RandomNPC – Video Game RPG Reviews, Editorials, and Features

Disgaea is one of those games where grinding plays a huge role. Some players are even so turned off by the concept of having to level up for hours upon hours that they give up and move on to other games. While grinding is a big part of the series, grinding efficiently can cut down the time needed to get through storyline battles to about ten hours, if not less.

The purpose of this Disgaea strategy series is to give you a few tips that will help drastically reduce the amount of time you’ll need to spend fighting hoards of monsters. It doesn’t cover advanced topics such as master/pupil chaining, maxing stats, et cetera and you might have to adapt it a bit depending on your play-style, but it should help speed things up a bit for those of you struggling with too much grinding. These tips will probably help a bit in the other Disgaea titles too if you focus more on general strategy than on specifics, though there have definitely been changes.

First, you’ll need to pick out a weapon of choice as well as someone to use it. Personally, I prefer to go with swords because sword skills are versatile, you mostly just need to worry about raising your Attack stat with them, and what is arguably the best weapon in the game is a sword. Next, it’s time to hit the shops. Pick out the best weapon you can afford right now, and you might want to get a little bit of armor too if you can find anything with Statisticians or Armsmasters in them. These increase the rate that you’ll gain exp and weapon exp skill respectively, so they’re a huge asset to growing powerful quickly. If you can’t find a nice piece of armor or just want to save money, feel free to steal armor from your other party members.

As far as the battles themselves are concerned, it’s in your best interest to use weapon skills as much as possible once they’re available and avoid character-specific skills unless you’re desperate since you lose them when you reincarnate. A nice benefit to weapon skills is that you don’t need to worry about missing as much as with normal attacks, and enemies can’t counter them. Wasting SP on weapon skills now when you don’t really need them very much will not only make your weapon skills more powerful for when you do need them, it will also give you a high medical bill. Why is this good? A high medical bill from SP usage will result in the party obtaining orbs as a gift at periodic intervals based on SP healing. Orbs cannot be purchased in shops, and they not only raise maximum SP, they also raise resistance against magic, something most purchasable armors sorely lack. You’ll eventually have more SP than you can ever use, but the bonus SP you get from orbs will help a lot early on, especially in the item world, and the resistance is quite useful as well.

Now then, despite the tutorial telling you that it’s stupid to send a single character in alone, this is actually the most efficient strategy in the early portions of the game. With a good weapon, the imperial seal, and some armor, your chosen warrior will be nearly invincible. Another benefit to letting one character do all the killing is that they will receive all of the mana, allowing you to create new characters with high bonus stats when you get a little further into the game. This isn’t to say that you should entirely avoid placing other members into battle if you need to use an item, distract an enemy, or the map’s clear bonus is free party exp, but it’s in your best interest to have just one character getting the kills at this point. If you focus on a single character and upgrade equipment periodically, you can get through most, if not all, of the first two episodes without any grinding whatsoever.