YMMV / Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Much of what we know about Christo's superiors is ambiguous given that Christo and his unnamed Superior are the only source on them, especially since the former eventually admits he might have deserved what they did to him after being such an Insufferable Genius.
  • Killia's view of Void. Because everything is told from Killia's POV, he paints Void in a negative light and blames him for everything that has gone wrong. Void appearing before Killia for the first time says its the other way around (claiming that Killia was narcissistic). Come chapter 14's flashback of Killia apologizing to Lieze, saying what he did to Void was wrong. So the question becomes did Killia intentionally push Void over the edge causing the already bad tension to worsen or was he in the right due to how Void was already antagonistic toward him?
  • While post-game has Void's love for his sister played for laughs, one has to wonder how much of the love is exaggerated. Void's evil heart takes it to incestual levels where he only calls his sister's name and only wants to be with her. Void himself is disgusted with the concept of the romantic implication but at the same time, doesn't do anything to change how he behaves around his sister. It doesn't help that Lieze doesn't do anything to stop her brother's clinginess. In a post-game skit, while she tells him she can't fulfill all of his requests (leaving Killia to be with him), she says she's happy that he's clingy to her. Makes you wonder if the attraction is really one-sided.
    • It also doesn't help that Killia is aware of Void's love for Lieze◊ but doesn't bother to stop him fantasizing about her.◊
  • Lieze is established to be the Nice Girl that everyone loves upon meeting her. However, Lieze may show signs of being passive-aggressive with how she handles Seraphina. On one hand, she tells Seraphina that she wants to be friends with her but only because Killia is friends with her. On the other hand, she makes it clear that she's smarter than she looks by removing the hidden cameras in the room that Seraphina installed and giving it back to her as if telling her that she knew what she was planning.
• Badass Decay: Likely intentional with our Big Bad. In the main game, Void Dark is a Galactic Conqueror with 70% of the Netherworlds under his control. He trounces several powerful overlords without the slightest exertion, defeated his formidable father Goldion in the backstory, and is very much The Unfettered when it comes to achieving his mysterious goal. In the post-game, he's reduced to buying groceries for his sister, the butt of a hundred sister complex jokes, and finds himself having to awkwardly socialize with the very army created to kill him in the first place. On the other hand, gameplay-wise, he can become stronger than ever.
• Base-Breaking Character: Many fans love Seraphina for being a succubus who's more than just a one-note fetish character with a strong sense of self-respect and agency and her Character Development arc where she realizes that her friends will gladly stick with her even in her Riches to Rags phase, while others find her clingy fawning over Killia to be obnoxious and cringy especially since she never really works on having a more reasonable mindset towards him.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • After everything she has done to Usalia and Red Magnus, being able to defeat Majorita in the final battle and seeing her suffer from a Villainous Breakdown is all the more satisfying. It's hard to even feel sorry for her when Void Dark kills her and uses her as another corpse to fight the Rebel Army.
  • This is actually defied with Void Dark. You spent the entire game getting stronger to defeat him but not only is he not the final boss but Void's motive is revealed and suddenly, you don't feel so good after beating him. It doesn't help the Rebel Army in universe are not satisfied with this sort of ending.
• Cliché Storm: One of the most common criticisms is against the more vanilla story to their less traditional predecessors, involving a Five-Man Band who try to take the down The Empire, and the cast unable to shake the cliche roles associated with them (Killia as the broody anti-hero, Seraphina as the haughty love interest, Red Magnus as the dumb muscleman, etc.)
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The only Overload people bother giving to their generic characters is Izuna's Comet Disaster, which hits every enemy on the map with a star attack. While the ability itself is quite good, the main reason for its overuse is because the rest of the available Overloads are either situational or useless.
  • Most endgame players will exclusively make curries consisting of three Carnage Dimension Elixirs as the primary ingredients, due to the HP and SP regeneration effect and the ridiculous HP boost, which can often come out to over 200 million, allowing even the weakest of units to tank hits from Carnage item enemies.
• Creepy Cute: A number of players bought the game because you can have a cute Yandere zombie maid in your ranks.
• Demonic Spiders: Armor Knights, during the main storyline at least. They have an innate evility that allows them to take damage in the stead of their allies up to three times per turn, and they have so much health and defense that they can soak up far more damage than should be reasonable. Note that while the player can use them too, the main reason they're here is because any map with Armor Knights will use at least 4 of them, meaning that they can protect their main damage dealers up to 12 times while still being absurdly difficult to kill themselves. They are thankfully used in few maps, but when they show up they are not going down without a serious fight.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Void gets some of this. It's been argued that half the main characters' motives for wanting to kill him are petty or hold him accountable for something he had nothing to do with in the first place. The Reveal that his murder of Lieze was an accident and something he himself regrets more than anyone also factors into it.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The Maid class, due to being a cute zombie girl with a Creepy Cute Yandere personality option.
