Disgaea 5 is a turn-based, tactical role-playing game that is known for its high numbers and insane number of hours that it offers for gameplay. There are a lot of mechanics in play, most of them returning from older titles, but there are also some new things introduced with this title. The overall flow of the game is still the same as previous entries, where players are returned to a central hub after finishing a map. They can do all sorts of things in the hub, like buy/sell equipment and items, create new characters, power up skills, access the Item World and a lot more.

When they want to continue the main story or fight another battle, they talk to a NPC called the Dimension Prinny. Note that there is a new thing available in Disgaea 5 called Skits. Upon returning to your base after completing a map, you will sometimes see characters with a “!” over their head. Talking to them will spark a short conversation with a few other characters. There is one more marker to make it easy to tell if there’s a Skit or not, by looking in the upper right corner of the screen and see if there’s a character’s face there with “Event” flashing underneath it. There’s usually a Skit available after the first clear of most story-related battles in the game.