Is strategy even a part of Disgaea games at all?

I usually find myself breezing through the item world, breezing through the main missions and then breezing through the item world again if things get a little complicated on the story missions.

How to put it... It's like I'm always playing the game on auto mode, y'know? I could be reading, checking Normiebook or even playing other games on my mobile phone while I play Disgaea at the same time. I very much liked the addition of the percentage weapon damage on the later iterations, it encourages you to mix up your units depending on the battle, but the sole challenge in those games is usually Baal, and he's simply too much of a grind for me to bother, at times. Keep in mind that I still find Disgaea's combat system to be much superior to garbage like FFXV.

Do you employ any interesting tactics or is it the usual 'combo it 'til it's dead' thing? Tips for a veteran who has forgotten what are the best post-game grind methods in Disgaea 5? I really want to beat Baal. Also how do you feel about Final Fantasy Tactics? Please, discuss.

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This is what I meant by "percentage weapon damage" btw.

I prefer Disgaea to FFT (any) too, but the grind kinda ruins it. Most RPG games have this unnecessary grind system. Maybe tactic RPGs should be more like strategy games, where you upgrade units instead of leveling up every single fucking mage, warrior or archer in your party. This would solve the grind problem and consequently make the battle much more difficult since you can't just grind to the max level and win using any garbage strategy

Tactics Ogre > FFT

Interesting tactics usually boil down to using different unit's abilities like crippling enemies with the succubus/mushroom, boosting attack and accuracy with a combo from a gunner, getting a kill off of a high level foe thanks to a samurai's deathblow.

Here we go again!

80% of Disgaea's strategy component is beyond your control the second you hit the map. The meat of disgaea is the preparation you do beforehand. Once you deploy tour warriors and your prinnies, the entirety of your strategy basically boils down to how you focus or divide force, mobility and positioning with a side of lift & throw, and an assessment of which units are best suited for which tasks. Or, in easier terms, resource management.

The strategy in Disgaea does not largely come from managing these resources, it comes from preparing them. Your strategy is deciding to give your Warrior a bit of bow experience, and carrying a spare bow around in the event that your Warrior needs that range to save the day. Your strategy is deciding that maybe keeping a Fire immune dragon around might be a good idea if a fire specialist starts crapping everywhere. Your strategy is deciding to include an Eryngi on your team not because of its battle capabilities, but because of the insane mobility it offers through Receiving. Your strategy is compounding the durability of your Warrior by bringing an extra armor with you, and swapping out that Muscle when they loose the HP it provided.
The only real strategy once you hit the map is which of your assets you deploy.

More recent titles have not given many opportunities to utilize this, the absolute best example was Disgaea 2's Dark World. These "puzzle" maps were not just geo puzzles or invincibility towers, they were almost always challenges to get around first and foremost. The other big candidate was the item world, especially earlier runs. Nothing tests the limits of your strategy like 10 consecutive maps of comparable opponents under bonkers conditions. Again, later Disgaeas have utterly dropped the ball on this. D5 is particularly weak here, since the IW is intentionally populated by weaker enemies than usual. The only real challenge from D5 comes from difficulty stars, and Proto Darkdeath.

There's lots of interesting tactics, cheesy and otherwise, especially involving Evilities. Like you can beat Baal right now, regardless of level. You just need to git gud. The only problem is the games are so easy you rarely have to use those tactics for anything but early game to leap frog levels, or Baal/Pringer X.

Disgaea 2 really was the most "strategy" of all. Anyone remember Ambling Pirates? Those guys were cancer when looking for map fragments, but fucking amazing when it came to playing smart. Oh, what, a level 200 guy just got dropped on my level 16 party? Time to get crafty with our abilities and geo panels, then.

it's hard to call a game "strategy" when it lets you grind

OP here, great post. Also is it even possible to beat ProtoDarkdeath at early levels? Because that nigger is always 30-60x as strong as your entire party combined. It's not like the pirates in Disgaea 2, where they have a considerable stats and health boost - you had to really plan how to deal with those fuckers, specially pic related - it is simply impossible to deal with Darkdeath. There literally is no other option than to run away.

i just bought a switch

should I get Disgaea 5? I liked Disgaea 1 and 2, but I was a high school student with lots of free time to spend thousands of hours grinding. Now I can't do that sort of thing anymore.

Also post more Flonne.

Disgaea 5 plays a lot faster and feels better than previous games but the characters and story are worse. You still have to grind a lot in post game but you can do most of it (the story stuff atleast) pretty quickly.

