This topic is for discussing your experience playing Disgaea 4. I'm most likely not interested in purchasing it at this time, primarily because I have enough games on my plate right now. Plus, I was immensely turned off by the Item World and almost all of the gameplay mechanics in the first game, the only one I've played. However, I am still interested in hearing about what it's like, since I don't think many other major RPGs have been or are going to be released in the near future.

Unlike my other topics, I would strongly moderate this topic for plot-related spoilers. However, I would encourage discussing what the plot is like in a general way, without spoiling the actual events themselves, if possible.

Thanks for the discussion. Have fun!

The only Disgaea game I've ever played was the 3rd one. I cracked out on it near the end of the 3rd chapter.

That game is the least grindy and the most grindy at the same time.

From what I've read 4 takes 3's overworld mechanics and refines them a bit

Also a lot of people are just calling it the best in other things too
Story
Characters
Music
Voice Acting

The story and music seemed really good to me in the first game. It's the gameplay that just killed it for me. It made the same mistake that TWEWY did: made the gameplay mechanics unnecessarily complex for advancing your characters. Random stats on equipment? Item World? Senators? Not to mention my own abilities from my classes. How are you supposed to figure any of that out on your own? It was so complex, I had a really hard time overlooking it, even though everything else seemed good.

And the grinding. Oh my god the grinding.

Maybe it's because I never played the first one (without hacking)
But the rest seem to have really good tutorials
And 3 introduced a double edged sword
Using mana to learn skills with whatever weapon/class you are

@Acynder
I don't see how you had to grind that much in the game
It took me a good 10 minutes to get my full team of 10 up to lv 20
When I got to Chp 3

How in the world can you level up that quickly?

I wanna know this as well.

I was exaggerating oops
But I have went from Lv 1 to Lv 74 in a quick shot
During Chp 6-7
3 hands you grinding spots on a silver platter

My guess is with a system that goes up to Level 10,000 getting up to level 20 would be about like getting to Level 2 in a Final Fantasy. (Or a good grinding spot)

Picture this
A group of enemies in a 3X3 square
You have attacks that can hit and kill at least 3 of them at once
Your standing on an Exp boosting tile
Congrats you just reached Lv 100

No. It's still pretty aggravating to level up.

Geez, it's still hard to level up to 20, or 30-ish and you can reach level 10,000!?

There's grinding spots but really they come late in the game to really matter so...

You can only reach Lv 9999
But the level cap is wacky since you can reincarnate keep half of your levels
Says your at level 1 but have the stats of a level 1000
And you can do that as long as you have enough mana.

Acynder might I ask what specifically was giving you trouble in Chp 3

The very last fight in the chapter. Even then my reasons for hating the series is pretty much the same as HCs. Repetitive overly convoluted gameplay mechanics.

Oh Archers
That would make anybody pull their hair out
*Painful memories of Snipers in Later Chapters*

Also, while the level cap is 9999, the last boss in Disgaea games is usually level 90 or so. People can still get through the story just fine, the high end stuff is just for grind lovers like myself <3

Chrona
How long does it usually take for you to grind up to max
Or whatever the highest level boss is

I beat Disgaea 3 with a level 70ish Mao, and a Level 60ish Almaz/Sapphire/Raspberyl, and like a level 50ish generic

My Disgaea 2 final boss team was similarly leveled, but Its been too long since I played that game.

