Disgaea coming to the 2nd last platform you'd expect...PC!

[peacedog]

I HAVE SPENT MY WHOLE LIFE MISSSSSSSSSSSiiiiiiiinnnnggg YooooooooUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

I got hard curb-stomped in world 2-1. That was not expected.

[rhamorim]

Did you pay attention to the Geo panels?

[peacedog]

@rhamorim

Did you pay attention to the Geo panels?

There aren’t any? FWIW this is world (whatever) “The Legend Begins”.

But more to the point, I just moved Killian out and figured he would one shot the stage and didn’t quite make it. I actually tried this time and as expected beat it (with a few casualties). Laharl and Etna were too tough to take solo. This may or may not be some sort of bonus content - they had much higher stats than anything else I had seen.

[rhamorim]

Ah, that’s a DLC episode, I think. I’d leave those for after you’re done with the main story or something, I suppose. ;)

[wisefool]

@Lantz

, but I am curious about the complaints that it is missing content.

AFAIK it’s just the custom map creator which is just a way for people to cheat [1]. I didn’t use when I played D5 through. I never bothered with network play either. And yeah, D5 is probably the only Disgaea I actually killed Baal on.

[1] I understand the point of Disgaea is to cheat, but there’s a difference between powergaming within the parameters of the game, and loading up a memory editor to edit your level.

[Mysterial]

Yeah that’s a DLC episode. It’s actually scaled based on your progress in the main quest.

[peacedog]

I never played Disgaea 4. I played 5 a bit on PS4 but I;m much farther into the PC version now.

The item world is sort of strange to me. I remembered the levels being very compact, and I felt like it took some variety out of the proceedings (although they’re much easier to traverse). I didn’t notice at first because I’m not at that point yet, but I finally realized that basic items don’t seem to have innocents in them. The innocent farm is new (AFAIK) and something that has been overdue but doesn’t seem like it’s entirely going to replace innocent farming.

Also new is the fact that so far I’ve seen monsters ignore innocents (I take a series quick trips into items whenever a story mission seems closer than it ought to be, gathering resources and some levels). Although they seem to attack fish and the bottles sometimes. I am used to the need to race to get innocents. I mostly like the new mechanics, with all the ways to improve item growth (some of which I think came over from 3) although I have barely touched that aspect (I’ve been down to level 30 on one or two items, that’s it).

[IkeVandergraaf]

So I picked up Disgaea 5 on the switch on a whim and this appears to be the most relevant thread. I’ve never played a Disgaea before. I understand it can be a little opaque. Any beginner tips that won’t be spoiler or overpowering? Or should I just plow into the story and see what happens?

Thanks,
Ike

Bonus points: Why is D1 $10 more than D5? Should I have bought that instead?

[Dissensus]

Just dive in. The story missions do a good job of introducing the mechanics and are generally varied and interesting. It has a lot of things going on, but they are introduced slowly over time rather than all at once, so you never feel that overwhelmed. You can also ignore entire game mechanics so if one of the new shops / mechanics do not seem interesting to you or if you don’t quite get it, you can ignore it and complete the game (for the most part).

This is true of the grindy elements too. Disgaea takes grinding to absurd levels, but I’m pretty sure you can complete the story missions without grinding that much (if at all). I created a secondary team to replay past missions and do other optional stuff, with my main party focused mostly on the story missions, and that worked out fine.

D5 is certainly better than D1 in that it’s more polished. No clue why the first is more expensive, but you made the right choice.

[wisefool]

Earlier Disgaeas have better stories and characters IMO but Disgaea 5 has absolutely the best interface and value for your money if you intend to engage in the post-game number porn grind. It respects your time in a myriad ways so your moves are efficient.

Now the thing about D5 is it has mechanics from all the disgaeas. They are rarely abandoned, but new ones are introduced. For example, D2 (?) introduced tower mechanics. They were very important, even obligatory in D3 puzzle maps. In D5 you can mostly ignore towers because there’s so many other tools to clear maps.