Only the Dark Worlds have any strategy to them and the really complicated ones have their outcomes determined entirely off of how prepared you are (most notably the ones that give you one turn to kill an enemy that is five miles away from you and on an invincibility platform. The main game is pretty mindless and can be best described as "stomp on be stomped".

La Pucelle: Tactics has more strategy to it but is slow as molasses and is basically a prototype of Disgaea, which means that the problems of its successor are drastically worse and has its own unique problems (easily missable one-time items, no new game+, no decent means of power leveling outside of farming your own party members, etc.) Phantom Brave is a tad less mindless but only because the bulk of your stats come from your weapons which can be stolen off you by enemies, which makes you petrified to ever let enemies get a turn at all.

D5 is my favorite cast since the original game, but I also skipped D3 due to not getting a PS3 until around the time D4 came out, which has a God-fucking-awful cast and plot but was great mechanically.

Disgaea are really low end srpgs.

I beat one at an average party level right before I got Usalia. The Proto Darkdeath was, if I remember, around level 300.
I got extremely lucky with my Geo Panel layout, and was able to get Proto Darkdeath tapped in a corner, walled off my my guys on Invincibility panels, and his back turned to a small raised section I set up Attackx50 and Attack+1 panels. It took about 20 turns of getting 30 hit comboes off of my archer posse, resulting in only Red Magnus, Metallia, and my Lady Fighter making a dent in it. I had only a few rounds to spare to kill it, since I was running out of SP recovery items to keep those three juiced.

My reward was having to shelve Metallia for almost the entire rest of the main story. It was a fantastic feeling.

It did bring back serious memories of some of the harder pirate encounters of D2. Another great story from that was some group of monster pirates (I know there was a Rifle Demon among them) being just barely held back by the Wood Golem I was raising standing on a chokepoint with regeneration and defense boosts, in a sea of silence panels while everyone else hid and pecked away. Those odds make the greatest Disgaea moments, imo

5 on steam WHEN

During the story, if you don't grind, you have to use strategy to get by.

La Pucelle is a strange one, and actually more prototypical of later Disgaeas than Disgaea itself.
It was the first to throw a bunch of random systems together, and as you understood how these systems actually worked, the game became progressively easier.
Once figured out, for example, how to reliably produce miracles, how monster training worked, how item enhancement worked, and how stat exp worked, the game turns laughably easy, when a Bit with rank 30 in every stat completely roflstomps the game.
It also didn't have much in the way of "power" abilities, so heavy defense investment, like with a Box or Eclair basically made a unit immortal.

Even moreso if you regularly add a difficulty star.

Ifrit are a best

...

Disgaea's required tactics are really up to the player, I've learned. I did a second play through of D5 and went with my usual crew of Fem Warrior, Maid, Rabbit and a few other support units like the Shaman and Professor. DPS classes shitstomped the maps easily, so easily that the game became a bore, so what I did was sent all my DPS classes off on a ship and took on maps with only support classes.

THEN the tactics came in, it was really exhilarating having to use your Zombie as bait by constantly making him massive using the Prof's buff potion while strafing off poison damage by having an Alurane mass heal everyone 20% HP at the end off the turn, all while your best damage dealer is a Shaman with Star who can't take a hit and needs to constantly be thrown back into the base panel.

A support class run of Disgaea 5, full of using status moves, debuffs, and tricky evility combos, was the most fun I've ever had with the series. The map design is actually pretty difficult, but you never notice because the MCs can easily nuke the hell out of everything.

Postgame is just number crunching, though I do make it a habit to find a way to 'roid my units up for a single turn via stacking evilites and such, I once beat Zetta's D4 fight with a unit 2000 levels lower than him by abusing the legendary tree stat buffs, I think there's a certain brand of tactics in use there.

tl;dr, Disgaea has potential to be an outstanding tactical game, it's just very easily lost in the fog that is it's penchant for making OP classes.

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>Witches use LE
what did they mean by this?

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Knight booty

>tfw I have all of these

Female Samurai is my favorite generic by far. I wonder if there's more.

D5's story is really long, and the postgame grind isn't nearly as bad as D1 or D2's, I think it's doable even for someone with a busy lifestyle. Also it being handheld is a dream come true. It's a good game.

Also Flonne is in it.

>Staff flonne in D5
They give you the tools for fisticuffs flonne, and you people don't utilize them.

>Dressed like a slut
>Pure

It's not impure if you think about coloring books while being deflowered.

Tactics/Strategy RPGs should be more like puzzle games

Reminder male fighters are gay.

