It's hard to make sense of Disgaea Mayhem, but perhaps that's part of its charm

While I’m not a total newcomer to the world of Disgaea, I’m also not exactly writing a primer to its expansive world any time soon. Yet even with my limited franchise knowledge, even I know that this series is, traditionally, built on tactical RPGs. So something like Disgaea Mayhem — which most closely resembles a musou game — is a pretty significant change of pace.

It makes more sense when you consider the game's Japanese title doesn't label it a Disgaea game, although it has Disgaea franchise crossover content.

Even now, after playing the demo available at PAX East, I’m somewhat uncertain what the logic here was. It’s so unlike the rest of the series. I’m not sure how many pre-existing fans will be interested in it, nor am I sure how many new fans it will hook when they see what's on display here. Still, however strange the reasoning might seem, it still exists all the same. So, what is Disgaea Mayhem like?

The PAX East demo has you selecting your difficulty (essentially: easy, medium, and hard) and weapon, and then just going for it. You’re dumped in an area with veritable hordes of enemies, and then, well, you just start blasting — or, depending on your weapon, hacking, slashing, whacking, and so on. To be clear, the variety of weapons you’re given is pretty decent: Fists, spear, bow, gun, axe, staff, and sword.

That being said, while I’m unsure if this will be the case in the full game, once you selected a weapon for the difficulty setting you were on, you were locked into it for the stage. I was able to try out three different weapons — once at each difficulty level. I tried fist, axe, what would be by far my favorite in sword; more on that shortly.

Each weapon brings with it a distinct set of skills. The sword, in particular, offered a tornado-like skill that was excellent for simultaneously doing damage while progressing through the map. Two prinnies in one stone .... er attack. Speaking of the map, each was fairly short and to the point. They seemed to generally contain a relatively straightforward path, leading you to a boss at the end. There are platforms you can fall off of, which can be annoying, but there would be ways of getting back to the main path. 

For better or for worse, the gameplay on display itself felt like a pretty standard musou game experience: Fun, explosive, just enough variety in the number of weapons and skills available (at least for a demo—in a full game, I’d want more skills, especially, but I’m hoping that will be the case), usually not too difficult, and nothing if not satisfying. Apart from the IP, there’s nothing too unique here that you won’t find in a dozen other similar games. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on what you want out of this game. However, if you don’t mind the tried-and-true musou game experience, and you just want a Disgaea coat of paint on it, Mayhem may deliver exactly what you want. As long as the full game can build on this and add further variety, it’ll be hard to go wrong.

Disgaea Mayhem is currently scheduled to release in Summer 2026 on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and Playstation.