Disgaea 2

You're not wrong to start with Disgaea 2, but you should play Phantom Brave as well tbh.

Holy shit you are stupid

how about you read a guide on basic game stats instead of making retarded questions?

also
fucking kill yourself.

The mechanics of the first game seem to be inferior to the mechanics of the second game, so I don't see the point in playing the first game.
Maybe the first game has a better story or something, but people who play vidya for the story are a bizarre species - there's a "skip" button for a reason.

I've played it, and I couldn't really get into it. I'll try again after playing Disgaea 2, and am more familiar with the design philosophy behind it all.

Yare yare, I've really stumbled into an otaku's nest, haven't I?

Well, he's not THAT retarded. If nothing else Disgaea games don't tend to continue their storylines.

That said, anyone who talks shit about the first game is a fucking retard.

Nigger its a fucking RPG you play them for the story as much as the gameplay.

Instead of switching to ultimate troll mode just admit you fucked up and fix your shit or get the fuck out. There is no way you are this fucking retarded. This is the most next level stupidity I have ever seen.

Talk to her the when it opens to get a "Gency's Exit". You'll get a second freebie when the story forces you to go in. They're always useful, and not available in stores: you can only get them by beating Item World bosses.
Also, be sure to have a flying monster on your team, since they can fly over mooks in the Item World. You can power up shoes with extra move speed and stack them on a moth and it'll basically let you skip levels; saves a lot of time.

It's a tactics game. You play them for the mechanics and the story may as well be 100% headcanon.

These are my opinions, and since they're my opinions they're automatically correct. Deal with it, or go make your own thread. There's no need to be rude. :^)

When I played the first game there was an NPC that was basically there as a guide who explained everything. Isn't there the same thing in the second game?

God what insufferable faggot

A Nippon Ichi Software game flooded with variables and menus and has heavy amounts of grinding to make you feel like you're always playing the game wrong?

What are the odds?

Gotcha. I'm sure I'll understand exactly what you mean once I unlock the Item world tutorials. Sounds pretty handy from what I can glean right now.

There are, but there's many of them scattered all over kind of haphazardly. I'm discovering the tutorials as I go.

Watch your blood pressure, user.

There's plenty of mechanics so far that are definitely unique to the point of being obtuse, but I wouldn't say it's as bad as all that. It's taking some getting used to, but I'm enjoying it so far.
Just made a bunch of characters to fill out my party, and now I'm grinding so I can give them equipment so they don't get one-shotted by a ghost tying them down.

My only actual complaint with the game so far is that it has too much graphics and animations that get in the way of the tactical information. I'd have liked a crisp, minimalist presentation, but I knew what I was getting into before I started playing in that regard so it's not a fair complaint.

This ones their main series, so I don't doubt it's more accessible.
But Phantom brave and Fate paradox were just ridiculous.

I want to pirate the steam version of D2, but I can't find any information on how butchered it is considering NISA was involved.

Anyone know if it's up to their usual standards of "quality"?

Just emulate the PSP version since it's natively widescreen.

I don't like any of the answers given so far so I'm going to take a stab at it.

This is JUMP. See how Adell can move 5 squares per turn? He has a vertical leap of 25. You can see the height of a square when moving a character around. Basically, chars with height JM will be able to get to higher places quicker than those with lower JM. Some characters and equipment later on will have crazy high JM allowing you to leap on top of trees, building etc.

This is THROW. Adell can throw another character 5 spaces. Monsters cannot throw but their TW shows how far a character thrown at them will bounce. Prinnies have high TW so you can use them to bounce someone a good way across the map. Throwing/bouncing characters that have yet to move or act can give you the drop on distant enemies.

This is population. This is an equipment stat meaning the item can hold 4 residents (more on that later). Leveling an item can increase its maximum population.

Those are the residents occupying your Cheap Axe. There are dozens of different residents that all do different things. The lv1 Amnesiac means the axe has a 1% chance of inflicting the 'forget' status effect and the lv1 gladiator raises the weapons ATK stat by 1. Unless you plan on beating the post-game you don't need to worry much about these.