OP here, how come D5's grind isn't as bad as D1/2's if Baal is much stronger on D5? D1 and D2's post-game grind doesn't take more than 120 hours, if I remember correctly, but in D5 you need a lot of investment to go through the grind.

I don't know, hearing someone say this is like a total reality shocker to me. I'd classify the Disgaea games in this order, from easiest grind to hardest

D2>D1>DD2>D5. Those are the ones I played.

>tfw no seraphina footjob

One, that's a Brawler, two, that's one brawler personality specifically designed to be gay. Just like the gay bouncer.

who is top left in the picture

Also is D5 even good? Haven't played a disgaea game since 2 and looking for a decent strategy game

Top left is Christo, he's a dude and he's totally a demon.

D5 has a lot of shortcuts, and you can save even more time by soloing Baal with Usalia or Overlord Priere. If you waste time in non-LOC content, or do other unusual things, I'm not surprised you could spend hundreds of hours there. I believe a non-optimized speedrun, basically some guy just fucking around with direction, went from a clean file to first Baal in under twelve hours.

What's more, normal Baal is piss-easy. Most people are much more worried about Carnage Void and Lize. Carnage Baal is interesting, but not that difficult.
DD2 is probably the hardest grind, both because of how long you need to grind Rasetsu stats and reincarnations, as well as the sheer perfection DD2 Baal demands.
D1 would be the easiest grind if it weren't the slowest system. Preparing for Baal takes about 15 minutes of capturing a couple 9999 Surts/Flambergs to do it for you, and a Galactic Demon with a few hundred reincarnation levels under its belt can stonewall his ass at around level 600.

The problem with that "looks to the side" face they use is that while Red Magnus is squarely looking at Sera, Zeroken looks like he is checking Christo out.

Gameplay wise, it's amazing. It's more offensively focused than D2, which is frequently considered the best balanced Disgaea, bit it is miles better than D3 and 4 in that regard. There's tons of stuff to toy with and figure out to make your crew of boyz really good. If you haven't been introduced to some of the more recent additions, you can expect nice difficulty, since the game does manage to scale difficulty against how much you don't know how to use surprisingly well.

Story-wise, is where things get messy. Disgaea 5 is fairly broadly considered worse Disgaea 2 in a number of regards. If you can find a character or two you like, it shouldn't be too bad. If you don't, you can use DLC immediately, so you can imagine the story is actually Zetta phoning up a party bus of overlords to celebrate Petta's birthday by going
on a warpath across the universe if you want.

>in under twelve hours
Seriously? I got to look this up. I always spend at the very least, 60 hours to get decent end-game stats in the Disgaea franchise. Maybe I just suck at the games? Geez.

There is strategy but with enough grinding you can just steamroll everything eventually.

I played Disgaea for the Nekomatas and the Nekomatas only
No other reason at all

Ok but what about Makai Kingdoms

understandable dood

I want Disgaea 6 so bad. Especially on the PS4.

Diagaea is an acquired taste. I've really come to love it, it shows that you need to grind in efficient ways, and the way people have broken the game is insane.

There's the campaign for the normies, but for others there's so much postgame content. I played FFX HD a few years back, complwtelt different genre of course but damn the postgame is amazing. I miss postgame content....

Does anyone know where I can see that Disgaea 5 speedrun where they kill baal in 10 hours? I've heard about it all the time but never seen it anywhere.

Try a solo run sometime with limited map revisits and item worlding. You'll be constantly deciding on what piece of equipment will serve you best and using and abusing maps to their fullest.

I do it for the generics in general. They are the most fun units to use.

I haven't seen it, but I assume it went something like
>Spend 15 minutes unlocking the Thief
>Spend 45 minutes making your Thief drink hundreds of cans of soda
>Spend 1 hour smashing boxes until you unlock the Sage
>Roflstomp the story in about 3 hours by nuking it from orbit and skipping the story
>Spend an hour grinding your Sage to nuke things that actually matter. Maybe grind Usalia at the same time
>Get to Double Fake in about 30 minutes
>Grind Double Fake with Sage+Usalia for another 30 minutes
>Unlock LOC in an hour
>Use Eryngi Fluid to get a Carnage Mushroom Soup
>Spend an hour getting broken gear from that Item world
>Spend an hour maxing classes for Usalia and Sage
>Smash the rest of LOC up until you can fight Baal in an hour or so
>Make a sandwich for an hour/Grind some shards or aptitudes or gear
>Murder Baal in one turn lasting about 15 minutes with Usalia

12 year old me bought Disgaea for the succubus on the cover.
I found a lifelong home, and view the succubus as a bro-tier monster now

Disgaea's Nekomata is like, the perfect fur%. Furry enough to feel exotic and not half-assed like a schoolgirl in a headband, not so furry that I feel like I'm a degenerate fucking a cat.
Human enough to enjoy moterboating a pair of fleshy breasts, inhuman enough to be scared, but also aroused by those feet.