And funny, as I was typing this message Outlook tells me I got a message from NISA reminding me that D4 came out today. Good timing :)

They always have good timing
Also I know map making was changed in the trasition from the Jap region to Na region
So I wonder how it'll work now

Depends on the game and the area. There are usually designated grinding areas - high level enemies on bonus EXP panels you can slaughter in one hit and restart the map, for example. Does take quite a few hours to be able to take them on, but a large chunk of your stats comes from equipment so if you have a level 1 with a maxed powered weapon, you can get him up to a thousand or two in minutes :P

I miss my gunslinger
Oh you were so close to tier 5

I can understand your disliking of the Item World HC, with your extreme dislike of random dungeons. Unless you're breaking the post-game, it's not even something you have to deal with, except for the obigatory 1 time you have to go through maybe 10 floors (I haven't encountered it yet, but then again I'm only in Episode 2). The "random" stats of equipment are caused by the "innocents" in each item. Some increase HP, some SP, some SPD, etc. Again, it's not anything significant unless you're doing post-game. There's also rare/legendary items you occasionally find, they're slightly better than a common form of the item, but the next strongest item will still be better. Senate: You pick something you want to have, such as better equipment in the shops, and the senate will vote on it. Just bribe them with the items you have in your bag. In 4, there are 6 kinds of senators, 2 each of high, mid, and low level, and each species has a specific type of item they really like. Of course, they still will take other items, and passing stuff is MUCH easier than it was in the first game. Learning skills requires mana, basically like JP in FFT except you only get it for killing an enemy and you get the same amount as their level. I'm not sure yet how it works to learn skills other than ones that you can innately learn, such as a fighter earning healing spells, but I'm sure there's a way. If you PM me or Nosgard or someone we'd be glad to hep if there was any other gameplay mechanic questions you had.
Edit: With the senators, it says what type of item they really like when you scroll over them, so it's not a guessing game.

Cinderrocks
Did they tweak on how mana is used
Cause I remember in 3 your were always tight on mana with your mage type characters

I'm still in Episode 2 (stupid need for sleep :angry: ), but there's already something in your "setup base" as I'll call it, that allows you to get 10% mana that anyone in said group gets. It's kinda like the classroom system of 3, but it's more strategic. You'll see. Placement of characters. That's all I'll say.

Oh good
Because my mages aren't good nukes if they don't have variety

Nope I was wrong. It's 50% of mana, not 10. There's one for 10% of Experience. Got the 2 mixed up.

That was another thing that bothered me. It took forever to learn new abilities. What if you're a healer? How are you supposed to gain mana then? Wittle an enemy down to 1 HP and kill steal it? One stray critical hit or stronger hit than I expect and I'm screwed.

Yeah that's a bit of a problem at first. If you give them a bow, that will help with damage output a bit. Later on there are stages that have geo symbol setups like Reverse Damage, where healers are boss. If you have them participate in team attacks, then the main attacker gets half the exp and the others who teamed up split the other half. This game makes it a lot easier to get exp & mana for them when you get your HQ. You can set it up to get spill-over exp and mana from some of your other attackers, and you do get exp from healing just no mana. If you keep them updated on the best equipment you can buy from the stores, meaning bow or staff (bow is recommended until later in my opinion)and armor, an orb for more sp, and my choice is an emblem in the last slot after I have found some for my main attackers. It increases all your stats.

I haven't started really colecting mana for my spellcasters yet, other than to learn one spell for my healer. Gimme a few, and I can tell you if the spells can just be learned with enough mana, or if it takes levels too.

Yeah you need mana and you have to be at a certain level. The spells are available to learn at a lower level than in Disgaea 1, and the skills are now level based as far as being able to learn, at least at this point in the game. I'm still only in Episode 3, so I'm still learning the changes in gameplay mechanics on the fly.

pish posh! Nosgard played this for about..16 hours straight yesterday, admittedly 6 or so of them hours I was busy in the item world, or bribing the senate, stuff like thats but eh, i'm on the final chapter nowz, plan on wrapping it up after work tonight. That being said, my playtime has reached 25 hours now and I can make this very simple.

Bailly, you will fucking hate this game. the "Random" factor is extremely pushed in your face. It has several types of grinding built into it, and to get all the content, grinding is absolutely unavoidable. Hundreds of hours of it no less! The storyline does not even -remotely- take itself seriously, we are talking about 4th wall breaks constantly, silly characters, and bad puns galore with a barely taped together plot. The game has no problem blatently saying "I am a video game!" in quite those litteral terms.

