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…

I only spent a little time in Disgaea tonight, but it was productive time, as I now have a couple muscle items that boost HPs, one by around 220 and the other by around 410. That’s kind of a lot when the character only has about 20 to begin with…

Technically, they were gained by perfectly legitimate means within the game rules…even if it was unintended… Basically, these muscle items are rewards from the hospital for healing your party a certain cumulative number of HPs. Since you can damage yourself by taking off a muscle item and putting it back on, you can repeatedly hurt yourself that way and get healed at the hospital without having to enter a battle. Eventually, you’ll earn the next muscle item reward, which lets you do it in even bigger chunks of HP, and you can sell off the previous muscle item you had to keep funding the healing.

I could have kept doing this for a couple more ranks of muscle items, but I don’t want to cheat *too* badly (or have to sell off too many of them to keep the funding going). These ones will be just enough to let me slap them on low-level characters and send them solo out on earlier missions to level them up, so they don’t fall too far behind.

Having shelved Sacred for a while, I still had a bit of an RPG itch, so I finally got back to starting Disgaea in earnest. I bought it over a year ago, but set it aside almost right away since its complexity seemed to demand more dedication than I could spare at the time.

And complicated it is. Other SRPGs like FFTA or Band of Bugs are downright simple compared to Disgaea, which has all sorts of things like ‘item worlds’, which are essentially dungeons within your own inventory items that you can beat in order to level up the item. Or capture specialists of different types and strengths within the item to improve its stats. Or the Dark Assembly, where you can try to pass resolutions that affect the game, often through bribery or brute force. Or the combat mechanic that has you picking up other party members or enemies and throwing them around the map, for various reasons. Or the ‘geo panels’ and how they alter the battle rules in certain areas of the map and how you can alter them by destroying them or throwing them around. Or how you can ‘transmigrate’ characters to increase their power at the cost of resetting their level. Or…ow, my head hurts.

I also started it since Disgaea 3 is coming out for the PS3 this year, and I figure I should have at least sampled the first two games before starting that one. You can spend a lot of time in Disgaea, grinding your characters up to level 9999, beating all of the ultra-advanced maps, and so on, but I’ll probably only bother with a basic run-through before moving on.

So far I’ve made it through the first world, where Laharl rechristened another demon competing for the throne as “Mid-Boss” (the game has a rather quirky, self-aware sense of humour) and I got him up to level 8. I’ve created one each of each possible combination of gender and classes, since unlocking better classes depends on certain specific combinations (e.g., getting a female warrior and female brawler up to level 10).

The main problem is keeping them all levelled up, since most of your xp comes from killing monsters. If Laharl is there, then he gets a lot of the xp since he’s so strong, so really you have to redo early battles over again a few times without him. Support classes like clerics are also tougher to level, since they don’t directly engage in combat well, but you can try to get them some xp by having them participate in combos (though it’s still a pain).

And the story isn’t anything special so far — demon prince slumbers a bit too long, wakes up to a war in the underworld for control of the throne, starts kicking butts… The characters are full of, well, character though, like Flonne, the dim-but-friendly angel who doesn’t make a particularly good assassin.