[IkeVandergraaf]

Is there a good beginner’s guide? I’m still early in, geo panels just got introduced, but I don’t really understand the mechanics, despite the tutorials

[peacedog]

@IkeVandergraaf

Is there a good beginner’s guide? I’m still early in, geo panels just got introduced, but I don’t really understand the mechanics, despite the tutorials

I’m not sure there is. Ask here if you have questions, lots of people have played it. It has evolved mechanically quite a bit from Disgaea 1, and largely in much improved. But there’s a lot to go over. Class tiers, weapon mastery, leveling up individual skills. And that’s before we get into the item world, specialist leveling, etc. There are good guides for getting into Post Game, but the game before that is straightforward unless you decide to make anything more than cursory dive into various mechanics. The thing is, a lot of Disgaea involves power leveling - eventually it will be dozens, and then even hundreds, of levels in a blink of an eye - characters for stuff, and you can’t really do that until post game anyway (but boy, can you ever do it there).

Once you open up the sidequest vendor dude, a lot of his quests are designed to point you to mechanics and get you introduced to them.

Know that spending stuff at the store will eventually unlock better stock, to a point. But you can only get up to a certain tier of gear, which is well below the max tier.

[RichVR]

@IkeVandergraaf

Is there a good beginner’s guide?

@peacedog

Disgaea is what happens when you take classic “find ways to exploit the game to achieve real ultimate power and then break the game” as the main game mechanic. With the ability to scale enemies (to a point) where they can still be challenging. It’s about figuring out how to gain hundreds, and later thousands, of levels on a character in hours at most. It’s about doing so much damage that it breaks the hard coded number limits (that does take a lot of grinding, though).

And it’s all terribly fun.

The campaigns of Disagaea are linear affairs. You proceed through a series of “chapters” which each tend to have 4-5 canned missions. Mission maps can be repeated over and over to taste. But that’s not where you spend most of your time. It’s the item world. Every item in the game - weapons, armor, accessories, even consumables - contains inside itself a procedurally generated dungeon. Floors are never the same. What you find on the floor is never the same. And is highly dependent on a variety of factors. Items have 3 tiers of rarity broken up amongst the item rarity score, which ranges 1 (most rare) -255 (lease rare). Items are also procedurally generated.

“Common” items are rarity 255-31 I think. They have a max of 30 floors. As a general rule, rarer score == harder enemies, but this is greatly influenced by other factors. There are 40 tiers of each item (think, “starter sword” all the way up to “omega end game doom weapon”, 40 types total), and tier matters. You can use the in-game Meta Mechanics (see below) to adjust enemy difficulty up or down as well.

“Rare” items are rarity 30-11. They’re proportionately harder with all other factors equal (so there’s a bump going from 31 to 30, as it were), and contain 60 floors.

“legendary” are 10-1, and contain 100 stunningly visual floors.

What might you find on a floor? Why, enemies of course. Each floor can be exited by either defeating all enemies or exiting through the gate. Sometimes the gate has a guardian, a stationary enemy who is generally more powerful than what you see on the floor who must be defeated. You can also find chests. Often there are these crystals called “Geo Symbols” that apply specific buffs/debuffs. They only work when placed on a colored square, which may or may not be present. They apply their modifiers to every square of that color on the current floor. Modifiers range from the minor (+10% damage given or received, e.g.) to insane and dangerous (things on square invincible, enemies on the square gain levels every turn, square does 20% of units max health in damage to units standing on it every turn). There’s an entire little sub game here, because you can set off chain reactions and score bonus gauge multipliers by messing with this stuff (every floor has 10 items rolled as rewards for exiting the floor; you fill up the bonus gauge by killing monsters spectacularly and also by kicking of chain reactions. Each level of the gauge unlocks one of the rewards. The items you get for maxing the gauge are usually rare and often “out of depth” tier wise). I should try to pull up a youtube video to show this off because it makes more sense in action.

You can also find special bonus things that lead to sub rooms, or cause crazy events to happen (in later games, you could get invaded by item pirates! Yarr).

But you can also find specialists. These are friendly dungeon inhabitants who represent the bonus stats on an item. Killing them frees them, which is really important. Because you can grow them in certain ways, and then combine them, and get crazy huge bonus stats on items (by transferring them between items, but only if you free them).

