November 02, 2011

Disgaea 4 - making a dent

Starting to bog down a little, honestly, though there's plenty of content yet.

Disgaea has always let you play around with a big party... but at the same time, it's far easier to deal with a small number of characters. It's all a matter of equipment. Each piece of gear (more or less) comes in 40 different, mostly-humorously-named varieties of various strength, and then modified again for rarity. Going into the item world lets you level up an item and increase its statistics... and it also means playing through random levels, so you'll get equipment rewards too, not to mention experience from killing enemies. It's not uncommon to go into an item world for, say, a Mad Cleaver and to get two more Mad Cleavers as rewards...

That said, the game definitely rewards you for having characters that are significantly tougher than the enemies they're fighting. If your SPD stat is a lot higher than their HIT, they won't be able to lay a finger on you. If your RES is a lot higher than their INT, their magic will fizzle. If your DEF is a lot higher than their ATK, well, you just won't take damage. Against a dozen or so level 100 characters, it's far better to have a couple of level 200 characters with higher stats, rather than your own ten level 100 characters. This is magnified by the story characters generally having special attacks with wider areas of effect, and other little bonuses to boot. Each character can have a weapon and three pieces of armor, so there's a LOT more work (read: grinding) involved in keeping up with a large party.

That said, there are disadvantages when playing with only one or two bone-breakers. If your Valvatorez is head and shoulders above the rest of your party (mine's about 470 at the moment, with Fuka, Flonne, and my fire mage around 220-230), then you'll do great so long as you're beating up on stuff Val can one-shot and wade through without taking damage. But when you reach the point where he CAN'T do that, you've just hit a wall. You can bring out your other characters to support and reinforce him... but they're a lot weaker than he is, and the AI is good enough to smell blood in the water, and if they're able to scratch Val they will -wreck- someone 300 levels lower. So your runners-up buy it in one or two floors, leaving you with a wounded Val and a bunch of characters that aren't any higher than 100 or 120... generally a good time to use Mr. Gency's Exit.

It's not all doom and gloom. It's relatively easier for you to fling characters around, and easier to augment their speed, than it was in past games. This means you can win a lot of item world levels by ignoring all the enemies and just tossing someone into the exit gate on turn 1. Even better, you can do this with relatively weak characters, since nobody's going to damage you on your own turn when you're not attacking them. Have a Gunner pick up Fenrich, have an Armor Knight pick them both up, fling the Gunner, fling Fenrich, and have him run for the gate, and you've got a striking range of something like 15-16 squares (gets you across many levels). Of course, that doesn't work so well if there's an enemy gatekeeper sitting in the exit gate...

It can be tough to catch up with characters you don't use much, too. You can make an effort to use them more, but since their stats are low, they aren't very effective. I need to explore some of the things you can do to bulk up your rookies aside from just pouring EXP into them with the Evil Symbols (for example, you can use Magichange to arm them with Desco - they split EXP with her, but get a lot stronger, as you would expect if they are wielding a sword which is also Cthulhu's kid sister.)



Alas, no maids so far.

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