The Disgaea series will always have a place in my heart, built and furnished by absolute absurdity. A franchise where you are a demon, max out with damage in the millions, and are encouraged to cheat every chance you get? Color me there. Typically, the drawback to the experience, besides the massive amount of grinding to reach the levels needed to exert your will in the demon world, is the slow pace of a traditionally tactical turn-based experience. Disgaea Mayhem is a drastic change to that, giving a faster-paced action spin-off that ‘might’ want to offer an alternative to players turned off by the former.
Unlike that slower concept that requires a massive amount of commitment, possibly even taking 100 hours to get to the good stuff, Disgaea Mayhem is Musou. This is a bit of a weird point for me since Nippon Ichi developed the title. On the other hand, Dynasty Warriors developer Omega Force has made a bit of a career taking popular franchises like Persona or Dragon Quest and giving them their signature flair. At first, there might seem to be some overlap; such a collaboration doesn’t seem like a crazy idea. Soon, though, you will start to see it’s clearly not the same developer, lacking the core understanding.
Players take the role of N.A., a mercenary hired by Princess Tichelle to recover her father’s stolen flan delicacies from several other overlords across a multitude of other stages. The thing here is, the characters are all painfully one-note. I know, I hear you say, “But Zach, this is Disgaea; all the characters are one note.” And you are right, but never this painfully so. The main story has a one-track mind with zero evolution. It’s usually fairly fun to see the characters constantly dropped into the plot with their single solution to everything but multiple situations to solve that way. This time, though, the characters rinse, lather, and repeat from chapter one until the final act.
What helps is that this is the basic structure of completing missions. Again, this is a musou, so at the heart of this is the one-against-many combat. Disgaea Mayhem has the typical format starting with big maps, but they are disjointed into smaller segments for the main game. After completing an area, you do unlock the full map to farm or explore, but by that point you are most likely done and ready to move on. I did like how some stands gave a structural narrative to moving between area to area. This was a barely used plot device, though.
When in these areas, you participate in combat against hordes of familiar demon types, so there is that. Hooray. The biggest damper to seeing hordes of enemies attack is a message popping up telling you that you need to slay 15 enemies. Yup, that’s every single freaking time. You select a mission, and they slay 15 enemies per grouping; they unspawn, then the next group spawns, and you do it again. Never are you allowed to lather yourself up into a honeyed funk of murder. In fact, this is so common I can note only two missions that did not follow this exact formula.
Stage design was actually pretty nice too, which makes the whole situation that much more painful. There are a few pitfalls added to these, such as a volcano with lava you can burn in or some complex navigation in a ruin stage. Character animations aren’t that great, though, which can also make interacting with the world at large a drag. The story never lets you enjoy any of it, though, and quickly starts to feel the weight of its repetition. This is where you get the interesting stages, the ones that are fun to fight through so the whole affair feels like a hammer to the head.
Where the combat is at its best is the return of the main franchise’s Item World. There are some drastic changes to it as well, though I haven’t played the last two games, so I might be unaware these were made earlier. For the uninitiated, any item has a world attached that you can go in and farm levels (your character maxes out at 9,999, so get busy) as well as increase weapon power. Basically, a double win. The cool thing now is these stages have waves, so there is a point at which any item starts to get minimal return on investment. This creates the need to make use of a multitude of items to progress.
These stand as the best place to actually embrace the combat, as they throw scores of enemies per wave, sometimes over 100, with a tougher boss to fight at the end of each wave. This is when you really get to smash everything, which genuinely shows the combat is a bright spot in all of this. The Item world, structurally, can be confusing as hell, though. There are multiple different variants, like the number of waves that are difficult to track, so you could find yourself jumping in blind and not getting the full results you want.