Why do item dungeons? It “levels” the item. At each 10th floor you fight an Item Boss (an Item King at 30, 60, 90, and the Item God at 100). This provides even more growth for both the base item and any spec ialists you find therein. A part of the Disgaea meta is farming specialists and leveling high level items to insane heights. So you can break the damage and the game! Disgaea is pure grind but it’s a lot of fun. There’s a ton of strategy to dealing with dungeon floors because sometimes you’ll have to really work hard to get to a far away specialist or get to the dungeon exit before all the monsters level past the point where you can do anything besides get hilariously one shot. The game does give you tools to deal with this. You can pick up and throw anything (except a floor guardian!), including geo symbols (unless they’re on a square with “no pickup”!). You can form huge towers and then make a series of throws to propel someone across the map to get to the exit quickly. Or you can just unleash unholy hell in the form of the game’s many spectacular special moves (movesets are tied to weapons).

There’s leveling of actual classes (each has 6 tiers; higher tier == better base stats. The highest tiers get huge multipliers to stats. So a high level character would have a leveled high tier, legendary item with huge base stats + crazy leveled specialists + class has a huge bonus multiplier in the stat that governs that damage == yay broke the numbers, killed everything. #feelsgood).

This seems pretty helpful from upthread.

[inactive_user]

That’s a really great explanation from @peacedog. I’d only add that the story can be pretty cute and funny in a (sorry) kawaii sort of way, particularly the first game - which has imo one of the better jrpg stories around.

[peacedog]

It’s worth noting that this doesn’t apply to Disgaea 5 though, where the item world is concerned. But Disgaea 5 is better anyway, with the specialist farm and I was coming around on the changed item world stuff (floors are endless, or at least they can go to some absurd number that doesn’t matter anyway).

I really need to get back to 5.

[IkeVandergraaf]

Thanks. That was pretty helpful, although I’ve seen almost none of that. I guess my plan is to just play he campaign without worrying too much about the mechanics until I hit a wall. Eventually it’ll click.

[wisefool]

Okay. You’re gonna play the campaign till you hit a wall. Usually at that point is exactly when the game introduces you to one of the best ways to increase power - Item world!

For geopanels, do you mean the maps with bonus gauge? For those, you get gauge as high as you can to get extra stuff. It’s hard to max it out in the beginning.

When a triangle blows up, it makes all the panels under it change color. You either put them in sequence so … all the blues turn red. then you make all reds turn green. then green turns orange… then you CLEAR orange with the transparent triangle. This takes a while to set up but it’s satisfying.

There’s a second way to clear them all but I can’t remember how to do it now.

One thing you don’t wanna miss: subclasses. They are the key when you start doing super power munchkin reincarnation up iirc. Again don’t worry about reincarnation if you can’t level back up quickly enough. Unless you want to. Because you find it fun to rerun as a level 1 and clear earlier maps faster. It is satisfying.

[Lantz]

I wouldn’t worry too much about mechanics when you are starting out. The game does a good job of explaining them over time and you can’t really mess anything up.

[Coldsteel]

So, I’ve had Disgaea 5 on my wishlist for a few years now and have decided to buy it at last since it’s currently on sale on Steam for $19.99 which is a historic low.

I’m fascinated but a bit overwhelmed as to how to begin playing it since it seems extremely complicated. I guess I’ll take the advice above and try letting the game explain itself to me as I play it. Hopefully there are not to many things that will bite you if you don’t know about them just starting out.

[T11]

I played through the main story on the PC and started the post game. Then I got distracted by other games I also did the story of D2 and purchased D1 for Android. I’m not an expert, but feel free to ask me any questions.

As far as team composition, it’s flexible, you can go with what you like. Just make sure to have 2 or more melee. Mages are very strong. Their spells increase in range the more you use them. I had a fire mage and an ice mage, They dished out some serious damage. Since units have weaknesses and resistances to certain elements, try not to have just one elemental mage.

Spear users are good since they can attack diagonally. Make sure to use and level up powers and use team up attacks.