izigame.me

It's a bit early for me to judge the meat of this entry in the series, Disgaea is usually largely about the postgame grind, but I don't think that element has ever really disappointed. I figure I will make this review now while people are asking about it, with enough knowledge of it to see the significant improvements over the previous game.
Disgaea 6 was, decent, but definitely a step back in many areas as the devs did a soft reboot of the art. It didn't have several generations of sprites to work with, having to build new 3D models and animations for everything, and that left the game feeling very light as the class variety and skill variety were seriously lacking. Disgaea 7 is two steps forward here, bringing back most of the old classes, adding some new ones bringing the total number of characters back up to the top, and bringing back weapon skills and all that diversity on top of the class skills.
The story so far is great, the characters are interesting, the pacing of the story is back to the usual stat/level progression (no more level 999 in the first chapter) and is reasonably balanced. The Item World, perhaps less well integrated into the early game this time, enemy levels spike very quickly, going from like level 10 to 50 within 10 floors, and the bonuses to level items aren't really worth it on low tier items. A tradition for me is to go into the item world of a legendary Imperial Seal and level it up to help power through the campaign. I went down 10 floors in one this time around, using the extra item levels route, managed to get +111 item levels on the thing, which raised the stats from +7 all to like +12 all, meanwhile all my core characters went from level 15 to level 45 from the exp they got in there and had stats approaching 500-750 by that point. So that is my one criticism so far, and I would just say probably avoid the item world early on if you don't want to imbalance things a bit.
I guess I need to discuss the price, but I think long term fans aren't going to be surprised here. It's been about $100 to get the game and all DLC around release since D4, maybe even D3. A lot of people on Steam are used to getting the games years late with all the DLC included at a steep discount, that's how D1/2/4/5 were delivered here, but D7 isn't years late on Steam, we got it the same day as the PS/Switch releases, so it's the usual full price. It sucks, everyone would always want to get a game for less, but that's how the series has worked and if you don't think it's worth it wait a couple years and get that bundle for 75% off or whatever.
Overall, at this point I would dare to say this is possibly the best game in the series. Years of QoL and features are all included here (except class world?), each game has iterated and refined on the last, and with D7 catching up on character/skill art and diversity it's really not held back by anything. This is peak Disgaea, if that's what you are looking for.