It's Disgaea again!
My title may sound reductive, but after Disgaea 6, it really isn't. Disgaea 7 is a return to form in almost every way, restoring so, so much that was cruelly cut from its immediate predecessor. It remains three dimensional, which will be a boon or bane depending on your perspective, but the visuals have slightly improved. NIS remains incapable of the heights achieved by Arc System Works in three dimensional anime style, but an improvement is still an improvement.
Gameplay has brought back everything missing from 6 as far as I could find, while keeping the scripted grinding mode for those who aren't willing to get to get to the traditional endgame the hard way, but reportedly now requires that you beat a stage yourself before using the tools to script your way through it. The language barrier is unfortunately too great for me to confirm this personally. Throwing seems strange here. You can pick up a character or a stack and then move as you please, taking them with you. This appears to trivialize the series' jumping puzzles, but compared to the many sins of Disgea 6, this is a small loss.
More disappointing to me is the continued absence of team attack and tower attack animation. These were silly, fun, fairly simple, and present in Disgaea for many years. Seeing a team attack cut-in and then no animation is jarring, and hopefully will be dealt with by the next installment of the series. Nonetheless, it's not a crippling loss.
Finally, the roster is back where it should be. A glance at the roll call image on the Japanese cover art shows that NIS got it together on the classes again. Not only is the roster no longer embarrassingly full of holes, they even dug out a few classes not seen since Disgaea 3, when virtually every class had a matching, opposite sex class. Welcome back, gunner! We missed you! Although I have yet to unlock new classes such as the meiko, the design is appealing.
Monsters seem not to have fared quite as well. While the series staples are largely intact, the absence of the beastmaster class (yep, classes are much better, but not perfect...) likely means the age old Disgaea problem of monsters not matching their humanoid counterparts will persist.
In what I've been able to play through a Google Translate mitigated language barrier, Disgaea 7 is exactly what long time series fans needed: not a total concession to the past, but a clear admission that 6 failed to satisfy in countless ways, backed by a serious effort to return to form. It's not absolutely perfect, but it's a proper, fun Disgaea again, and as a player of the series since it began, I couldn't be happier.
Japón 
