I want to get gud at playing SRPGs and I really want to get into Phantom Brave...

I want to get gud at playing SRPGs and I really want to get into Phantom Brave, but the problem is I suck total and utter shit at them.
It's like the equivalent of playing chess. I want to play it and feel smart, but I have no concept of strategy, and ultimately get my ass handed to me and I end up just feeling even dumber.

I want to get good at SRPGs because as it stands, I missed the boat on FFTactics because it was too hard for me. Disgea looks incredibly fun, but I hate not knowing all the game-breaking super shit you can end up doing with it (and leveling EVERY thing to ridiculous numbers like 9999 is daunting as fuck to me).

So, I'm sitting my ass down and starting with Phantom Brave.

But how do I play? I have no concept of these mechanics.
I can understand my party members are phantoms (sort of) that I have to "combine" with items in the field (like rocks and trees), and those items affect the stats of the phantom being combined.
And after 5 or so turns (Removed or whatever), the phantom disappears and has a % rate in which they can take the item they were combinbed with back with them to the main island.
But so what? What am I to do with these items?

Don't worry too much about combining. Just give them weapons and items that give them strong attacks that fit their classes. Train them by taking them through random dungeons in between levels.

Do what said, and don't worry about combining early on. Unless you wan't specific skill for specific character.

Dude, are you me? I want so badly to play these SRPGs but I just can't get into them.

I picked up phantom brave because of cute girl and I was feeling like you were, that I was going to sit down and actually play this game.
But I still couldn't manage it.

What I did was focus on combining the items that I wanted, making sure that I didn't end the level before those phantoms disappeared, and then gave those items to the phantoms that I knew were good with them.
For example, I gave the starting girl a bomb, then threw the bomb and summoned the main guy on it for the damage boost. But everyone else would hold, say, a starfish for speed. Or a tree for a wide attack. Or a sword. Stuff like that.

In the end it was still too hard for me to decide to summon my entire army in one turn, over the course of several turns, which ones to use first, when I needed to call out a healer, which enemy to take down first, whether or not to bring items back, which items to upgrade to get their special attacks, the different personalities on each of the monster, making me resummon them to get the best one (speed), trying to take home expensive items to sell, etc. etc.
I stopped having fun, so I put the game down.
>pic related

How so? Simply just buying weapons from the Merchant on the island? They all have titles on them, which I know are important for something, but I couldn't figure it out.

Money is also an issue. I read up on it, and something about the random items that you "combine" your party member with into battle that they bring back to the island. Those items are in your inventory and you can either "Store" them which does ???? or you can "Summon" them which does ????

I know I could just shut up and play it, but I could spend 100 hours doing everything wrong, and I kinda want to play more than one video game in a given year.

Unless I'm saying it wrong, I don't mean "combine" in a alchemist/merging shit into something stronger way, but when you enter a battle, and you have to select a random rock or tree to summon/create your party members?

Fug, that's literally me when I played.
Hopefully you can figure it out. I couldn't.

>I read up on it, and something about the random items that you "combine" your party member with into battle that they bring back to the island.
That's "Confining". In order to summon a phantom into battle, you need something from real world. When confining phantom, game shows steal(or take home, depending on translation) percentage. When phantom times out, you roll that percentage and if successful, you get that item to the island and extra brouzoufs. Merchant has higher chane to steal things.

In Disgaea, leveling to 9999 is only the tip of the iceberg. If you can say 'The stats are off the charts!' That game takes it quite literally.

I always play Disgaea games like every other game. No guide, no grinding unless I have to and that will only be characters that are behind on levels. The super crazy shit, all post game. Feel free to pick it up whenever. If you're EU. Disgaea 5 is on sale for 20 euros and + 13 season pass for all dlc.

GL with Phantom Brave. They're all quite fun.

Yeah, that.

So I'm confining these things primarily for the purpose of hopefully taking the item back home with me. I don't really understand that.

I can store these items, but when I summon them, they add to my population which must also do something, because people I understand, but having 45 rocks sitting in my lawn counting as population is not right.

