This is maybe not a popular opinion, but I absolutely love grinding in RPGs. I actually find it kind of relaxing to disengage my brain, build a nice little party, and conk a bunch of monsters while I watch my numbers tick upwards. Sometimes that’s the most enjoyable way to play a game, especially after a stressful day.
In fact, I love grinding so much that low level caps stress me out. When I found out the level cap for Final Fantasy VII Remake was 50, I was pretty bummed out. When I learned that the level cap in Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning was 40, I was devastated. While I did some grinding in both of those games, it was always beneath a suffocatingly low ceiling that kept inching closer and closer to my head.
In a typical Disgaea game, the level cap is 9,999. On top of that, you can reincarnate a character back to level 1 if you’d like a shot at improving their base stats. And since level-up stat bonuses are based on percentages and not static numbers, having your level-1 ATK stat at 12 instead of 10 will start to have exponentially large returns, blasting your character into way higher damage tiers by the time they’re around level 80 or so (and only getting more absurd beyond that).
But wait, that’s still not good enough. For Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny, the absolute freaks at Nippon Ichi have decided to raise the character level cap to 99,9999,999. Yes, that’s almost 100 million.
This level cap is so incomprehensibly high that my brain melts at the very thought. I have a tendency to feel overwhelmed at the beginning of any Disgaea game already. Come launch day for Disgaea 6, I will probably fire up the game and just marvel at the overwhelmingly large numbers that stand before me, which I shall never even come close to reaching. But they’re out there nonetheless, and that makes me happy.
Did they need to raise the level cap in the Disgaea games? Of course they didn’t. But the fact that they had the guts to actually do it fills me with an indescribable joy. I seriously cannot wait to drown myself in the unending grind of this game.
