As expected, I finished off Disgaea 3’s story today, wherein the big enemy was defeated and Mao was reconciled with his dad and all that garbage. That’s not really all that important, because now the “real” game has started…

I can unlock the DLC characters now, and did so for Adell and Rozalin from Disgaea 2, and Priere from La Pucelle, but I’ll need a bigger classroom before I can unlock too many more. There’s not really too much to them — there’s a short scene to introduce them, you fight them, and they then join you at level 100 after you defeat them. I’ll have to look more closely and see if there’s anything interesting like unique skills.

I can also unlock some extra maps, and did so for something involving Master Big Star , though I haven’t started it yet. Instead I started powerleveling via the 7-3 map, as described in the Gamefaqs guide. The details of powerleveling get tedious, but in the end I’d used the honor student and robber clubs to put characters through enough reincarnations to unlock at least their third or fourth class tier, put the story characters through their five reincarnations to get maximum stat growth, and got Mao and my personal character up to around level 400-500, with most others around 60-100. (Mao was up over 700 at one point before I had to reincarnate him.)

I also got the rest of the healing spells for my character and then reincarnated him into a martial artist. With his ultra-high SPD stat, he should be able to survive fairly well, which has always been the problem I’ve had with healers, and he can dish out some pretty good AE damage, too.

I then unlocked the House of Ordeals maps, which took a *lot* of bribing in Homeroom, and made it through a bunch of them with just Mao and myself. HoO3 was particularly annoying because it’s extremely long, and I had to abandon my first attempt because I accidentally destroyed a geoblock I absolutely needed to keep around, so I had to do it all over again.

HoO4 is where the next stretch of powerleveling will take place, but I’ll need to prepare for it a bit. It’s about time to start delving into Item World and collecting specialists.

I did all of chapter 7 in Disgaea 3 tonight, though there wasn’t really much notable about it. The story has devolved into some touchy-feely garbage about Mao’s true feelings, and character progression has been fairly straightforward.

There’s only something like four fights left to go, so I should be able to finish it off early tomorrow. Then I can start focusing on the real powerlevelling…

I don’t want to let my time in EQ lead to neglecting other games again, so tonight it was back to Disgaea 3 for a while, and I managed to finish off Chapter 6. Nothing too notable along the way though, aside from a slight plot twist at the end involving the butler… This chapter also really ramped up the “you’ve got to rely on your friends to help you along” theme so common to JRPGS. Mao, of course, isn’t having any of that. Yet.

Once the chapter was done though, I checked the newly spawned chests in the ‘town’ area and one of them had an extremely kickass axe. It was 8 ranks ahead of the one my fighter already had, and was Legendary to boot, and in the end it over doubled his ATK. He’s going to be a force to reckon with from here on…

I also unlocked a couple more school clubs, including one that lets me choose which teacher is used in homeroom, and one that adds belts to the store. I created a new gunslinger character, but her only real purpose right now was so I could put her in the club (you need at least one person in it for the belts to show up) rather than one of my main characters.

Getting back to actually progressing, I finished off Chapter 5 of Disgaea 3 today, running into a literal class war between the sophmore and senior students of the academy, meeting some new NPCs like one of the Diez Gentlemen (in rather Nazi-esque attire), and gaining Mr. Champloo as a recruit.

The last fight in the chapter was actually fairly tough, even though I’m a bit overlevelled thanks to the earlier grinding. The problem is my healer — it’s tough to keep him alive since he’ll often die in one hit, but you can’t keep him too far away from the battles either or he won’t be in range to heal…

Back in Disgaea 3 again, I repeated level 5-2 a couple more times, and then decided to finally delve into the Class World for my zealot, since he was still lower level and it would be fairly safe. Class World is a lot like the Item World, except you subdue ‘dropouts’ instead of ‘innocents’, and boost the character’s stats and skills instead of an item’s.

It was slow going since I wanted to clear out all of the geoblocks on each of the 10 maps, which earns you bonus mana, and in the end I got quite a few levels for my lower characters thanks to the xp-heavy bonus meter, raised some of the aptitudes (the rate at which stats increase) on the zealot, transferred a female healer skill over to him, and got thousands of mana points on him. That was far more than I’d ever gotten before, so I splurged on a whole bunch of magic skills for him, making him my best healer right now even though his level is still lagging a bit.

I also unlocked the female archer, beast master, and magic knight classes along the way, and had enough leftover mana to create a good magic knight character. They’re supposed to be pretty good at both melee and magic, so I’ll have to try and get her caught up to everyone else…

And then, getting back to Disgaea 3 after that weird little detour, I started Chapter 5 tonight. I didn’t get too far into it though, thanks to level 5-2. No, it wasn’t too hard, in fact the problem is that it was too easy and I couldn’t resist the temptation to grind it a handful of times.

With all of the exp gained there, my main characters are in the 34-36 level range now, and I also had enough mana to reincarnate my armour knight and heretic (they were too low to really help out much right now anyway), unlock the honor club and geo master class, and create a few new characters of other unlocked classes.

I finished off chapter 4 in Disgaea 3 over the last couple days, wherein Mao confronted his daddy issues, got turned into a mental child, and the princess Almaz was pining for showed up. Never a dull moment in the Netherworld.

Progress-wise, Mao’s at level 30 now and I’ve unlocked a bunch of stuff like a bigger classroom, a few more character classes, some more school clubs, and the Class World. I haven’t entered the Class World yet, and like many of the other features it won’t really be useful until after the main story, but I’ll probably go through it once sometime soon just for kicks.

Grinding has been fairly minimal so far, though new weapons are starting to get really expensive now. The really good grinding spot isn’t supposed to be until chapter 7, though…

Having finished Fallout 3, next on the list is getting back to Disgaea 3.

I made it through all of chapters 2 and 3 today, involving tracking down an Emeril-esque Home Ec teacher who takes cooking rather seriously (“Cooking means always risking your life!”) so that Mao could cook a dragon egg in order to open his heart and get rid of a fake hero’s title, and then beating up the netherworld school board.

Well, nobody claimed Disgaea ever made any sense.

Mao’s around level 25 now, with a bunch of others close behind, but I also created some new characters (a thief, an armour knight, a heretic, and a wind spinner), and some of them are lagging behind. It’s hard to get the xp and mana to split evenly.