Disgaea 7 is a huge game, with a lot of systems the player needs to work with to achieve victory. For those just getting started it can be easy to miss some useful tools that the game makes available to you, and you can easily find yourself a little bit lost for direction. Below I’ve put together some information and tips in this short guide to help smooth out your start in Disgaea 7.
Dark Assembly
The Dark Assembly is a mechanic that allows the player to pass bills to unlock various game systems, temporary buffs or changes, and some permanent buffs for individual characters. The Dark Assembly unlocks once you finish Episode 1 of Disgaea 7’s story. A lot of systems won’t unlock automatically as you progress, as they are locked behind Dark Assembly bills. It’s a good idea to keep checking in for new unlocks as you progress to make sure you’re taking full advantage of the systems on offer.
Bills aren’t always easy to pass. You’ll have to convince the members of the Dark Assembly to vote in your favour with gifts, or if your bill fails you can also pay out a bribe or start a battle to beat them into submission. Early on though you likely won’t have enough HL for bribes, and you definitely won’t be powerful enough to fight them. If you don’t want to risk losing mana, you can save before attempting to pass a bill in the Dark Assembly and reload to try again. This isn’t the most honest option of course, but it is efficient.
Important Unlocks
As soon as you’ve unlocked the Dark Assembly there are some important bills you should pass as soon as possible. Before you do anything else make sure you pass the “Pull Evil-Gacha!” bill, which costs 150 mana and unlocks a gacha machine at the Netherworld Hospital. The evil-gacha is an incredibly useful mechanic throughout Disgaea 7, and it opens up some particularly good options for you early on. The gacha is a great way to grab some useful gear for your characters, and it’s also a great way to earn HL early on.
After you’ve unlocked the evil-gacha, the next two important bills to pass early in Disgaea 7 are “Let’s Have Fun With Cheat Codes!” and “Let Me Change My Class!”. Both of these bills cost 100 mana and open up some useful features. The cheat shop will allow you to adjust the balance of various rewards, for example reducing HL income to increase XP gain. The cheat shop expands as you progress, eventually allowing you to drastically increase the multiplier for various resources. We’ll talk about the option to change classes a little later on, but do make sure you grab it.
Skill Shop
In Disgaea 7, the skill shop unlocks after completing the second mission of Episode 2. The skill shop has a number of useful functions you should take a look at. Levelling your skills costs mana, and is important to keep your units on track as enemies grow stronger. It’s important not to just upgrade skills blindly though. When you upgrade a skill it’s SP cost increases, often by a sizable amount. It’s important to balance your skills against your character’s SP pool. If you mistakenly push your skills too far and you can’t afford to use them in fights, there is always the ability to downgrade them. Range upgrades for spells are useful, particularly for healing and buffing spells, and they don’t increase the base SP cost so grab these when you can.
The skill shop is also where you’ll manage character’s evilities. Evilities are equippable passive abilities that provide a range of combat benefits and options. At the skill shop you can learn new evilities, convert learned evilities into mana, and, once you pass the “Inherit Evility!” bill for 2000 mana, create scrolls of known evilities to transfer to other characters. The evility system is a bit bloated, there are many evilities that could reasonably be called filler, but it’s worth taking some time to look through your options and find what works best for your setup.
Early Mana Farm
Once you have both the skill shop and evil-gacha unlocked you can farm mana relatively easily. The loop is quite simple. By playing the gacha you can get scrolls that are used to teach a character an evility. These evilities can be farmed easily through the gacha so they’re relatively disposable. Pull some scrolls and then use them on the character you want to farm mana on. Head over to the skill shop and use the ‘convert evility’ function to turn the newly learned evilities into mana. This is an easy way to get a substantial pile of mana in the early game.
RP Farming
RP is earned naturally as you heal up your units after clearing stages. There are ways to speed this up though. If you want to farm RP you must create damage to heal, this can be done a few ways. A simple, if inelegant solution, is to turn your units against each other. A better option is to lift and throw an enemy unit into your base panel. If you throw an enemy of a class you haven’t yet unlocked they will wipe out every unit in your roster, giving you plenty of damage to heal up.
Early on the armor knight is a good option as you must clear a quest before they can be recruited. This also works with higher tier versions of a class. Regardless of what unit you decide to toss in, make sure you have deployed enough units to still clear the stage. Also remember you’ll need enough HL to heal your team. Farming the gacha should provide enough HL, but be careful to make sure you don’t go broke.