• Epileptic Trees: The game's ending spawned a big one about Christo, one that affects the entire series. This one in turn created more regarding other characters and plot points in earlier games.
• Evil Is Cool: In contrast to most other villains in the series, time is devoted to giving all three of the major villains in 5 significant badass credentials. Particularly Bloodis.
• Fridge Brilliance: Usalia's short-lived Running Gag involves using real-life issues like low birth rates and the freedom of the Internet to cover up her desire for curry. She reveals before the final battle of Chapter 10 that her parents let her be with them even when they were discussing political affairs. Listening to her parents and their advisers debate such issues would be an obvious source of that information in hindsight.
• Game-Breaker: Has its own page.
• Ho Yay: In the Post-Game, one of the missions has to fight a huge number of Asagi clones, which are suggested to be exaggerations of the real Asagi's personality traits. After you complete the Asagi map one of the skits has Zeroken duplicated by the same effect that made all of the Asagi clones...and at least one is a totally lecherous Camp Gay, which may suggest that Zeroken himself is Straight Gay.
• Iron Woobie: Killa has not had a nice life. He doesn't let that slow him down.
• Memetic Mutation: Usalia makes a rather interesting face◊ during one of the Next Episode segments. Naturally, the face spread.
• Moe: Usalia has this down to a science, having a Long List of reasons for cute Verbal Tic.
• Moral Event Horizon: Majorita is proof that having a tragic past ^note she's a war orphan, you see means absolutely nothing if you spend your time committing atrocities left and right. Arguably the worst of it involves Toto Bunny, where she captured the Netherworld itself, blackmailed the Overlord (Usalia's curse) into lending his army to the Lost's cause, and promises to relieve Toto Bunny of its burden after a hundred days... only to kill the Overlord and his wife on the ninety-ninth day, subsequently resurrecting them as zombies to further torture Usalia. Usalia has nothing in her heart but searing hatred for Majorita over this except when Void Dark raises her as a zombie with her own Overload, and when Majorita points out that she razed Scorching Flame (whether Panchos and the others were onboard with it is irrelevant), Red Magnus jumps on the hate train without a second thought. Liezerota is the only person who doesn't hate Majorita in the end, and that's because she was dead while Majorita played jump-rope with the Moral Event Horizon.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Maids with the Yandere personality, as expected of the trope, get some seriously creepy love-obsessed lines.
    "My heart throbs when you stare at me...I want you to know this heartbeat...Wait. I'll take my heart out right now..."^note Thankfully, she doesn't actually do it, but the mental image is enough.
  • Majorita's Slasher Smile in her status screen portrait is seriously uncomfortable to look at.
  • One of the Nether News reports is about a Sea Angel whose interview was canceled due to a largely-unspecified "grotesque sight" involving the way she feeds. Mind you, sea angels in real life sustain themselves by extending their buccal cones to suck out the flesh from whoever they attack, in a manner very reminiscent of Metroids, and Sea Angels in Disgaea have a skill that replicates this by way of Life Drain.
• One-Scene Wonder: Logan, a bombastic Hulk Hogan-like wrestler who serves as the boss of the first chapter. Along with his amusing personality, he ends up being surprisingly sympathetic due to having lost everything to Void Dark (his Netherworld has essentially become uninhabitable and he and his men are shadows of their former formidable selves). While he becomes an Optional Party Member later on in the game, he does not participate in the story in any further capacity.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Fans are in agreement that while the story may be rather bland and cliche-heavy in comparison to the rest of the series, NIS has improved on the faults of its already polished predecessor to create some of the most engaging gameplay in the mainline series.
• Polished Port: In the best way possible, the Switch port is basically the full game, plus the DLC, except it's also portable, which, for a game with a ridiculous amount of Level Grinding, is a massive plus. The solid reviews for it don't hurt it either.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Nether Editor doesn't let you save your custom Netherworld's layout until you've placed every single character possible. Facility NPCs (such as the Item Worlder and the Dimension Prinny), fair. "Resident" NPCs (the main cast, character-specific servants, and other canon characters), fair. But you also have to place every single spawn point for non-Resident player units, even though interacting with them is strictly optional; depending on the size of your Netherworld, this can result in a needlessly cramped hub.
  • The "Hog All EXP" bill causes the unit passing the bill to take any EXP earned by other units in the next battle, so by the same logic, "Hog All Mana" should cause them to do the same but with Mana rather than EXP, right? Wrong. What "Hog All Mana" does is immediately take Mana from all other units from your roster. And just to add insult to injury, if the amount of Mana transferred causes the unit to cap their Mana out (9,999,999), the extra Mana is completely thrown out!
