Tag: DisgaeaWeek

D6 – Max Level, 1 Fight, No DLC Guide

I keep seeing a bunch of references to farming in D6, with every single guide mentioning the Prinny trick, getting max, but no single guide that actually explains the full strategy. So here’s my writeup, with exact steps and details on what I have done, and the results. This guide does NOT use any DLC to get this outcome. No Valvatorez or Pleinair required.

Prereqs
Rakshasa Unlocked
3000 Cap In Cheat Shop
Capped Squads

Prep

1x Killer – Level Whatever

This slot is more or less whatever you want it to be. In my case, I used Bieko with capped Omega Wind, and had every other booster equipping “Kill With Wind.” You could probably make a more efficient version of this setup, that doesn’t require that. The only important thing about your “Killer” is that they can kill every single mob on Peaceful World – Bell of Blessing – Rakshasa without dying, and that they have a 900 Statistician equipped.

9x Boosters – Level 1 – Any Class/Unit

One of these is the unit you’re power leveling.

Evilities
World is Mine
Genius Studier
Happy Song
Overlord Training
Kill With Wind – OPTIONAL, SEE ABOVE

Items: Each character had a 900 Statistician

90x – Fodder – Level 1 – Prinny God Capped with any one job, for EXP Bonus From D-Merits

Evilities
Recycle Spirit
Focus Bomb

Items: Doesn’t Matter

D.I. Target Myself -> Wait Until Other Units Have Acted -> Nearest Unit -> Lift -> Nearest Unit -> Throw
Put this on every single one of these Prinnies.

Setup and Execution

Setup – You only have to do this stuff once.

  1. In Cheat Shop, set Enemy Strength to 20
  2. In Cheat Shop, set Back to Square One to ON
  3. In Cheat Shop, set EXP to 3000%.
  4. In your auto-battle group, set up your units to be in the following order. PRINNIES -> BOOSTERS -> KILLER
  5. Add the Unit You’re Power Leveling to the Boot Camp Squad

Execution – Do this each loop.

1. Dark Assembly Bills – (Any unit can pass these)
Give Me Triple EXP!
Praise My Performance
Throw a Welcome Party

2. With the unit you’re power leveling, pass Hog All Exp!
3. Go to Peaceful World – Bell of Blessing – Rakshasa
4. Press Autocombat, and watch Prinnies go boom for a bit.
5. Bring out your boosters, and killer.
6. Clear the map. Optional
7. Repeat until you lose your mind and get tired of trying to farm Karma when you can only get 124 Million a Loop.

Additional Notes and Tips

  1. You can fill the Dark Assembly squad with the Prinnies you’ve created. Once your Dark Assembly is capped, this mean every bill will pass without bribes or fights effectively every time.
  2. This is by no means “Optimized.” I’ve spent the last few days trying to get this to work, and every source of information either left parts out, or was a 16 minute YouTube video that claimed you needed DLC, or didn’t include all info.
  3. I get about 9QD per run with my setup. If you’re getting less then that, here are a few things to check. I’m going to be honest, I do not understand how EXP addon stacking works at all in D6. Example: You can’t stack more then 1 Statistican per character, but you apparently can stack Happy Song.
    1. Stick as many EXP boosting Evilities as you can on the character you’re powerleveling.
    2. Confirm everyone has an item with a Statistican
    3. Stuff even more EXP boost Evilities onto your booster characters.
    4. Make sure you’ve capped your cheat shop
    5. Make sure none of your Prinnies ended up above level 10 somehow.

I mostly wrote this because of how incomplete or just inaccurate the other guides were.

Disgaea 5 Complete

I like Disgaea 5. While I didn’t enjoy the story as much as Disgaea 4, there are a variety of improved mechanics, UI, and massive quality of life features that make it a massive upgrade over its predecessor.

Also, just for clarity here, I’m mostly going to be discussing my experience with the game pre-endgame. I’ve played about 40-45 hours, and while I plan on playing more, that may not happen for a little bit for secret reasons.

So, let’s start with the story, and some of the related mechanics. Across the Netherworlds, now rendered as planets, Demon Emperor Void Dark is trying to take over everything. You’re introduced to some of the main characters, Seraphina, and Killia, both who have a bone to pick with Void Dark. In Killia’s case, he’s a brooding loner. In Seraphina’s case, it’s an arranged marriage to Void Dark that she has no interest in. She’s decided the best way to deal with the problem is to kill Void Dark so she doesn’t have to marry him.