Play Rime Berta. It's simple as fuck without making you feel like an idiot, has next to no story so you can dive right in, and pretty fucking fun. Art is so shit it's almost cute.
Read the manual, though. It's simple, but it still expects you to know what is going on.

>So I'm confining these thing
Right thing to do.
>having 45 rocks sitting in my lawn counting as population is not right
That's mostly sprite limit back from console version. Changing it would make some secrets too easy to obtain. Also items out in open gather mana when you go killin'.

Can anyone give me a brief summary how it compares to Disgaea?

I can do my own research but thought something condensed from Sup Forums could give me a better idea of how to approach it. Played the hell out of the original Disgaea on PC and my favorite parts are the level of customization and the item world. Phantom Brave sounds like it has some interesting mechanics but don't know about pulling the trigger yet since it isn't that heavily discounted on Steam. Plus I could just wait until the end of January for Disgaea 2.

Physics.
>tfw conserving dm by hundreds on slippery terrain

I read up on some more things, about having the items in your home and stacking them on top of each other to get hidden items including a bottlemail, which people keep mentioning.
From what I gather, it's a phantom/player that has a high "take home" rate, so you "confine" it to an item that has a high chance of returning home with you.

Still though, don't understand why being able to take rocks and trees back to my house is so crucial.

That looks pretty silly.
Definitely something I'm interested in.

Rocks and trees have their own skills too.
Also money.

Get the bottle class as soon as possible and steal boss weapons. Bottles gave the highest theft and retrieval rate of any phantom class in the game. I renember you get one by going to the highest point of the island in by stacking items.

Also look up "failure fusions" it's a good way of building up strong weapons and characters.

Finally, put as many powerful skills into Ash as possible, like the soldier's ability to stay on the field for one round longer. You can do this with other phantoms too but Ash has the best stat progression outside of steal% in the game before post game content.

Don't worry, there's no such thing as strategy in SRPGs. It's a misnomer. Aside from the earlier fire emblem games, every SRPG is just grinding.

Ok. Time to school you all niggers.

First. Forget about taking stuff from the stages for the most part. The only things worth taking to your home are unique weapons from bosses and the ocational eggs you find in some maps (and these are must have if you plan to go balls deep into the grind).

For the most part you just want a single good item to equip to Marona. This will serve as a medium to dummon your best ghost IF the map has nothing good on it. Other than that the stuff that's on each map is very serviceable.

Now onto the meat.

Speed is a god stat. It determines your turn order and if high enough you can finish a map before enemies have a chance. Attack goes second for obvious reasons.

Now, what really matters for your units are their titles. These give them the real meat of their stats.

You can increase the title's bonuses by going into their item dungeons, similar to Disgaea's but here you improve the title and not the item.

Now bad titles are godlike, not because of their stats but because their item dungeons can and should be heavily abusable. Enemies in it will all have the dungeon's title. So it you enter a -80% to all stats dungeon. You can beat enemies that are much higher leveled than you.

Now, these titles also reduce experience gain from the monsters inside it, but you still get the same exp bonuses at the end of a stage as a regular lvl >1000 stage.

This way you can easily power grind an entire army easily.

I got the bottle guy and didn't know what to do with him.

I try to grind, but I think that the game's basic mechanics are over my head.

If it were Othello's minutes-to-learn,-lifetime-to-master kinda thing, I'm stuck at the minutes-to-learn part.

You should try something more simple like the Luminous Arc series on the DS. It's a really basic srpg so there's no job/class creation and you just play with the story characters sort of like your average turn base jrpg. It's not the greatest srpg but I'd say it's more beginners friendly.

You know, I think the problem that I had was that I was expecting my phantoms to be even half as good as Ash.
But he is so much more powerful than any other unit in the game, I thought I was doing something wrong.

I've read up on getting the bottlemail, and about creating a character with the "Failure" title, which I then picked up and told Morona to banish thus giving me the title to use.
I understand the creation of random dungeons using the Dungeon NPC, but I need a "Titlist" class person to be able to change the high-level random dungeon into a "Failure" random dungeon. But I don't think I'll come across a Titlist until after the first chapter.

I don't know how to keep my head above water until that point.