As planned, I finished levelling up the rest of my Disgaea 2 characters a bit, ending with them somewhere in their 30s.
It was made much faster by my discovery of a much more reliable method than team attacks: stack attacks. Instead of hoping that the nekomata didn’t counterattack and then get up close for a 50% chance at a team attack, I figured out that I could send a decoy character ahead (ideally one at least strong enough to survive a single blow, but letting them get knocked out works too) to draw the enemies close, then have the decoy retreat and the captured nekomata and character being leveled run up, and then have the leveling character lift the nekomata and attack. This way it still counts as a team attack but happens 100% of the time, and avoids the problem of the neko’s counterattacks prematurely killing the target.
I also took the opportunity to reincarnate a few characters into their higher tiers, like the healer and main fighters and tanks. It won’t really help a *lot* at these low levels, since the stat difference becomes much bigger at high levels, but it couldn’t hurt and I wanted to at least try it out.
Having leveled everyone up, I bought new equipment for pretty much everyone and resumed the storyline, blowing through chapters 6 through 8 with a lot less trouble than I expected. The enemies’ levels are getting closer to my own again though, so it’ll probably even out around chapter 10 or so. The only really notable map was one of the colosseum fights, arranged as a geopanel puzzle where you had to avoid hitting certain geo symbols or the fight could become impossible to win as every panel turns invincible.
And as far as the story goes, we finally met Zenon at the end of chapter 7. It wasn’t going to be that simple, of course — there were still six more chapters to go, after all — but Etna and Laharl have shown up again and now I’m apparently off to try and find the real Zenon.
More fun with prinnies after the cut:
And one of the other opponents in the colosseum:
