And now that I’ve got a nice stable of diverse, moderately-leveled Disgaea 2 characters, it’s time to get exploitive.

Following the advice of one of the Gamefaqs guides, I returned to level 4-3, which is populated almost entirely by Nekomatas on tiles that will raise their level each turn. The trick here is to simply keep capturing them by throwing them into my base, after waiting until they reach the right level. You can only capture a monster that’s roughly twice the highest level in your base, so first you capture, say, a level 25ish nekomata, use it to capture one around level 50, use that one to capture one around level 100, and so on.

Technically, you could keep doing this until you’ve captured a level 9999 nekomata, but I’ve stopped with one around level 200 for now. I don’t really intend to use these monsters to beat the main game, which is my focus right now, but just to help earn some cash and levels for my regular characters. I’ll come back for more capturing after that, when I’m going to *need* ultra-high levels for things like the Dark World…

And earn cash I did. I had to alternate between capturing and cash farming anyway, since capturing creatures injures and knocks out a lot of the characters in your base, and that gets really expensive to heal. After capturing a nekomata, I’d then redo the level with just the newly captured one and a healer, after waiting until the enemies’ levels were just a bit below mine, and rake in the cash. With my level 197 nekomata, each clearing of that map nets around 450,000 credits, a lot more than the 2000 or so I’d get for clearing it at the standard levels.

I can also take advantage of those cash farming trips to help level up characters, by having them tag along and try to get in on team attacks whenever possible. A single successful team attack is enough to boost a character from level 1 right up to around 24, but it’s tricky because the nekomata counterattacks a lot, which doesn’t count for team attacks, the team attack chance is only around 50%, and the other character has to hang back a bit to avoid getting hit and rush up when the opportunity presents itself.

I think I’ll just do this until all of my basic characters have their levels up into the 20s, buy the best equipment I can at that point, and then continue on with the story. That’ll help a lot, but not make it *too* much of a cakewalk.