fact, but Void is a bad guy after all, so it’s only natural. And hey, Killia keeps pulling out this flower encased in ice and talking to it in a bitter, remorseful way, referring to someone named “Lieze.” What could that mean? I’m sure it’s not important to the plot at all.
The story now follows Seraphina, Killia and their growing army as they travel around trying to liberate Netherworlds from Void Dark’s massive forces, who call themselves the Lost Army. In the course of freeing these worlds, your party enlists a bunch of other demon overlords. These include Red Magnus, a giant dude who’s extremely hotheaded and quick to jump to conclusions but also loyal to the death, Usalia, the orphaned bunny-eared daughter of the defeated king and queen of a rabbit-populated Netherworld, and Christo, a demon strategist who is suspiciously evasive about his background, claiming to be the overlord of a “certain giant Netherworld” (which the boneheaded Magnus mishears as a Netherworld named “Certain Giant” that must be populated by giants.) Rounding out the main cast is Zeroken, an annoyingly chatty kid who aspires to be a great martial artist and soon latches onto Killia as his “big bro” much to Killia’s irritation.
The crew all together, having a post-battle conference.
As our band of demon allies flies around the universe of Netherworlds, they begin to form a serious resistance to Void Dark’s empire. Void finally takes personal notice of these pests around the start of the mid-game and sends his two top generals, Bloodis and Majorita, to harass them. These two couldn’t look more different. Bloodis is a massively strong guy dressed in a full suit of armor who punches his opponents to death, while Majorita is just a kid, albeit a skilled necromancer who revives the corpses of her enemies to join her army in a horrific process she calls “kill and recycle.” These two pose the most serious threats to our cast of characters throughout most of the game.
Around the middle of the story, most of the characters’ big secrets and motivations for fighting are unfolded. They’re all seeking revenge of some kind: Seraphina for nearly being forced by her father into an arranged marriage with Void Dark because he’s too much of a coward to fight the guy, Magnus for the destruction of his Netherworld by the Lost Army, Usalia for Majorita killing her parents and turning them into enslaved zombie soldiers. Christo’s reasons for fighting are a bit different; there have been plenty of hints dropped by the mid-game that this sophisticated, learned demon overlord is really an angel in disguise pretending to be a demon to carry out surveillance, but he still has a bit of a personal grudge because he was temporarily booted from Celestia by his colleagues on suspicion of being Void’s spy.
Christo, just asking about what the team thinks about angels. He’s not an angel, though. No, just curious, that’s all.
The most serious dramatic material comes out of the story surrounding Zeroken and more critically Killia himself. Both were formerly students of Goldion, a famous warrior and martial artist. Zeroken is a defector from the Lost Army who treated Goldion’s wounds after the martial arts master was captured by Void and became his devoted follower. Killia was more of a formal student — not really a willing one, since he started his studies by getting soundly beaten by Goldion in combat back when Killia was the ruthless overlord of a Netherworld. Killia’s frequent flashbacks show that he really was quite an asshole back then, in contrast to the polite, considerate killing machine he is when we first meet him.
Yeah, that’s a lion tail she’s got too. Her father is full lion-man, so I have to guess this is a trait that passed down genetically.
It turns out that both his current kindness and sense of patience were instilled in him by Goldion and his daughter Liezerota, who more or less became Killia’s family. And then we remember that there’s this “Lieze” who Killia keeps mentioning and thinking about in asides, and it sounds from the context of these like she’s dead and he’s really upset about that. Well wouldn’t you know but Void Dark is the one who killed her. Not only that, but Void was Lieze’s brother and Goldion’s son, and he had a real hatred for this upstart punk Killia when he showed up at their house to study under his father. When Void finally loses his temper and attacks Killia, Lieze is in the way trying to make peace between them and ends up getting killed instead.
So now we’ve got the source of Killia’s hatred for Void — a very personal one. And it’s a strong impulse. Every so often during dialogue, time stops and we see Killia talking to himself in an aside, or rather to another version of himself, who tells Killia to “unleash” him, to stop holding him back. This shadowy version of Killia, apparently a part of his soul left over from when he was a terrible tyrant named Killidia, says a lot of ominous stuff about losing control and killing without restraint. The new, non-tyrannical Killia wants to avoid this because he’s afraid of accidentally hurting or killing his new allies and the residents of innocent worlds. But the impulse still seems to be strong.
