The Disgaea series has always been about excess — excessive level caps, excessive grinding, and excessive cheating (or exploitation of deep game systems). But Disgaea 6: Defiance of Destiny takes an excessive approach to its quality-of-life features. It’s so extreme that the game will mostly just play itself.
I’m going to walk you through some of these features so you can get a feel for just how ludicrous this is.
Auto Battle
First off, you’ve got the Auto Battle feature, which you can toggle on and off by pressing the + button in battle. This does exactly what you’d expect — it causes your team to automatically move around and fight without you having to do anything.
This feature will always use the first ten characters in your character list, so you can manually arrange that list to make sure Auto Battle uses the characters it’s supposed to. Then again, you can always just sort by level, from low to high. This tends to be a good way to approach Auto Battle, since it will send your lowest-level characters into battle. For a while…
Once those characters outlevel the others, you will have to manually sort the character list again, but that doesn’t take long.
Note that Auto Battle isn’t super smart. It doesn’t understand Geo tiles, so it might send your whole team to stand on damage-dealing tiles. It also tends to get stuck when it encounters chasms that you need to throw characters across. However, you do have…
Demonic Intelligence
Demonic Intelligence, or D.I. for short, is a feature that basically lets you program macros on a grid. You can set up really complicated movesets for your characters, such as moving toward a specific enemy type (based on its stats), then attacking that one before the others. You can set up throws here, and you can even target a specific panel on the grid (using that tile’s coordinates), which is great if you’re setting up a D.I. macro for a specific map.
This should get you around some of the limitations of the A.I., letting you toss characters over chasms and set up Geo panel explosions. However, this would actually take a bit of work and trial-and-error to set up for maximum effectiveness.
Auto Repeat
Now, things really start to get absurd when you factor in Auto Repeat. You can toggle this on and off in battle with the minus button. When it’s on, battles will restart as soon as they’ve finished.
But what about HP and SP? Well, your characters now automatically recover after every battle (though not between floors in the Item World). This means that the hospital is now only a place where you collect rewards — you don’t need to manually recover HP and SP (or revive downed characters) between battles anymore.
Because of this, you can set up Auto Battle and Auto Repeat, then just leave your Switch running for hours. When you pick it back up, you’ll have a team that’s immensely more powerful than it was before.
Change Speed
If the default auto-grind isn’t fast enough for you, you can adjust battle speed to:
- 2x
- 4x
- 8x
- 16x
- 32x
You do have to visit the Dark Assembly and pass the proper bills (which will continue to increase in cost with each multiplier), but once you get these speed options set up, your grind will be way, way faster — like, absurdly fast.
Item World Research
You don’t even need to visit the Item World anymore. No, you can just send out squads to do it for you. This works pretty similarly to the Nether Research Squads in Disgaea 5, only now you’re sending these squads into the Item World instead of other netherworlds.
You can even toggle which things you want your squad to focus on. Here are your options:
- Enhance Item
- Seek Items
- Gather Innocents
- Gather Essence
Yes, you can send teams out to subdue innocents and pick up items inside the Item World.
Do you want to know what makes this even more absurd? In previous games, if you sent characters into an Item World, they would level up that specific item. Now, when you level up an item, you level up all copies of that item at the same rarity level. If you level up a Common Demon’s Knife to 77, every Demon’s Knife that’s at a Common rarity will now be 77, even the ones you buy from the shop.
If you want to grind the Item World via Auto Battle, that’s still an option. The Cheat Shop has an option that lets you skip Innocent towns, meaning you can set your team to just plow through the Item World uninterrupted. Keep in mind, however, that there aren’t auto-heals between floors, so if you don’t have a decent-sized roster of high-level characters, you might be sending them to their Auto Battle doom.
Shortcut Wheels
So, this last point isn’t technically about the game playing itself, but it’s an incredible quality-of-life feature that I think is worth mentioning. If you want to visit a location in your home base (such as the Cheat Shop or the Dark Assembly), you no longer have to actually walk there. Now, you can press ZL or ZR and a wheel will appear that lets you select your location. This opens that location’s menu without you actually having to move your character over to the associated NPC.
This is a great time-saving feature that removes some of the tedium of home base activities.