I've played thousands of hours of Disgaea so I know what I'm talking about.

if you are only going to play one because you want the "best mechanics" then play Disgaea 5 because it's the most refined version to date. But if you are playing for the story and characters the first game is hands down the most endearing and memorable. Disgaea 2 is mediocre. But why just play one when the definitive version of both are FREE ?

ppsspp.org/

emuparadise.me/PSP_ISOs/Disgaea_-_Afternoon_of_Darkness_(USA)/157253

emuparadise.me/PSP_ISOs/Disgaea_2_-_Dark_Hero_Days_(USA)/157744

Daily reminder to lift.

No, a 25 tile high area, he has a good jump rate since he's the physical main character but he can't leap buildings.

Yes, but it can't be increased (unless the item world merchants have bonuses I forgot) and is based on class. Each main character has their own unique class separate from generic classes.

It's actually pretty simple, Item world residents increase stats on the item, and some of them give other bonuses, like to EXP to make leveling easier. If you go Item world delving, you can unlock them and get them to move to other items, and those residents stack.

Not throw distance? I'm confused now.
Tower capacity is how many people you can stack on top of eachother (if I remember). The one on the bottom determines how many he can hold, but generally it never becomes an issue.

...

why are you crying for a PC port when you can easily emulate PSP?

I wanted a port for the PSP. It's japanese only, and you can't learn japanese.

what a coon

There is an English translation that is 99% complete and if fully playable.
romhacking.net/translations/2328/

But are you sure there is not USA release because there is this:
emuparadise.me/Sony_Playstation_2_ISOs/Makai_Kingdom_-_Chronicles_of_the_Sacred_Tome_(USA)/150650

There's this:
gbatemp.net/threads/phantom-kingdom-portable-english-translation.365313/
But it's buggy. I think when they copy/pasted the English script they forgot to escape characters or something; I remember when I played through it some punctuation was missing from dialogue.

Item world sounds like it's going to be fun to muck around in, but it's nice that it's not required for a main game playthrough so I can just pop in and out as I feel like it.
This is crazy and awesome.

Is there a way to turn nothing-blocks into geo-blocks? Like, if there's a bunch of buff blocks, can I somehow turn the entire map into buff-zone, or am I limited to just merging existing geo-block zones that are touching? The null-colored pyramids are used to delete zones entirely from what I can tell, but is there a reverse of that?
Also, what is the Bonus meter based on after the battle? Even the first tutorial missions have a Bonus meter that goes up to ~10, but I've only gotten it up to 2. Is it based on just raw damage dealt, or maybe longest combo hit string, or what?

If I like Disgaea 2 enough, I'll definitely poke around the series some more afterwards. It sounds like I might want to make Disgaea 5 my next stop, though judging by the tantrums throughout this thread, Disgaea 1 sounds like it might actually be somewhat decent.
If the story is completely ignored, how does Disgaea 1 actually stack up?

The "stories" just consist of a skeleton framework with wacky jokes thrown on, and one requisite twist per game.

See, this is the impression I've gotten of it right off the bat from just a few hours' worth of playtime. The dialog is just a mish-mash of quirky jokes, pop culture references and memes that were stale well before the game even came out. There's a bit about a curse that turned everyone (except the main character, explicitly because he is the main character so quirky 4th wall breaking trope) which is mildly interesting, but beyond that the characters are all very grating so far.

The best played PC maybe. The latter the better. 5 is the best one but it's only available on nogames4 and nintyshit soon.

For the record you don't need to mess with the item world too much but felonies (they boost your exp rate) do help the grind.

I imagine 3DS will be sufficiently emulatable before too long. The franchise will probably be up to Disgaea 17 before the PS4 can be acceptably emulated, though, unfortunately. If they're the same game, I suppose the version doesn't matter, though.

its the most basic of all the games but its still addictive and fun. However, it also established the main core feathers. The differences between Disgaea 1 and Disgaea 5 are very minor but each game tweaked an iterated on the formula adding cool new features and improving old features (an in some cases adding streamlining features that can be used as exploits). That said the core game is 99% the same through all of them. Its like comparing Dragon Warrior 1 to Dragon Warrior 4. However the Story in the first game is debating the only one with lovable characters and considering it's the foundation titled many would rather just play the first one skipping all the others. Seriously just emulate the first game if you are even curious. What ever you do, not wast your money on disgaea d2

That's the PS2 version, which was brought over. NIS later ported it to PSP and added a bunch of new stuff, but they never brought it over to the states.