• Spoiled by the Format:
  • When NIS first released information about the characters' birthdays and age, they accidentally revealed that Void Dark has the same birthday and age as Liezerota. This was fixed a few days later when they removed information about his birthday and age.
  • The original PS4 release came with an artbook and an album with every song in the main game. Thing is, those who are sufficiently savvy might notice that one of the last songs is called "Lieze Rock", which can give away who the Final Boss is .
• That One Attack:
  • Any attack that can inflict Charm. Your characters may be steamrolling through enemies, but any enemy lucky enough to inflict it has your characters suddenly turning on each other and could mean losing much of your party. Even worse if you're doing aiming for no ally kills since allies killed through Charm counts.
  • Land Decimator. Set up the right way, it's an instant One-Hit Kill... for everything on the map, ANY map. You could almost hear the Sage go "That's all? Took me no time at all."
• That One Level:
  • Outer Dark Demise, specifically the 2nd and 4th stages. The worse part of the level is the Neitherworld Effect, Reinforcements, which adds one new enemy unit each turn until the battle ends. In addition to the Armor Knights mentioned under Demonic Spiders, there are also Succubus who can charm your units as mentioned under That One Attack, and Gunners that can strike from long ranges. These enemy types combined with the Neitherworld Effect, make the level harder then necessary. The level layout also makes it hard to get to some enemies, especially since they'll spawn on a random part of the map your forces may not be able to get to in time. If you can't defeat at least 2 enemies just about every turn, you might as well give up and start heavily grinding because those levels will be unwinnable.
  • One level that can get harder during a New Game Plus run is Stage 4-5. Your characters in use are probably too strong even at 20 Stars so pray you don't counter-attack Usalia, otherwise, you get the Usalia's Death ending more often.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The lack of cameos from returning Nippon Ichi characters in the post-game, especially the infamous Disgaea trio of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness, who have been post-game regulars in almost every game since then. Many felt that Disgaea 5 lacks post-game replay value unless you buy the DLC. The DLC also garnered criticism as it lacked some fan favorites from previous entries (Gig, Marona, Ash, and Alex) while lacking new additions outside of Almaz and Sapphire getting HD sprites. Possibly justified given the games status as implicitly a prequel, though this is unconfirmed and requires one to consider much of the bonus material entirely non-canon, or alternatively, given Killa is shown traveling alone during the scenarios, happening many many years later after the army has disbanded
  • Notably, The Nintendo Switch version gained a lot of praise for the simple fact that you're not having to purchase all your post-game characters, with Pleinair being a Bragging Rights Reward.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A lot of players are disappointed that Seraphina's one-sided crush on Killia, which is her most prominent flaw, is never really addressed beyond the realization of (paraphrasing) "I like Killia because I can't have him and my Balor Gaze doesn't work on him." When it comes time for her Character Development arc, it's centered around her largely-unrelated insecurities about how people will perceive her and her family now that they've gone from Riches to Rags, something that was only given a single piece of Foreshadowing early on in a brief phone call between her and her father, and her clinginess to Killia continues to stick, amplified further when Lieze enters the picture in the postgame to unwittingly create a Love Triangle.
• Toy Ship: Zeroken x Usalia, the youngest members of the party, is fairly popular despite the two not showing any romantic feelings towards each other. Shippers commonly cite Zeroken usually being the first one to show concern for Usalia's well-being as proof.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • You can upload your Netherworld for others to research and get invaded by during Item World runs. In practice, however, almost nobody ever encounters another player's Netherworld through either means, instead encountering game-generated Netherworlds and Stray Lost Armies virtually every time. Furthermore, equipment and generic unit names use the usual random name pool instead of being the names set by their respective players (presumably to avoid Video Game Perversity Potential), meaning that you may as well be fighting the army of yet another computer-generated Netherworld.
  • When managing your units, you can sort them into dispatches for easier organizing (for example, you can assign physical attackers to one dispatch and magic attackers in another, or make one dispatch for humanoid units and another for monster units). The bar that shows your dispatches seems like it would be able to fit at least 10 of them, but there's only three dispatches that you can ever use, with no way to add more.
• Unexpected Character: Void Dark becoming a playable character post game. While the Big Bad being Promoted to Playable has happened before in the past it was always through DLC. With Void Dark it is in-story.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Majorita mostly manages to avoid this, as despite her crappy life she's treated with about as much sympathy as she deserves, but there's one little eyebrow-raiser near the end of the storyline: when she's disgusted by what Void did his own father, we're supposed to take it as an Even Evil Has Standards moment, but after what she did to Usalia's parents, it just makes her come off as a massive Hypocrite.