Adventure intensifies, and as the duo go on their merry way, we meet an increasing cast of other indivuals, including Red Magnus, Christo, Zeroken, and Usalia, who all also have their reasons for wanting to see Void Dark six feet under.

There’s not too much else to say. Our band of misfits proceeds from Netherworld to Netherworld, trying to push back Void Dark’s advance while not getting slaughtered. Each of them gets a mini-arc/story around their background and flaws, usually followed by a redemption or adjustment.

While I appreciate that these moments existed, most of them feel standard anime trope-esque. There are a few that are more interesting, but most end up feeling predictable. This annoyed me because 4 did (at least by my standards) a much better job of handling these sorts of changes. Here’s an entire mini-writeup on what I mean, but be warned, here there be story spoilers!

Oh, yeah, this whole thing was supposed to be about new game mechanics, wasn’t it?

Well, one of those new game mechanics is Revenge. Each character has a Revenge Bar that fills as they or their allies take damage. Once a character’s bar is filled, they enter Revenge Mode, where all of their attacks are critical hits, and all of their spells and specials have their costs reduced down to 1.

In addition, characters that are Overlords of a Netherworld, like our MC’s mentioned above, also get access to their Overload. Some bosses get them as well!

Overloads are one-time use per battle skills that have a variety of effects, many of which either play with tactic game tropes, or just utterly break them, and all of which are fun. While some are simple (Deal damage to everyone on the map, stat boost, heal all friendlies) there are also a few really neat ones. My personal favorite would have to be Zeroken’s “Superluminal Wolf” which creates 4 temporary copies of the character. And when I say copies, I mean full copies. Each copy can take any action the original can, up to and including casting all of his specials, throwing units, and lifting enemies. Another character has an ability that allows them to temporarily take full control of a few enemy units.

Overloads can turn fights that are going badly, and at the same time add an interesting element to some of the boss fights. You know your enemy has an Overload, and you have to try to manage their access to it. You can do this by chipping them slowly, trying to take them out in one hit, or just finding ways to avoid the Overload’s effect. Dealing with bosses’ Overloads is a fun and interesting change from how static boss fights were previously.

Pretty much every side system has also been improved, but going into detail on each them would be both a waste of time, and not something I’d be capable of doing. So instead, let’s take one system as an example: innocents.

If you haven’t played a Disgaea game before, it might be easiest to think of innocents as a sort of sub-item that can be socketed into other items. They have a type, and a value. The type determines their behavior, and the value determines the impact. For example, socketing a Gladiator gives the item it’s located in additional ATK, and the Dietician gives additional HP.

These are both fairly straightforward examples, but there are also innocents that give extra EXP, extra Mana, innocents that change the damage type of basic attacks, and innocents that give you chance to steal items from defeated enemies. There’s a lot of variety.

Acquiring innocents is a little more complex, though. One of Disgaea’s primary features is the Item World, a series of semi-random procedurally generated levels that exist inside an item. And inside items is where you get innocents. When you get an item, it will usually have a few innocents inside of it, but they’ll be in the hostile state. When you go into that item’s Item World levels, those innocents can show up as enemies, and if you defeat them, they go to the subdued state.

So how do Disgaea 4 and 5 handle innocents differently?

In Disgaea 4, innocents couldn’t be moved until after they were subdued. This meant that collecting an innocent you wanted required going into an item, clearing levels until it appeared, defeating it, and then repeating this process for each new copy of the innocent. Because of how innocents level up, getting an innocent to its level cap could be even more painful, requiring gathering lots of copies of a single innocent, and fusing them into each other.

In Disgaea 5, non-subdued innocents can be moved between items. So instead of going into 5-10 different items you might not be interested in leveling up to get a bunch of innocents you want, you can now move the innocents you’re farming into a single item, and do one run to gather them in a single fell swoop.

But these changes on their own wouldn’t solve the problem of needing to grind a silly amount of innocents. And that’s where the Innocent Farm comes in.

The Innocent Farm is a daycare center zone where you can leave innocents, and they passively gain levels as you do other things. In addition, if you leave two or more innocents in the Innocent Farm, they can breed, giving you even more innocents.