They actually released the game in that state, with that many abilities that flat-out crash the game every time they're used?
That's the kind of shit that's so unbelievable that I have no choice but to believe it.
What was the other game that was released in such a broken state that it bricked systems? Witch and the 100 Knights or something like that? How does anybody even get away with that level of incompetence?

mindless fanboys and no punishment for their actions.

Speaking of, is there any reason to get the PC version instead of emulating the PS2 version of Disgaea?

As far as I know, no. I don't think they added anything to the PC port.

not only do they crash the game, but they crash the entire ps3 OS and in some cases has caused peoples systems to be bricked permanently. Not only that but they only tried to patch the problem once and not only do they not fix the issue but cause new bugs and when asked about it they locked the thread and banned people from the forums. The only safe way to play the game is to turn off battle animations.

nisamerica.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=13386&sid=306803796c9f2faa4401ad1486adc62f&start=300

The only thing listed in the PC features is that there's some Japanese DLC characters (or classes?) that weren't released in western versions before.
I'm not sure how true that is, because I've obviously never played previous versions of the game.

Jesus fucking christ.
Is this from incompetence, or is it something more sinister, like a censorship strategy where they brick the systems of the target audience to try to shrink market share? Just 5 years ago, this would have been tinfoil-hat territory.

You cannot. A geo-block affects all squares of the same colour that it is on and turns them to its own colour if it is destroyed. With this in mind you can turn all the blocks to one colour and leave the block that gives you the desired affect. Coincidentally, Chaining this affect is one of the the best ways to fill out the bonus gauge. Speaking of….

Every stage has a bonus gauge that caps out at 10, even if there's no reasonable way of getting it that high. It fills up when you kill stuff, land combos, do lots of damage, use abilities and destroy geo-blocks, pretty much everything. It changes every time so don't stress if you see a rare item that you can't get.

Pay close attention to it in item world since there will always be lots of geo-blocks to combo with.

It doesn't seem like a plan, it just seems like petty rebellion. All you have to do to cause a crash is to remove a file while still having something call it.

So in the original japanese, you have an animation that calls a set of sprites for an animation, all they have to do for the boss glitch is to remove a single sprite made for the skill that does it. So Burning Knuckle and they other crash skills have to have one sprite made for that specific skill.

It's either that or they wrote malicious code and inserted it into a boss damage formula, or fucked up a line in that formula when it attacks a boss character.

It's no doubtedly intentional, the only thing you have to do in localization is to change text files from Japanese to english, switch out voice files and edit the existing stills to translate text, there is no way that they could cause a crash in a game as simple as Disgaea if they did their jobs.

Generally, if something like this has been going on for this long, it's not stupidity, it's plain malice.

I'm pretty sure NISA hates their fanbase for being shitlords who play games with characters that have flat chests.

Also, I just realized, a simple sprite delete crash doesn't brick consoles. they wrote malicious code. This is intentional.

So why does NIS allow NISA to sabotage their projects like this? Or do they absolutely not give a shit because Japan is all they care about?

They just hate their fanbase period. The incompetent they showed with DD2 and Nep V was astounding and I can't believe people I know still give them money even when they know about the shit they've done.

In general, Japanese publishers don't keep a tight leash on their American collaborators. As long as the Americans tell them how much profit was made from the localization, the Japanese publisher probably doesn't give a shit how badly butchered the localization is (see: anything Treehouse touches).

Is there anyone other than XSEED that takes their fucking job seriously or is the whole scene Holla Forums vermin LARPing as Stalinist commissars?

Speaking of, is there any reason to get the PC version instead of emulating the PS2 version of Disgaea?

Whoops, ignore this. Accidentally re-posted my previous post.

Whatever you do, don't play Disgaea Infinite. It's a a VN instead of a strategy game, so it's just a gigantic pile of that stuff. Nothing but hours of quirky characters talking about buying things from the shopping channel.

(checked)
A horse wiener!? Now, That's dangerous!

Disgaea games are not good

the competitive advantage of disgaea was a grindy power-creep type game full of otaku-pandering/fan-service spritework. This was pre-2007. Disgaea lost its competitive advantage when mobile, MMOs, and other grindy and power creep games evolved. Disgaea is repetitive and really has no deep or interesting gameplay mechanic besides stacking, and its not really that fun.