As the endgame approaches, each of the characters in our main cast goes through a big self-revelation. Instead of giving in to their bitter feelings and desires for mere revenge, they realize that giving in to those feelings will only lead them to destruction. They instead come to trust in each other and band together as a sort of family. In doing so, the team decides to fight Void Dark not just to carry out their retribution but also to restore peace and begin the rebuilding process. Killia’s revelation is perhaps the most dramatic: in the third or fourth-to-last chapter, he has his final meeting with the “other” Killia, and instead of rejecting him as he has all this time, he accepts that other Killia as part of himself. Because he has now gained the ability to control himself, he can use all the old power he’s been suppressing without going berserk like he does in a couple of earlier chapters, which is nice.
Once all your characters have faced themselves and reached out to the truth all Persona 4 style, it’s time for them to come face to face with Void Dark. The crew have a final confrontation with Bloodis, and just as Killia and Zeroken suspected, he’s really Goldion, brainwashed by his own son to turn evil but brought to his senses by the pair during a previous battle, though he doesn’t tell them this until the very end in order to test their true strength. After their final fight, he concludes that they’re strong enough to defeat his “unworthy son” Void and then falls over dead, having sacrificed himself for just this purpose.
Here, in the game’s final act, we get to the bigger twist: that Liezerota is still alive, magically preserved by her brother Void, who’s been doing all this world-conquering just to suck enough power from them to bring her back to life. Void even sacrifices his remaining general, Majorita, after she’s defeated and left defenseless by the protagonist and company — Majorita, who mistakenly believed that Void was doing all this to create a utopia of peace for all demons under his rule, has her power stolen and is killed by her boss. She may have been powerful, but she wasn’t a very good judge of character.
Just before their final fight. For as much of an insane tyrant and a callous asshole as he is, Void still seems to care about his sister.
When the party breaks through his final defenses, Void is there at the top of his fortress waiting for them. After a typical final boss fight, though, Void asks his old adoptive brother/rival to help his sister before he dies. But of course, it won’t be that easy: there’s one more big fight in which his evil spirit possesses Lieze’s body and she has to be exorcised to get the good ending. And somehow, miraculously, the final absolute ultimate technique that Goldion taught Killia in their final fight works in expelling Void’s spirit from her and restoring Lieze to her normal alive self, just as Killia remembered her. Then the credits roll and there’s a “where are they now?” sequence describing the happy fates of all the rebel army crew before they inevitably get back together a few minutes later for the endless post-game grind.
Disgaea 5 is quite the ride. The main story takes us through a lot of up and downs. There’s death, destruction, and heartbreak, but also newly found friendship and even some love. D5 is pretty open about this part, in fact: the game doesn’t say it outright, but it’s implied that the feelings between Killia and Lieze aren’t just the familial kind of love. And in the good ending, the pair go back to their old home and seem to be about as close to married as most demons probably get, since they don’t seem too concerned with those kinds of legal formalities. This is a bit rough for Seraphina, who has obviously been pining after Killia for most of the game. She accepts the new situation pretty gracefully, though. Even when Lieze comes along with Killia to join the rest of the old rebel army crew in Seraphina’s base in the post-game.
And of course, some of the loose-ish ends left over after the end of the main story get tied up again in post-game story chapters that can be opened through the Dark Assembly, though you may have to beat the legislators up to get them to pass those bills. Fortunately, Disgaea 5 provides a cheat shop full of ways to manipulate your units’ growth and maps specially designed for powerleveling. Put on a podcast or something and get to it for a few hours and you should be okay.
No amount of powerleveling can help defuse this tension, though.
So that’s the story of Disgaea 5, or the bulk of it anyway. I found it hard to write about at first, and there’s still a lot I haven’t covered — each of its six-character central cast has their own side plots and dilemmas to work out. They all do happen to get worked out throughout the main story chapters as they fight alongside each other, contributing to the strong sense of camaraderie they have by the end. And without that, we wouldn’t get that classic tired old “power of friendship defeats evil” ending where Killia receives actual power from his companions he uses to beat the shit out of Void Dark.
I don’t really know how to feel about the ending, actually. On one hand, it all cleans up a little too nicely. It’s really convenient that Void just happened to have been keeping his sister in a perfectly preserved state so he could revive her, and also that Killia just happened to learn a technique from Goldion posing as Bloodis just before his death that could both defeat Void and then exorcise his soul from Lieze’s body without doing any harm to Lieze at all. It’s so damn convenient that it feels a little wrong. To be sure, that’s the best ending — there are less good endings in which Lieze and/or other characters don’t make it out alive.
