Today’s Disgaea 2 time was spent focusing more on helping the lower level characters and working some weapon skills.

In particular, the only bow user was my healer, since nearly every other class has a crummy bow rating, and she wasn’t using it enough to really advance it much. What I really needed was an archer, but you have to raise the bow skill on someone else first before it unlocks, so I redid level 1-2 over and over again until it hit skill level 5.

Similarly, the mages need staff skill points to enhance their spells (as the staff skill goes up, the range, area of effect, and power of spells increases as well), but they don’t get to use it much in battle, so I ran a couple of them through those same early levels until they also hit level 5.

With those skills raised, I could now unlock the Magic Knight, female Ninja, and Archer classes. I think that’s all of them now, except for the Majin, which I can’t unlock until completing the game and starting over (Japanese RPGs love putting in unlockables that you can only get on your second time through). After passing the bills to unlock them and create a character of each, this should now be the final set of characters I’ll use, excepting any temporary ones I create just to cross-train skills.

And that reminds me… Masters can learn skills from their pupil characters if they stand next to them and use it, so I did that for a few of the pairings in my party. Not all skills can be transferred like this though, and I think I only did four or five in the end — of the ones I can remember, my healer got a Star damage spell, my fire mage got the first two ice spells, and someone else got the ‘enfeeblement’ debuff.

It was another day of Disgaea 2 of course, and today I did Chapter 5 and rescued Taro. It wasn’t really that tough, especially since I have a good number of characters with ranged attacks and the last map let you take advantage of that in a lot of bottlenecks.

Most of my characters are in the level 12-18 range, which seem to be good enough for now, so I probably won’t grind too much unless I run into trouble in the next chapter. I also managed to unlock the Ronin and Male Ninja classes, so I might have to level them up a bit though.

Continuing on in Disgaea 2, I finished Chapter 4 today and rescued Hanako from the washed-up TV star, though Taro is apparently going to have to wait until the next chapter. I also discovered why 4-3 is considered a good leveling spot, though it’s not quite as safe as 5-3 in the original Disgaea. The developers seem to have caught on to how people abused the hell out of invulnerability tiles there, so it’s a bit harder here.

I rechecked with the Dark Assembly and noticed I could now unlock the Beast Tamer, Heavy Knight, and Gunner classes, and passed their bills with little trouble. I only created a knight and a gunner though, since I don’t use many monsters that would benefit from having the beast tamer around. Next up I’ll try to focus on unlocking the Archer, Ninjas, the Magic Knight, and the Ronin, since I just need to keep raising weapon skill levels a bit more for them.

After that I redid 4-3 a few times to level up some people, ending the night with Adell at level 15. The trick, as usual, is to put someone strong in front on the bridges, so that they’re the only ones that can get attacked, and then put the person you’re leveling behind them so that they can join in on team attacks. The monsters on this map hit pretty hard when they’re counterattacking though, so it’s preferable to put someone with a low counterattack rating in front (which is a good idea anyway, since kills via counterattacks don’t count as team attacks and the other guy won’t get any xp).

Back to Disgaea 2 for a bit, and I finished chapter 3 and made it halfway through 4 today. There was one fairly tough fight against some blob-like creatures that I had to retry, since I didn’t expect their rather nasty area attack.

I also had to get a subpoena and commit a felony, one of the other new features of Disgaea 2, before I could finish off chapter 3. All this really means is that when you fulfill some condition (this starting one was for Tink merely existing), you get sent a subpoena item. Enter the subpoena’s item world, get to the dungeon level the Dark Court is on, and whoever enters it (including lifted stacks of party members) has their felony count increased by one. Besides being necessary to advance at this point, each felony reduces shop prices, increases your influence in the Dark Assembly, and adds 1% to the exp you gain, so they’ll be important for powerlevelling later on.

I also ran into Etna from the original Disgaea, but the battle against her was one you’re basically forced to fail since she’s level 1000 and you’re probably…8. Oh well. Chapter 4 started after that, and Adell’s siblings got kidnapped.

I also noticed that I could unlock a new class, Sinners. Their stats didn’t look very impressive at first, especially since they don’t start out with any special attacks, but then I noticed that they get *four* counterattacks per turn. The highest of any of my other characters is 2, I think.

I ended the night with Adell at level 11 now. I’m not sure if I should carry on or do a bit of grinding, yet. The trend so far is that about half my party (i.e., the weaker members) gets wiped out during the battle, and then the stronger ones left over go on to clean up and get the rest of the xp. It’s hard to get the weaker ones leveled up in the regular battles.

Onward with Disgaea 2 tonight, and I made it partway through Episode 3, picking up some frog guy with a French accent who was a friend of Rozalin (the overlord’s daughter) and meeting the thought-to-be-dead TV star again, though after our little encounter he’s now closer than ever.

Leveling was a bit slow today since I was trying to spread it among as many people as possible, so I ended the day with Adell only at level 7. I did manage to unlock a class new to Disgaea 2 though, and created a Druid. One other difference versus the original Disgaea here is that when a new class is unlocked, you still have to successfully pass a bill in the Dark Assembly before you’re allowed to create any characters of that class. It took me a couple tries and some bribery of the senators, but I managed to squeak it through without having to spend too much.

And one more mystery has been solved: according to the trailer on the disc for the associated anime series, it’s pronounced diz-guy-ah.

For a sense of some of the weirdness of this game, check out some pics after the cut:
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Well, I’m not sure if I’ll permanently abandon the original, but I’ve at least started a game of Disgaea 2. It still feels pretty much the same in these early stages apart from the new home base, battle maps, UI changes, and the story.