The remaining competitive mechanic was that it was not casual friendly, hence Holla Forums likes it. However Disgaea has been butchered by Nisa and for that reason alone you should never ever purchase or give money to Nisa.

If you played Makai Kingdom and the first disgaea you pretty much played everything the series has to offer, and after disgaea 2 the rest really doesn't fucking matter, although i give props to three on their superior spritework.

I hope you're emulating. And honestly, after story-mode just drop it. The grinding autism is not worth it.

Drop Disgaea right now. It's easily the worst SRPG series of all time. Don't be fooled by "charm", it's irremediable shit gameplay mechanics with an even worse publisher.

If you played better tactics like game before, drop it for your own sake.

how dare you?

LIES.
OUTRAGEOUS LIES
The forth one is the best. Disgaea 4 on ViTA has more features and content than 5.

What's the best way to level up new characters? It seems they're easy to boost with equipment, but would it be worthwhile to create an entire alternate low-level party to level up with them? Is there a cap on how many characters you can have in your stable at one time?

Yeah, the story isn't really pulling me in at all beyond minor interest in this monster curse deal.

I've played pretty much all of the tactics games out there, at least all of the ones that are in English in some form or another. I just go through cycles of playing favorites like Front Mission 2/5, FFT, X-Com, Vandal Hearts, TOLUCT (and Ogre Battle: MotBQ + 64 if those remotely count as tactics), Silent Storm, etc, and then craving something new.
I never played a game in the Disgaea franchise before, so I'm checking it out.

The writing, or at least the localization, is legitimately godawful. The game itself, though, is actually pretty damn addicting so far. I haven't made it to any turbo-grind points yet, so we'll see how it holds up. I should be okay with the grind, though, considering I used to sit for hours circle-Accumulating over a wounded chocobo without getting bored.

I never played 4 or 3 they where the only games I haven't played but I think you might be mistaken.

It also has Ashly Burch

Where can I get JP 3/4 for vita piracy?

don't have a vita wish i did then I would get the remake of 4 but i don't so make do with what i got.
disgaea 5 is good just because the new dev team didn't fuck it over that alone shows the series will go on longer which is great.
I mean if they are gonna do year releases on each game we can expect disgaea 4 in 2018 and remake of disgaea 5 2019

there are gonna be certain maps that have exp+ and they are gonna be good for leveling stuff up also if you build a tower of units and have the tank one the bottom everyone in the tower gets exp per a kill spread out of course.
also there are magic enemy levels that seem to give more exp i think it was 77 you'll have to look it up.

I started on normal game and got to the second chapter before remembering Axel story unlocks magic change on like the second or third stage so i'm basically starting over and gonna burn thru that tonight.

I keep hearing this, and I also heard about bouncing units off of Prinnies, but I can't figure out how to do it. Do I need to wait for the tutorial to tell me about the mechanic, first?

My best guess was throwing units on top of each other, but I just get a "buzz" sound when I try.

No, you gotta lift a unit, then go up to the unit lifting with a different character and lift that unit.

Oh shit, that makes total sense actually. Thanks.

monsters classes can't lift so you also need to make them the top of the tower.

I snagged a ps3 version.
What are the differences?

disgaea 4 base game aint bad. but the remake just improves by adding the good shit from next game in the series which would be like cheatshop.
disgaea.wikia.com/wiki/Disgaea_4:_A_Promise_Revisited

If i could get a cheap vita and disgaea 4 remake I would in a heartbeat but I'm extremely limited on money and only got disgaea 2 for pc because I sold my dota 2 crap after I stop playing

A shit ton.

disgaea.wikia.com/wiki/Disgaea_4_Return

Disgaea 4 works with the PS TV, which is like 50 bucks.

ya but I'd rather have portability from the vita then having the tv thou i've seen the tv cheap as fuck many times

disgae first impressions are scary
it seems you must do 15 diferent things just to make 1 character strong.
after you play a bi you will see its not that complex

No he's right, Val was damn good protagonist.

Wait, this version of the game fucked in any way? I don't want to get my hopes up about something that can give my vita life again.

see

gives a list of whats been added

for some reason I don't believe you Geo Blocks seem fucking cool as fuck though and monster fusions in 5 and they where introduced in 4

No no, I read that and got excited but I want to know if NISA fucked it in any way.