However, you’re almost guaranteed to get this ending on your first playthrough, even if you have no idea what the necessary conditions for that ending are. Because to get a different, sadder ending, you need to have both 1) killed fifty allies in combat and 2) made the very obviously wrong decision to run away from the final battle against the possessed Lieze. And those probably aren’t conditions you’re going to fulfill by playing normally. Contrast this with Disgaea 1, which shuts you out of the best ending if you’ve so much as killed one ally during your playthrough. Accidentally killing one or two of your own units is surprisingly easy to do during a Disgaea playthrough; allies can easily get mixed up with enemies when you’re trying to wipe a map clean with wide-range attacks. Killing fifty allies, however, isn’t something you do by accident — not unless you play in a very reckless manner. Even then, the game will still let you choose the best ending if you want it. Feels a bit too generous, maybe.
But what the hell. They earned a happy ending, didn’t they?
On the other hand, I’m not sure I care too much. It’s admittedly very nice to not have to worry about avoiding ally kills, which is one of the only truly frustrating aspects of Disgaea 1, one that I’ve already complained about at length. And my first time around, I honestly expected that Lieze would end up dead or incapacitated somehow, so getting her back alive was both a pleasant and a genuine surprise. In any case, not everyone comes out of the story unscathed — Goldion is dead, and so are Usalia’s parents, and as far as I know there’s no way to get any of them back unless there’s some extra DLC or post-game stuff I haven’t seen.
There even might be some sympathy to show to the game’s villains, because they had understandable motives, though motives that made them do unspeakable things. Majorita was a war orphan who believed Void Dark wanted to create a utopia of peace controlled by an iron fist and obeyed him fanatically for that reason. And Void himself really just wanted to revive his sister, which is understandable. Never mind the fact that Lieze is a nice girl who disapproves of the mass murder and tyranny Void has committed for her sake. He didn’t think that far ahead, I guess.
In the end, though, while the villains are completely consumed and finally destroyed by their desires, our heroes manage to master theirs. They start out seeking revenge, but they end up finding each other and fighting for each other and for all their worlds. Even when they realize Christo is an angel, one of their natural enemies as demons, they just kind of pretend not to notice because he’s both an essential part of the crew and a friend.
Christo still wears those fake horns, though. You have to keep up appearances I guess.
This sort of stuff isn’t anything original as far as JRPG plots go, but it is nice to watch our protagonists grow as the story progresses. And it’s pretty heartwarming in parts. I know Disgaea is just supposed to be goofy and irreverent and all that, and it is, but as with Disgaea 1 there’s a bit more to it than some players might expect at first. In fact, the story to Disgaea 5 is really worthy of an old classical opera — it’s got all the necessary drama, conflict, betrayals, a love triangle, a few dirty jokes to mix things up, elaborate costumes, and a pretty operatic-sounding opening theme sung by Killia’s voice actor. If anyone reading this is planning on turning a PS4 strategy RPG into an opera, I think this is the one you should pick. I don’t need any compensation for the idea when it turns into a smash hit and revives the opera scene, though it would be nice.
One of several fights against Majorita. Not sure how you’d stage a scene like this, maybe use some strings to hang her from the ceiling.
Still, for me, the real appeal of Disgaea 5 isn’t so much in the story (I still think Disgaea 1 has the best plot and main cast; you can read all my rambling nonsense about that here) but in just how much entertaining content it throws at you. It provides a truly massive post-game section and a bunch of side features, some of which I got into in part 2 of this series. It also contains a ton of banter between characters from chapter to chapter that you can run through when you’re back at headquarters. Most of these are pretty light and comedic, some taking the form of skits involving the main cast, and they do a great job at breaking up the war drama plot you get when you play through the story maps. Granted, not every joke hits (Seraphina pulling her pistol out and non-lethally shooting Red Magnus and Zeroken for making fun of her gets old after the second or third time, and it happens about twenty million fucking times in this game) but a lot of them do, and even when they don’t, these characters have plenty of charm and chemistry anyway.
This one really takes more explaining than I care to do here
The Disgaea series looks like it might really be finished now, at least in the form we’ve known it. Publisher/developer Nippon Ichi Software is supposedly not doing well financially, Disgaea 5 came out five years ago, and there’s no hint of a Disgaea 6 beyond some talk and the outline of a basic plot. Fans are still holding out hope despite the troubles at NIS, though. I hope it isn’t the case, but at the very least if Disgaea 5 turns out to be the last Disgaea game, it would stand as proof that the series didn’t end because it ran out of creative steam. There are still a lot of great ideas here: fun, interesting characters, new gameplay mechanics, and enough extra content to occupy your time for weeks or months if you’re the addictive type. Considering the times we’re living in as I write this post, an addictive game that keeps you stuck indoors isn’t such a bad thing, is it?
