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.