Permanent Buffs
In the Dark Assembly there are bills to increase some of the base abilities of your units. These bills are unique to each unit and allow you to increase movement range, jumping height, throwing distance, and counter-attack rate. Each of these bills have three stages with increasing mana costs. It is worth passing as many of these bills as you can on the characters you use the most. Extra movement in particular is a great benefit to have. The mana cost can get quite high, but with the mana farming method above you can easily pick up the first two tiers of these bills early on.
Class Mastery
Increasing your character’s class proficiencies is an important part of Disgaea 7. Pushing up these proficiencies allows you to recruit and reincarnate characters at a higher class rank, but it also increases the base stats of a character. To get the most out of a character you’re going to want to max out their proficiencies with every class. That’s a daunting task, but there is a feature that will make it a lot easier. Passing the “Let Me Change My Class!” bill unlocks the abilty to change class at any time from the status menu. “Changing classes” is a bit of a misnomer here, as your class doesn’t actually change. It doesn’t impact your character in combat at all, it’s more subclassing than anything else. The big benefit is earning class proficiency for the chosen class as you play normally, which makes the grind a lot easier. Make sure you’re paying attention to your proficiencies as you work your way through the campaign. It’s easy to get close to max rank naturally. The final rank of each class will require more focused grinding, but that’s an endgame concern.
Quests
The quest system unlocks once you complete the fourth mission of Episode Two. It’s important to regularly check up on the available quests as there are some great goodies waiting here. Most important are class unlocks. Certain classes are locked behind quests, for example as soon as you unlock quests you will have access to quests that unlock the Ranger/Archer, Gunner/Gunslinger, and Felynn classes. Make sure you check in on quests after you clear each episode of the story to see what is available for you.
Juice Bar
After you finish Episode 2 of Disgaea 7’s story you’ll unlock the juice bar. This system allows you to distribute XP, mana, and stat boosts, via juices that are earned in a variety of ways. XP and mana juice is earned when you clear a stage, the amount earned is dependent on the total XP and mana earned on the stage. You can also get XP and mana juice from the evil-gacha, which also offers stat boosting juices.
The juice bar is a good tool to make use of when you find some characters falling behind as you play through the story. Stat juices aren’t terribly useful until the endgame though, so don’t worry too much about them. XP and mana can be farmed via the gacha, but it’s pretty inefficient and you’re better off just playing through the stages and using the juice bar as a catch-up mechanic.
The Martial Dimension
The Martial Dimension is an extra episode, containing five stages, that you can unlock after clearing Episode 2 of Disgaea 7’s story. It’s unlocked by passing the “Train in the Martial Dimension!” bill for 5,000 mana. This set of stages are useful for grinding, but you probably won’t be strong enough to tackle them right away. The first stage in particular has some geo panel effects that you can use to your advantage when grinding, so if you can clear it then have a play around and see what you discover.
Item World
You’ll gain access to the item world in Disgaea 7 once you’ve cleared the fourth mission of Episode 3. The item world is your best option for a fun way to grind up during the main story. You’ll level up your characters faster here as enemies increase in level as you clear floors, but they have somewhat reduced stats so they’re not too difficult to kill. There’s also the benefit of powering up your items and equipment as you go. Make sure to pick up the bills to unlock item enhancement and reincarnation when you’re able as those are critical parts of the item world experience.
Don’t get too hung up on perfecting your item world runs early on. You’ll be swapping out gear a lot as you progress through story stages so there’s no need to worry about optimization at this stage. Just have fun with it.
Experiment & Have Fun
“Just have fun with it” is probably the best advice I can give for your playthrough of Disgaea 7. The tips here will help you have a smoother entry into the game, and should help you overcome some of the early obstacles, but there’s no one solution in Disgaea. The fun of the game is in the experimentation with different classes and team setups. Try some different things out, run some fun gimmicks, and don’t stress too much about reaching the endgame. It’ll always be there waiting, so enjoy the ride. Having a broad stable of units will help you in the multiplayer tournaments too, as different rules will restrict the types of units you can deploy.
Review: Click Here
Looking for more tips, tricks, and guides? We have a broad selection for you to take a look at. You can also check out our review of Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless.
Thank you to Reef Entertainment for providing a Playstation 5 review code for Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless.
A man described by critics as “pretty normal” and “memorable in the abstract”. He has committed his life to the consumption of anime and games, against the advice and wishes of his family and friends. Now writing about his passions, hopefully for your enjoyment.
