Disgaea 5 Complete

Disgaea 5 Complete was one of the first major games to arrive on Switch in its launch year, and for fans of tactical RPGs it was an ideal showcase of what the hybrid console could do. The Disgaea series is famous for pushing the genre to absolute extremes: the story of the demon Killia and his rebellion against an overwhelmingly powerful overlord is told as a parody of heroic epics, full of exaggerated characters, absurd one-liners, and constant self-irony, yet underneath it hides one of the deepest character-building systems ever created.

Battles play out on a grid and look like classic tactics at first glance, except the rules are wild. Characters can pick each other up and throw one another across the entire map, stack into towers and attack together, carry and rotate colored blocks that change the rules of the whole battle, and in the so-called Item World you can literally step inside your own equipment and level it up floor by floor. Damage numbers climb into the millions and beyond, and the game openly assumes that its most demanding content only begins long after the main story is finished — anyone who dives into maximizing characters can lose hundreds of hours here.

The Complete label means the package bundles all the expansions from the original PlayStation 4 release, including additional playable characters, scenarios, and costumes. Technically the game runs without a hitch, the visuals are a simple combination of pixel characters and three-dimensional maps, and it suits portable play down to the ground, since a single battle can be finished in a few minutes. The music is energetic and over the top, just like the rest of the game. Reception was good, and the title was frequently recommended as one of the first games worth picking up on Switch. Today it remains the best entry point into the series and an endless time sink for anyone who loves crunching numbers. The main story can be finished without digging deep into the systems in roughly thirty hours, but anyone who gets pulled in never quite finishes for good.