Don't be scared of them. You can make cute children with a nekomata.

Them muscle thighs.
I love that piece of concept art that make clear her legs are supposed to be thick and muscular as fuck, not simply curvy.

Is that considered a failure of a Nekomata design? Because she looks like a dog.

that would be called weapons resistances for the non-retarded

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Well she is half human and still young. Maybe she'll grow more monsterlike in time.

flonne is cute
CUTE

She is.
And she belongs to Laharl alone.

Disgaea 1 and 2 are more difficult than Disgaea 5. Go play those.

I already did and I find them way easier than Disgaea 5.

She left him to be an archangel.

...

Girls can't love girls.

Delete

I play this game for it's ridiculous attack animations, whismical humor, and laid back storytelling. They clearly don't care strive to sell the game as "deep," as much as silly fun. The strategic elements of the game can be completely circumvented by grinding enough stats. D5 has awful new characters, but thankfully you can pull all the previous ones from free DLC in the Switch version, then bench all the new entries and skill their dialogue in cut scenes.

This one, right? Those abs tho
>tfw have to censor official concept art for a rated T game on an 18+ anime-focused image board
Based guy who isn't Harada but did some early Disgaea/La Pucelle stuff anyways.

Just to be clear, how many people like the Nekomata because she's a catgirl, and how many love her because she's ripped as fuck? Both is also an acceptable answer, though I'd prefer one or the other.

final fnatasy tactics is a much, much better agme.

strategically yes. Not enough fans service fun classes for me.

But riddle me this.
Would Lift/Throw make FF tactics better?

I'm definately in the ripped af category. The hands scare me in a good way, make no mistake, but I want to run my hands on those abs and thighs, man.

Muscle lolis wen?

Those paws. That ponytail. Those breasts created specifically for motorboating. Those cat ears I want to stroke gently. And I also really like her voice. Also there is something about her constantly semi-happy face that makes me feel better.
I like everything about Disgaea Nekomata.

They are some seriously good nekos

lvl 9999 bump?

I'm 200 hours into the game and I can't even scratch base Baal (my Killia barely survives being summoned on the field). I never played Disgaea before, how do I get my stats higher than 10millions?

Are the any happy fullfilling vanilla doujins of Nekomata? I want to see her happy and loved.

I have never bothered to post-game in any Disgaea but I imagine it's about maxing out those equipment aptitudes first then grinding out those stats second
then Item World to improve Innocents and obviously equipment

So what's the optimal way to grind priests/healers?

Sound like 50 more hours of grinding. I guess I'll just pass post game then.

give them offensive spells and then clean house

I want to do awful, awful things to the male priests in this series.

give them mage Pupils so they can attack offensively.

Teach them spells from mages is usually the best thing. Some games let them get the death heal evility, which makes healing magic damage instead of healing.

>get really into the first game early this year, having a great time
>life gets in the way and I don't really have time to sit down and play for several months
>come back and try to play some tonight
>I have no idea what half these gameplay systems mean anymore or what I was working toward
Welp

After 3 and 4 :^)

You forgot DD2.

tsumino.com/Book/Info/23200/yarikomi-man-
This is the only doujin I've ever seen that even featured her. It doesn't even focus on her, she's just part of the hades orgy.

Disgaea doujins are usually something else, man. Too bad they are so rare.

Spend a few days getting reacquainted. Disgaea's like riding a complicated bicycle. You'll probably forget what the lever was for, or why you had the chain on backwards, but you'll remember when you automatically and absentmindedly go to reset the chain the next time you reincarnate, and the next time you push the lever on a boss that's wrecking your shit.

Thanks.
It's sad that Nekomata gets no love.

Yeah, I've got a pretty empty week for once so I'll spend some time kicking back and trying to get reacquainted with things.

>/fit/ neko is canon
>tfw almost no /fit/ neko art

I've only played the PC port of 1. It's fun.

Enemies should never get a turn in PB because Spd is the most powerful stat. A PC can attack all their turns if Spd is high enough. It's stupid easy to load one item with high confine stats, a character with high Spd, and a weapon/item with high stats and just wreck everything 4/5 times before you despawn.