He's a top tier bro and is what I think the best Disgaea protag.

the only fucking i know nisa has done to the disgaea series is the fuck ups with disgaea d2(the crashes and possible shit never had those happen but heard they were pretty bad when they did) and shit handling of online with disgaea 4 base making limitations other then those no.
the remakes have always been worth playing thru

Yeah, suffered the crashes myself and it made grinding CoO and item world beyond stressful and I eventually gave up on the game. Nice to know the remakes aren't fucked but it makes you wonder why they can't do a good job in the first place.

PSP version has added content, and the DLC characters can be gotten here.

nicoblog.org/psp/disgae-2-dark-hero-days/

You can read the Double Jump strategy guide; it covers a lot more than a typical guide would and serves as a detailed manual.

Grinding is refined towards a sadistic art form, but usually boils down to a handful of key places.

Levels gained are cumulative in a sense- as when you reincarnate back to level 1 to re-class, it keeps track of total levels gained and there's a stat increase from it.

With Item world you just go in, kill the specialist, then they're tame. Outside item world you combine them to increase their level; this can only be done outside item world.

There's also ones that can be made only by combining certain kinds. Keep in mind there's drawbacks to using duel stat specialists.

huh? they backported that into disgaea 2?

disgaea 1 is mostly liked for its characters. the story isnt especially well written or anything but its a lot of fun.

So how do Towers actually work? One user suggested that I stack my party up on a huge tower and then walk around a map killing everything to level up my guys, but I'm having a problem where my tower can't move while stacked, and on subsequent turns can't act at all except to throw. Do I have to unstack and restack every single turn?

Toss your tower around with the character at the bottom, next turn move that character next to it, pick it up, throw it again. This is how you move the tower. The tower can still attack after being thrown.

Got it, and it's working like a charm, thanks.

oh, and when you go to court, throw a tower onto the entrance panel, everyone in the tower will get felonies.

ah ya the exp gain in this game isn't on gear its Felonies so do bad shit aka kill friendlies etc send tower of your people in they get felonies aka exp gain up to 300 felonies which is 300% exp gain.

this also effects the ending of the main story only by adell having fellonies adell needs to have friendly kills and felonies at 10(no adellxrozalin) and 99(rozalin dead Adell gets possessed by zenon eats Taro and hanako) there are other endings like not losing to Enta/laharl etc.

The bonus gauge . High-level maps will give hundreds of thousands of EXP to every living character. Just take the new guys out of the base right before you kill the last enemy.

Honestly, I just focus on a single character, with a few dozen non-combat helper characters. (Fist-users to knock gatekeepers off of exit portals, beastmasters if my main is a monster, a flier to speed through the Item World, etc.) Disgaea doesn't have anything like Makai Kingdom where your characters can randomly get knocked off a cliff, so keeping all your eggs in one basket just cuts down on the grinding.

According to a sticky in the GameFAQs forum, you can have up to 104 generic/custom characters in the PS2 and PSP versions of Disgaea 2.

2 isn't even the best one, it's one of the weakest in the series compared to 1 or 4.

2/4/5 are great
first game did not age well even the remake isn't worth it unless you want to play every game.

I keep trying to play D2 but the terrible VA and translations keep me away. Are there any patches to de-NISA D2?

The localization is pretty atrocious. I'm just skimming through dialog rapidly to maintain the gist of what's going on, and I switched to Japanese voices so I don't have to listen to leftists grunting in my ears.

Definitely. It's like the voice actors were just handed their lines without any context. And nobody told Tink's VA that the two personalities should talk differently.
And why'd they change "de gozaru" to "zam"? They have to explain her saying it either way, nobody would blink at a ninja talking Japanese, half the people playing the game probably already know the phrase from some anime/manga or another, and "zam" sounds ridiculous for a serious character. Even changing it to "sir" and having her be military-formal all the time would make more sense.

This, however bear in mind that the amount of felonies Adell has determines how bad your ending is. Not that you're in it for the story to begin with, but just thought you should know.

So what would you even have to do, give everyone else 300 felonies without letting Adell get a single one? I suppose if he's the one throwing the tower into the court each time that would work out.

I started with 2 when I was in high school and loved it. Also, you're wrong about tw.

Yes there are npc's who explain almost everything, if not everything. The fact that you're level 1 means you haven't even done anything yet.