In the spirit of Disgaea, then, I’d like to end this series of posts by throwing out some of the more weird/amusing stuff I came across while playing D5. You can consider this an appendix to this post, or sort of a post-game equivalent to it. A post-post? Never mind, I’ll just get on with it.
You have the option of wandering around Seraphina’s base from Chapter 1 on and talking to its residents in between battles. Some of them are just the generic grunt warriors and other units you recruit, but others are NPCs with set names and personalities who always hang around their same general areas so you can track them down easily. This Prinny is one of my favorites. He’s pretty much a lazy, useless load who wants nothing more than for the war to end so he can get wasted again. If I’m represented by any character in this game, it’s this guy. There’s a reason I use a Prinny as my avatar now after all.
These undead maids are pretty fun too. Not sure where the idea of a zombified maid came from, but they are devoted to their masters and mistresses despite not always being great at doing typical maid things. This particular one is Seraphina’s head maid. At the beginning of the game, she hates Killia because she suspects him of trying to put the moves on her mistress. By the end of the game, however, she seems to be falling in love with Killia herself. Better to just keep well away from her, really. He’s got Lieze anyway (see just below, she’s standing right there overhearing this weird conversation. Maybe that’s what the ! above her head is about.)
If you like demon catgirls better than zombie maids, you can talk to this nekomata, one of the many recruitable units that will be cluttering Seraphina’s pocket Netherworld by the end of the game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any way to take her up on this offer.
And hey, remember Etna from Disgaea 1? She, Flonne, and Laharl are back and also recruitable through one of the many DLC missions that come free with the Disgaea 5 Complete package, along with Laharl’s little sister Sicily from D1‘s direct sequel. And Etna is just as demanding as ever. Not sure I’d ever want her for a boss.
The Item World in Disgaea 5 is full of strange pocket dimensions to discover. Some are obviously helpful to the player, like hospitals and secret item shops selling rare products. Others are seemingly not helpful at all, like this carrot patch. If you don’t know what to do in a situation like this, you can either leave and continue playing through the Item World or keep talking to one of the NPCs until they get pissed off and start a fight. In this case “eat a carrot” means “let’s fight” I guess, because you end up fighting a squad of rabbit soldiers in this one. You do get a little bonus in your item’s stats for beating them, though.
Here’s another seemingly pointless level in the Item World: a bar. There is a special item you can get here, and of course you can also start a fight if you bother one of the NPCs in here enough. There’s also this succubus patron, but once again, there’s no way to take her up on her offer. Well, the game is rated T after all, so what do you expect.
But really, who needs that succubus when you can just spam Tera Heal? In addition to all its side attractions, Disgaea 5 features a lot of skills for characters to learn. Both generic and unique skills involve animation sequences that you’ll definitely want to turn off after a few battles because they make combat three times longer than it needs to be. However, some of them are really nice. Like the animation for Tera Heal, the most powerful generic healing spell in the game, in which your lucky warrior(s) get a visit from some kind of goddess of healing who patches up their wounds with the power of being huge and almost half-naked. Kind of reminds me of those Great Fairies from the Zelda games, though I like Tera Heal lady a lot better.
Okay, I’ll stop being a pervert for a few minutes and talk about something I like other than fanservice: music. If you talk to this moth guy back at headquarters, you can access a large library of data and info related to the game, including a music room. These have been a standard in Disgaea games for a long time. And this music room is worth visiting, because the soundtrack to D5 is really good. I’ve already posted a link to the game’s OP, but the regular stage and cutscene tracks are great as well, my favorite being the sort of Latin jazz-sounding Night Scoop. Tenpei Sato is an excellent composer, and I’m sorry I haven’t even mentioned his work up until now. Though I have to admit that I got really fucking sick of constantly hearing Moving On play in the background in the pocket Netherworld. It’s a nice, chilled-out relaxing sort of song, but it does get old, and it has vocals that are weirdly out of tune. Thankfully, you can replace it as the base song with any of the other tracks in the library.
Finally, here’s best girl Pleinair, fan favorite and the personal mascot of series character designer/artist Takehito Harada. She shows up in every Disgaea game, though she never has a role in the plot or even very much to say, assuming she says anything at all. She is recruitable, though, and she has some excellent skills. It’s to be expected, since she’s sort of the teacher’s pet (artist’s pet?) of the series.
***
And now my Disgaea post series is finally done, after three months and a lot of words. I hope I’ve done justice to one of my very favorite game series. I’m still not sure I really have as far as Disgaea 5 is concerned, but at some point you just have to publish what you’ve got. You can expect something completely different next time. Until then — I sometimes say “stay safe”, but I really mean it this time. Consider getting one of these Disgaea games and just play through the Item World until life returns to normal. 𒀭