And these sorts of improvements are present across the rest of the game’s systems as well. Better capture mechanics and prisoner management. The Chara World is now its own unique Mario Party style world… thing, instead of being a sort of rip-off of the Item World.

Okay, so looking back at this whole writeup, I think I might have rambled enough. Here’s the five second version of my thoughts:

Disgaea 5 is a mechanical improvement over 4, both for its subsystems (and tweaks to make them more friendly), and also its improvements to the combat structure. While the story didn’t grab me the same way 4’s story did, it’s still solid. It just doesn’t surpass the usual JRPG tropes the same way some of it’s predecessors do. The end result is an incredibly solid game that I’d probably recommend over earlier games in the series, because as much as I like the story, this isn’t a series that I personally play for the writing.

Disgaea 5 Complete is available for Switch, PC, and Playstation 4. I played on PC with a controller, because, well, mouse and keyboard just doesn’t cut it for grid based tactics games.

Disgaea 4 Vs Disgaea 5 Character Growth – SPOILERS

Okay, so this was part of my Disgaea 5 writeup, but it ended up being several paragraphs long, and not quite fitting the flow, and also having story spoilers for both games. In the interest of not doing that, I’ve moved it over here. What I want to talk about here is the difference in story pacing between 4 and 5, a specific mechanical reason that they end up feeling different, and why it leads to me liking 4’s writing and story more.

Emizel is one of the primary side characters in Disgaea 4. He’s the son of the President of the Netherworld, and functions as an antagonist for the first few chapters of the story. After his father declares him dead for various political reasons, he joins the player’s party, still remaining fairly obstinate about the state of things, and often still taunted and mocked by the rest of the group.

However, by the time the group actually stages their coup, he’s firmly a member of the party. When an enemy general berates Emizel for betraying his father, other members of the party step up to defend him.

Compare this to Zeroken. Zeroken serves a somewhat similar role in Disgaea 5, in that he’s a minor NPC who joins the main party. His tragic backstory is that he was a member of the Lost, Void Dark’s evil army who got taught martial arts by another demon he admired, and then fled the Lost army. He serves a similar role to Emizel in that he’s one of the weakest members of the group, constantly gets dunked on, and is overall seen as kind of a dweeb.

His big moment is when he “Masters his own heart” allowing him to perform a purification ritual to try to save someone. And after this, he’s brave as opposed to cowardly. And that’s about it.

It’s pretty boring, but it does make sense when you look at how the Disgaea 5 character development often also includes a power-up or the character getting an Overload. Since Disgaea 4 doesn’t use the Overload system, there’s no point where any of the characters get a dramatic mechanical boost as a result of story progression in this manner.

So, here’s the thing: the Overload buffs that the characters get are cool. Zerokens’s Superluminal Wolf which creates fully functional copies of himself is one of my favorite things in Disgaea 5. It’s an ultimate that simultaneously breaks a bunch of standard tactics conventions, and gives massive amounts of utility.

But because of how it’s given to him, his character development feels cheapened. Instead of the slower change that Emizel gets, we just see Zeroken power up, and then his arc is more or less… done.

And I get it. Giving a character a brand new power at a clutch moment is cool. But for me it cheapened the arc of basically all of these characters. Emizel doesn’t ever become super Emizel, or anything. Instead, he has a much slower grind of changing. And I liked that more.

Disgaea RPG

I have mixed feelings on Disgaea RPG. The reality of it is that when you strip away much of flavor and art, it’s a fairly bog-standard mobile phone game. On the other hand, it’s also Disgaea flavored which means I’ve been playing it every day more or less non-stop for a week.

Yes, I know. I’m weak.

So, Disgaea RPG. It’s a mobile unit-collection RPG. In practice, this means that you spend most of your time playing the levels you have access to, grinding out the highest content you can when you hit a wall, and waiting for your energy to recharge (or running the item world) when you run out. And saving up as much premium currency as you feasibly can to roll gacha.

In terms of actual gameplay, you build a team of five units, then select and play levels. Units have a basic attack and a few abilities that require SP, which recharges over time…. and that’s pretty much it. There’s no grid system, and you only have a maximum of these five characters in your party.

