I kicked off today’s Disgaea 2 session by opening the Dark World, just for kicks, though I won’t actually work on it until later on.

Chapter 11 was a bit odd in that a bunch of the battles had no story development at all; you were just dumped straight into them and returned immediately to the village afterwards, making them feel a bit like padding. It also ended with another forced loss, but I at least managed to steal a couple of really good items (Testament and an Orion Belt) in the process. Here was also where I could see one of the possible endings to the game by actually beating Laharl, which I could do with my level 9999 neko, but doing so ends the game rather unsatisfyingly of course…

Chapter 12 was a bit annoying in that the maps were made up of crystalline slabs and it was difficult to tell what was connected to what, but it wasn’t too notable otherwise, aside from a revelation at the end about Adell’s parents that I should have seen coming a mile away.

And finally, chapter 13 was a fairly straightforward series of tougher battles, though they were still fairly easy with my powerlevelled crew. It ended with a fight against ‘Zenon’ and another revelation about Rozalin that I didn’t expect, but makes sense in hindsight. And so ended the main Disgaea 2 story.

There’s still more to do, of course — the Disgaea series is infamous for having almost *too much* to do. The post-ending save starts you over at the beginning again and I have to reopen all of the battle areas, but I get to keep all of my characters’ stats and items. I still have to do the Cave of Ordeals, Dark World, get legendary high-rank items, kill the Item Gods in their item world, create a Majin now that I’ve unlocked its class, reincarnate and unlock the best tiers of all of the classes, see the alternate endings, unlock some more special Dark Assembly bills, find the pirates in an item world, do the Land of Carnage, work on felonies…

I have no idea how much of that I’ll actually do though, as other games await to be played, and I’ll probably put this one aside for now. Time to do something a bit different.

But in parting…

Today I easily completed chapters 9 and 10 in Disgaea 2, picking up Etna along the way, but it was starting to get a bit tougher again towards the end as the monsters’ levels evened out with my own. So, it was time to farm nekomatas again.

I used the capturing trick to get a level 9999 nekomata, and it didn’t take too long since I didn’t even have to farm for cash along the way. Instead, I left the farming until after getting that one, and I discovered that if I cleared a full field of level 9999 nekos via that stack attack technique, I could get characters to level 100 within two attacks, and gained over 300,000,000 credits at the end the battle. That might seem like a lot until I discovered that the highest-end weapons and armour cost in the tens of millions of credits…

Farming xp this way is rather tedious though, since you have to wait something like 70 turns for the enemies to raise up to level 9999, so I only bothered levelling up my 10 ‘main’ characters, got a bunch of the best equipment for most of them, and now I’m set for the rest of the main story. I’ve got a bunch of other characters still in their 30s, but they’ll have to wait.

And since I now had an ultra-powerful monster on my side, I forced through a bunch of bills in the Dark Assembly, including opening up the Cave of Ordeals, increasing shop quality, becoming a senator myself, and increasing my influence.

Yeah, I’m cheating my ass off here, but I’ve got so damn many games waiting to be played that a little boost to quicken the pace doesn’t hurt…

My new army:

And it was finally revealed that that orange thing on the father’s chest is a giant pimple. A giant, sentient, horny pimple…:
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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:
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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.

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.