I generally try to read through a game's entire manual before I play, so I know what all of the mechanics are and how to do them. I like when games have a big thick encyclopedia in them, so I can study properly. This game instead scatters all of the information around and hides it behind different NPCs and in different level dialogs at different times.
I suppose it's nice for people who like to take baby steps as they learn, but I typically like to dive in and let all of the information hit me at once.
That was a couple of days ago at this point, though, and I hope I've got a firm grasp of most of the game's concepts at this point.

I've still barely done anything, though. The last things I did were go to the Dark Court and get my shit pushed in by Etna with a level and stats higher than I've ever witnessed in an RPG in my entire life. All of her moves were short anime episodes that resulted in overkill so extreme I'm amazed my characters weren't erased.
I'm just basically at chapter 4, in other words. I do a lot of grinding for money and loot on that one map where you can kill every enemy and max the bonus gauge on turn 1.

After looking into some things other anons have said, though, I'm trying to decide right now whether it's worth throwing my file away and restarting with Axel Mode to unlock Magichange, though. You can apparently transmogrify monsters into weapons with that ability, but I have no idea if that's actually extremely useful, or just a fun gimmick. I've also not bothered with monster units at all, because I don't really see the point of them beyond novelty.

I don't think farming felonies is really that important for the main campaign. The endboss is only about level 90 or so. You should be fully prepared by the time you get there.
Even if you are pants-on-head-retarded it can still be cheesed with a level 9999 Nekomata, but if you have any self respect you'll refrain from obtaining one until you actually need it to speed up Item World grinding in the post game.

Oh, and when you have to fight over powered enemies like Etna you are obviously supposed to lose to proceed. You can win in NG+ but that just triggers an alternate ending.

I found that magichange was near worthless in actual combat, but amazing for grinding because of the turn limit. In any situation where the enemy is near or above your own level, magichange's turn limit is never enough time, meaning you're better off with a standard weapon. On the other hand, doing grinding maps is generally one to two turns, perfect for magichange to show how ridiculous it can be as your monster grows with the user.

You can use the rebirth + atonement option to clear Adel's felonies before the last fight. The good thing about this is that while it wipes the slate clean, he'll still have the EXP bonus from the felonies. You can do this with any character, but generic units will be reborn as prinnies to atone. Their level can be grinded to reincarnate them to their previous class.

Gotcha. I'll definitely hold off, then. The Item World is kind of interesting, but also kind of meh. The crafted levels are much more interesting than the random ones, at least so far.

Yeah, I don't know if the game could have made that any more obvious. It came just short of physically reaching through the screen and flicking me in the forehead.

Oh, so it's a combat ability? I thought it would be a crafting ability, where you could take a max level monster and transform it into a weapon that gives all of that monster's stats to your character. That sounded pretty cool.
But if it's just something where you temporarily swing a monster around, I don't know how interesting that actually is.
That reminds me, is the general practice to reincarnate classes into their more advanced versions (thief -> rogue for example)? Or should I be focusing more on multiclass type stuff?

Yup. Fair warning: unlocking magichange (which happens in the alternate story mode available in NG+) is permanent, and enemies will then be able to do it too. It can be a nuisance occasionally: an enemy might randomly equip a dragon and suddenly be immune to your fire spells.

There's no such thing. There are classes with unique attacks, like ninjas and thieves, but those can't be kept if you change their class. There are spells, but any unit can learn any spell: just use its mana to create a spellcaster and have them stand next to each other. It'll be able to use the spellcaster's spells at L0; use them until they reach L1 and they'll be permanent.

2 is the second worst after 3 you chump, you've been meme'd.

Of course, if you played them all, you'd know for sure which one is the best.

So then is there any reason not to use reincarnate to upgrade classes as soon as possible?

It's fun so far. If you're talking about story, I'm skipping all of that anyway.

Adell can get 300 felonies no problem, just pay attention and do not let him get simultaneously high felony while your team has high teamkill. If you play like Disgaea 1 and end with 0 teamkills, you always get the best ending IIRC.

I heard the 9999 nekomata thing was fix.
could be wrong since it was kind of a thing that was build into the game with getting monsters a bit stronger then you.

Leveling a character before reincarnating them boosts their stats. Don't worry about it too much; just be sure to level a bit before reincarnating.

...