If it wasn’t for the Disgaea theming, I’m not sure I’d still be playing. But since it is Disgaea themed, the flavor and ability to get a bunch of characters from the other games that I like (such as Valvatorez and Desco) is actually pretty neat. The polish on the art and animations is very solid, and I’d be surprised if the assets weren’t taken directly from the other games. The same is true of the background music, the voice acting, and story elements.

Unfortunately, outside of that, Disgaea RPG doesn’t do too much that most other mobile collection games don’t do already, from what I’ve seen so far. While some elements of the combo system are interesting (such as the way tower attacks are ported over), they aren’t interesting enough to force you to really think about what you’re doing at any given point in time. There have only been 2-3 fights so far that have even made me do anything more complex then “Use best attack I have access to, then keep using it”.

Outside of this though, the aspect of the game I’d say I enjoy the most is the story and character interactions. None of it has quite hit the level of quality I’d expect from a mainline series game, but even if it feels like glorified fanfic, it’s good fanfic. Etna planning on murdering Laharl is still funny, Fuka and Desco’s questionable teamwork is amusing, and Mao cackling maniacally is still fun.

Overall, Disgaea RPG is… fine. I think it’s enjoyable if you’re already a fan of the series, but if you’re not, there isn’t much there for you. It’s definitely carried by the setting and art. But there simply isn’t much mechanically that hasn’t been done in a mobile game before.

Of course, if you’re curious, you can grab it yourself. It’s free on the app store and google play store with in-app purchases. (The ratio of real world money to in-game stuff is pretty garbage in my opinion though.)

Disgaea 4 Complete+

God I love this game.

Ed Note: Images for this writeup are from a combo of the Disgaea 4 Complete press kit, and my own save file.

Disgaea 4 is, somewhat strangely enough, the first Disgaea game I played. Specifically, Disgaea 4 Complete+ for the Switch. As far as I can tell, the “Complete” part just means that they opted to include all of the additional DLC and scenarios that were added to the game after its initial release in… 2011.

10 years ago.

Okay, so we might be a teensy bit late on this one.

One of the best things about Disgaea is the ability to customize your hub world and move all the NPC’s you actually care about next to each other.

In any case, like the other games, Disgaea 4 primarily takes place in the Netherworld. The main focus of the story is Valvatorez, a previously incredibly powerful vampire and also arguably total idiot, who never breaks promises he makes. One of these promises involved an agreement to not consume human blood ever. Pretty much all the other side characters are great as well, including Fenrich, Valvatorez’s second in command, who feels like an inverse version of the traitorous vizier trope, and Fuka, a elementary school child who dies, goes to hell, and then proceeds to determinator her way through the Netherworld by refusing to accept her death.

Valvatorez, the vampire who doesn’t drink blood, and Fenrich, his loyal servant who would really like it if maybe he would again.

These games can be kinda weird.

The general arc of the game is Valvatorez’s staging of a coup against the current President of Hell, in an attempt to fix the problems the Netherworld is having, including lack of energy, an inability to handle the influx of guilty souls, and just general failure to… well, be hell.

Behold, the… grid that I don’t remember the name of.

Mechanically, this comes in with the Corrupternment and building placement map. As you advance through the game, you’ll unlock political titles, buildings, and other elements that give benefits to units placed within their area of effects on this grid. You can also pass bills and policies to boost yourself, your rate of EXP gain, unlock new units, make friends, and also just shake down senators for cash.

The general structure of the rest of the game is fairly straightforward, with both the Item World and Chara World in Disgaea 4 following a similar structure of being procedurally generated combat levels where you need to clear all enemies, with a few additional minor changes between them. The game also has Magichange, the ability to turn monster characters into weapons temporarily for your other characters to use (don’t worry, they get better), and monster fusion, which lets you fuse monsters into larger versions of themselves with better range and damage.

Is it really a Disgaea game if the stats aren’t measured in hundred thousands?

Overall, Disgaea 4 is currently my favorite of the games story-wise, if not mechanically. While the game’s art style and mechanics haven’t aged terribly, many of the UI elements and menus do feel a bit outdated at this point, and some of the connectivity features, like fights and pirate ship leaderboards, feel a bit dead. Despite all of this, though, the fights are still interesting, the grind is nice and grindy, and story and characters are still funny.

Okay, so maybe I’ve played a bit too much of this.

You can get Disgaea 4 Complete+ here for Switch, and here for PC if you’re interested.