You only play as one character, with buddies made up of the usual demons that can aid. This means the weapons you collect, many of which you will gain and test in the Item World, make up the diversity in gameplay. All weapons play differently, some VERY differently, like the magic wand, but they are fun. They have different abilities, and some have mighty ults you can throw down on enemies and delete entire sections. Personally, I jumped between the sword and spear, but there are a lot to jump between, so players should be able to find their niche. I will say that combat, especially when pinpointing an enemy, can be sporadic, as even with a lock-on, I would throw myself straight past and get stuck hitting air.
There are some issues with the Item World to lodge, starting with the fact that, despite a few variations in the layout, the stages share a single aesthetic. Some level designs are also annoyingly large, forcing players to run between groups, which was more of a problem than I wanted. The other issue is just HOW badly you can break the game here. I stated above that the game welcomes cheating, and you should unlock the cheat shop pretty early on. The big thing here is enemy scaling.
The Disgaea games never let the player divert so far that they can’t balance the experience. You can raise enemy level for increased exp or drop it down so you could just skip right through. But you get that option. Part of what tactical games do, which I have a love-hate relationship with, is that later missions are often set upon with objectives, so even leveling might not circumvent some added task that requires attention. The Item World is just a typical farming place.
In Disgaea Mayhem, there is virtually no difference between the main game and the leveling stages. You will burst past the level scales with ease. Even at max enemy scaling, I was about 600 levels too high to break a sweat. The mode also has bosses who are almost identical to most game level bosses, creating no distinction between them. Part of this is probably the fact that you really only have one character to actually worry about, a second only if it works for you, removing the multipart and therefore the added grind required to keep yourself comparable.
That is one of the positives with the experience in general. The Item World doesn’t level you up until you end your run, but usually you skyrocket about 50 levels. With the structure of it, you also don’t need to worry about the loooong stage-by-stage process of slowly making progress on your items. It all happens fast by comparison. There is a pretty hefty endgame if you want to keep progressing N.A. to his full potential, but by the time I rolled credits, I was checked out. Places to go, people to see. It takes nowhere near as long as other Disgaea games to do so as well, so that’s saying something.
Each end area of each stage gets a special boss who is unique compared to other enemies, but this is very little compared to the number of these enemies that are just identical with varying health. These fights were the only ones I had genuine trouble with, but even then you can easily beat a boss 100 levels above you. It’s a bit of a slogfest and grind, but they telegraph attacks so much you can dodge behind and spam attacks without much interference. They also, weirdly enough, have plenty of attacks that hit at range but not close, meaning you can let the attack happen and not be disrupted at all on the attack. That isn’t just a sometimes thing; a few times that was my entire fight.
The back end of everything in Disgaea Mayhem felt familiar, though, which helps to keep the game at least engaging. You still get to vote to pass changes to your experience, now with the ability to bribe if you don’t get your way. Basically, the game is more realistic now lol. You will also unlock many secondary elements, including a board game-like mini-game for an added experience, though the mode did not hold up for me as much as I was hoping. The quirky Disgaea soundtrack returns as well, keeping a tone you would expect here, so it manages to FEEL like the franchise despite the coat of paint.
Verdict
I was excited to see what Disgaea Mayhem would feel like. I understand NIS isn’t exactly the biggest or boldest studio out there, but they’ve rarely left me unimpressed. This was sadly one of the times I was. The concept on paper works well, but the story mode rarely gives the company a chance to shine. This is on top of having a lackluster, completely uninspired structure. I could gripe about the technical issues of combat as well, but when you get engrossed in it, there is a genuine enjoyment there. That’s the painful part: there is a great game buried under cumbersome design and poor choices that leaves this as a lackluster romp in the demon-filled Disgaea world.
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Reviewed for PlayStation 5, also available on Xbox Series, Nintendo switch 2, and PC
Developer: Nippon Ichi Software
Publisher: NIS America
Release Date: July 23, 2026
Pros
+Some fun combat moments
+Translation od Disgaea elements, like the item world, mostly work
+Added elements to make the game play faster
Cons
-Combat is severely limited.
-Some poor animations.
-Main story structure poorly designed and main narrative is bland.
-Boring bosses
-Extremely repetetive
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Disgaea Mayhem