And the story is just nuts so far, with some family who’s been turned into demons except for one kid (you) that remained human, and their three-eyed mother who spent 15 years researching a method to summon the demon overlord that did it to them, except it requires a life sacrifice that the all-too-cheerful mother is only too happy to do to her newer born-as-demon kids, except it screws up and summons the overlord’s daughter instead, and now she’s bound by contract to join my party and take my main character to the overlord, and she tried hitting on him but he said he doesn’t like girls, and now she’s secretly plotting to betray me, except now she’s getting targeted by some other overlord out to defeat her father and I just accidentally murdered some washed up TV star who was doing a travel show and… *whew*

Ah well, so far I’ve done the first chapter, gotten my main character (Adell) up to level 5, passed a ‘more expensive items’ bill in the Dark Assembly, and created a few more characters (a thief, a female fighter, and two more mages to round out the element types).

I did a bit more powerlevelling in Disgaea tonight, getting a few more characters into their 20s and 30s and Laharl all the way up to 45 now. After a bit of reading, I’ve been tempted to just abandon it and start on Disgaea 2 though, since it’s supposed to be very similar in the fundamentals but improved in many ways (more classes, more monsters, better UI, quicker combat, more useful Dark Assembly, etc.). There aren’t quite as many detailed guides available for it, but I imagine a lot of the same information still applies.

The main thing I’d miss is the story in Disgaea 1, but I’m not sure if that’s worth the probable 30+ additional hours it’ll take just to finish the main plot, and I can probably find the endings on Youtube. But then again, I’ve already put in around 21 hours…

Today I finally made it to Chapter 5 of Disgaea, and the all-important third mission therein. It’s important because this is one of the best spots for leveling up characters, so I pretty much stuck around here all evening. It’s kind of a cheat since it’s not how the map is intended to be played, but hey, it’s within the rules.

I used the technique described in one of the FAQs on Gamefaqs (throwing and combining enemies onto one of the two non-invulnerable spots), but it was slow going at first as I couldn’t do much damage to them. Eventually though, I figured out that the best way to do it was to always use Laharl one space away as the second person in the team attack, with the person I want to level in front. In order to trigger the team attacks, I gave each character being levelled a sword as well, since the odds of a team attack increase a lot if they’re using the same weapon.

Using this method, I leveled up a handful of characters, and created some new ones of classes that had been unlocked in the process (a ronin, ninja, and star mage). Laharl is up to level 32 now too, and though I’m tempted to swap someone else in instead so he doesn’t get too far ahead, he can now do enough damage that I can combine all of the enemies into a single level 112 monster and still be able to hurt it. When I do that, I can take a character right from level 1 to 22 in a single battle.

The only downside is that since they level up so quickly, they don’t have very high weapon or magic skills, since they only go up with use. I should probably be letting them practice them on the invulnerable enemies as they’re being gathered up, while someone else is being leveled.

I’ve also unlocked various higher tiers of existing classes, like Fighters (a better version of Brawlers), but I probably won’t bother with them for now. I’ll eventually transmigrate characters to them, but it doesn’t seem that urgent.

After playing with my new toy for a few days, I got back to Disgaea this evening. Since the good powerlevelling areas aren’t until a couple chapters down the road, I got back to just working through the storyline and finished off chapters 2 and 3. I had to restart one battle because of an accidental ally murder (you cannot directly kill any of your own party members, even accidentally, if you want the ‘good’ ending), but otherwise the only difficult fight was the boss at the end of chapter 3.

I picked up two new unique recruits along the way: Flonne, the kind-but-dumb angel we met earlier and who’s now apparently out to see if Laharl is capable of love, and the ‘rich demon’ defeated at the end of chapter 3. I get the feeling Flonne is going to be difficult to level up, since she’s not exactly a front-line fighter… I also unlocked a few new classes, and created a Rogue and a Scout to add to the party and ran them through the usual newbie levelling.

With the Rogue, I now have a decent chance at stealing items from enemies, and I experimented with it a bit while doing the newbie levelling. Turns out that if the enemy has no actual items to steal, you can steal stats from them instead, called by a variety of different things (e.g., if you steal their ‘age’, you gain exp). I also discovered that you can even steal from geo symbols, and I successfully stole ‘innocence’ from one. Poor thing…

I ended off by fiddling with the Dark Council a bit, managing to get Laharl through his fourth promotion exam despite being up against two level 20 enemies while he was still 12. I also successfully passed a bill that made better items available at the store. Now I just need more money for them…

I didn’t bother with progressing any further in the main story in Disgaea tonight, focusing instead on beefing up some of the weaker party members. With the muscle items I mentioned earlier, I could easily solo all of them up to at least level 5 in the earlier maps. I also gave a cleric a bow, even though it’s not their preferred weapon, just so he could gain three weapon levels in it and unlock the Archer class, since none of the starting classes can really use a bow that well.

Just for kicks, I tried doing an item world run on one of the more useless items I’d picked up recently, a belt that added some attack points but reduced defense a lot. The item world wasn’t too difficult, since the enemies were mainly level 2 or 3 at worst, but there were a lot of them and it was a bit of a slog since you have to go through at least 10 levels before it will let you exit the item world. I eventually made it, gaining a few more levels for some more party members, and the stats on the belt improved quite a bit, with the attack bonus now far outweighing the defense loss. I might actually use it now, and it’s shown me how useful doing item worlds can be. You just have to make sure you have a good chunk of time set aside for it…