I like Disgaea alot, and I have since #1, and i'm sure alot of you would too. Bailly should stay awaaaaaai, cause he'd hate it. Trust the nos, he knows :)

Edit: and one last thing, Healers suck with bows, their is no feasible way to get a healer mana truthfully, except maybe giving her 50% of someone elses using the evility symbols. However, I have a much simpler solution, you stock up on da mana potions from the item shop, stock up up up, you hook the healer up with all her spells through them, than you reincarnate her into something less pathetic and she'll retain her heal spells. A "true healer" is a waste of a char. in Disgaea.

I'll be honest, I want to like the Disgaea series. I like silly stories, which is partially why I love jRPGs. From what I've heard, the music is generally cheery and playful.

Grinding alone wouldn't make me hate a game. The problem is that when it's applied to an SRPG, it takes forever to do. SRPGs are bad enough when they take a 30 second battle and unnecessarily extend it to 15-20 minutes. But when they apply that to massive level-grinding, that's way too much.

I used to think that the reason I tolerated grinding was because I grew up with it and there was a lot of nostalgia behind it. However, I think more so the reason is because it didn't take that long. Take Dragon Warrior 2. According to my notes, I did about 5 hours of grinding. Granted, that's probably at least 50% of my gameplay time. So why wouldn't I mind 50% of my gameplay time consisting of grinding nowadays?

Games take 100 hours today. That's 50 hours of grinding vs. 5 hours. It's no longer a question of the proportion of grinding vs. actual progression. It's just the sheer amount of time required. I'm okay with grinding if I can spread it out AND it's mentally engaging. Massive grinding and SRPGs just don't jive with me, and that probably ruins any chance of me getting into Disgaea, which is a shame, because the rest of the game sounds like it has enormous potential.

I can see where you would get that impression playing games like FFT, but unless you're at the beginning of the games (and even then), battles should never be taking 15-20 minutes in the Disgaea series. Here are some quick examples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0YWNbcAnk - Level 1 to 72 in a single battle that shouldn't take over a minute

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGklHSB761g&feature=related Cave Of Ordeals grinding - if you turn off animations, this battle will take less than ten seconds to do and can give you hundreds (or even thousands if you're a really low level) of levels

The level cap may seem daunting at first glance, but it's a matter of gradually getting strong enough to the point where grinding becomes easy

I love Disgaea, but yeah, I don't think you should try to play any of them in the near future, mainly because you're trudging through FFT right now, and both it and Disgaea are pretty hard to digest. If you really have an SRPG craving, then I'd recommend either Fire Emblem or Shining Force right now. But hey, it's up to you.

Yeah playing Disgaea and FFT at the same time will drive a man crazy. Yep , no one should ever do that...

I didn't say 50 hours. I said 500. and I wasn't exagerating. You can reasonably grind for 500 hours in Disgaea 4 just to be powerful enough to properly take on prinny Baal pirates on floor 100 of a Tier 50 LoC item (the hardest thing to do in the game to my knoweledge). You wanna beat the main story? will take you 20 hours tops honestly, not worth a 60 dollar game IMO. you play Disgaea because your willing to invest the next 3 monthes of your life into hard grinding, or you don't play it. Its just that simple. To say otherwise would require me to invade your game with my pirates and kill you. Painfully. (don't tempt me, I CAN and WILL do it!)

On unrelated but still wonderful news, My thief stole her first item just now, yes I know, it took me 26 1/2 hours of game time to get around to stealing something, i'm failing my profession, and just unlocked tier 3 of my primary DPS classes, and Tier 3 thief. She got me a feather charm off an item King, such a good girl she is. *pets my thief, Anhassi*

I second the notion towards playing Shining Force.

ATTN: EVERYONE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soH8jG_gfGQ

That is all