Do not enter here, but if you do, do not abandon all hope.

[Ultimate_Rumbler]

I finally platinumed this game tonight after nearly 6 months and 450 hours.  I had never played Disgaea before this and it isn't my kind of game.  I just so happened to have bought it on a whim for PS3 around 13 years ago so it was sitting on my account, irritating me with its very low trophy percentage, and eventually this annoyed me enough to have a go at it.  This turned into months of struggle and frustration, before eventually I learned enough about the game to push through it.  Anyway, I thought I'd leave some tips, as while the game isn't that hard, there are a lot of systems that are quite opaque and the information that's out there is all over the place and some of it isn't quite right.  I am assuming you can follow the guides to learn the basics of the game, how to level up, and unlock the basic trophies etc.

 

- Consider playing the game unpatched, at least at first.  I didn't do this, and it meant I did no duping at all throughout the entire game (told you I'm new to Disgaea).  I reckon I could have saved 50-100 hours if I'd had access to the easy duping.

- You will be going through 1000s of item and chara world levels, so make sure to prioritise raising move stats, creating a masked ranger generic (then raising his move stat) to help sprint through them easily, and finding some Move+ items (Accelators, Propel Verniers, then later Barefoot X's - it's worth even going into the item worlds of these items and passing a move+ bill or two).  Getting used to using monsters to bounce characters off is also helpful for reverse pirating and some X-dimension levels, as is getting a couple of units (e.g. Armor Knights) with high throw stats.

- Prioritise getting some Thiefs/Rogues levelled for easy stealing.  I had three and they made life so much simpler in the LoC and deeper item world levels - 99% steal chance is critical when you will die in one hit if the enemy gets a turn.

- The Biggus Stickus trophy can be picked up easily in the late post game if you have Natural Sardine equipped (probably on Valv), and you attack a Nekomata with Lion Stance.  To get Lion Stance you need to run through the chara world with someone who can learn it from random Evility rewards (I did it with Fenrich).  I don't know how much attack you need for this glitch to kick in but I didn't have more than a few million and I don't think I even used Braveheart (I did through a Tera Heal on the Neko on the same turn).  This requires far less stats than the other methods that I saw.

- Collect Gencys as you go through the item world (just kill all the enemies on the 10th, 20th, 30th etc. floors and you get them as a reward, plus the free ones from the Thief's Mystery Room).

- Level up the Mana and XP Evil Symbols as much as you can (fairly obvious).  The rest I didn't find much benefit to being bigger. 

- Level up the good skills, but be a bit careful about not rushing them up so quick you run out of SP all the time.  Also if you are levelling Skulls remember you can't get Tera Star as a Galaxy Skull (it needs to be learned as a Star Skull, then you can reincarnate into the last tier with it).

- There's an "exploit" (obviously developer intended) on the patched version of the game that lets you Gency in and out of the 100th floor of an item to repeatedly kill the item president for repeated stat boosts.  By doing this you can jump your Baal Sword (or other level 40 weapon) and/or Trapezohedron's stats into the stratosphere.  They do cap, but at levels way above anything you'd ever get otherwise (I had c.2.8mil attack on the Trap I did this with).  You'll need to do this 40+ times though, so you therefore need a ton of Gencys.  I did everything necessary for the platinum with a fairly underpowered Baal Sword (no Gency-ing), one maxed Trap, and two half-decent Traps.  The hardest fight is Pringer X in the Land of Carnage, but you only need to kill one of the 8 which spawn in then you can lose the fight/reset.  This isn't too hard to do with 20 million attack or so, assuming you have a few level 9 skills, and throw Valv back into the base after each attack.  Attacking from behind gives you much more chance of hitting high level enemies.

- Rarity matching is very, very strong, and gives you an absolute ton of free stats for only a few easy resets.  I didn't even do it perfectly and got several million free attack from having two Traps and a Baal Sword with the same rarity (I should have done all 3).  Legendary items have a rarity between 0 and 9 - if you equip 2/3/4 items with the same rarity you get a huge stat boost.

- Getting an item to level 300 is not too difficult if you use the GameFAQs guide on it.

- Collect Statisticians early by reverse pirating (use monster bounces to jump them back over to the ship if you can).  Quick level ups are extremely useful for many functions later in the game (just use the Desco/Neko fusion -> magichange to Valv -> Big Bang loop on Mt Ordeals 4, preferable in the Land of Carnage, and with a few stacks of Statisticians on an item the 10% bleed across will jump units up 1000s of levels).  I could have saved myself 10-20 hours by doing this much earlier than I did.  Also get Fencers and Guardians (you can Innocent farm a huge stack of Gladiators, but Fencers and Guardians seemed to do much more for me).  Beware that if you merge stacks of innocents above the stack cap for an innocent any 'excess' vanishes rather than forming a new stack (I wasted c.100 statisticians learning this).

- The Pirate Ship part farming from disciplining isn't that bad using the Wiki and the guide if you do it one a single X-dimension map at the start of your second run, but the Pirate Ship item "Treasure Body" is recorded in lots of places as being found by disciplining the Thief - it is actually from the Peachbody Pirates, found on the 51st+ floor on the Treasure Route (this route is accessed by alternating between the Item and Weapon routes).  Knowing this would have saved me 3 - 5 hours of pointless resetting.  This forum post tells you how to efficiently discipline each class, which helps speed things up: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/995078-disgaea-4-a-promise-unforgotten/78139546

- Hunting the Red, Meowkins, Prinny, Commando and Artist pirates in the Item World is much worse, but if you know that they never spawn on maps with Mystery Rooms (you can go into the room and out to reset the map and the might spawn though) or Event squares you can run through 10-20 levels pretty quickly before resetting (I also never saw them spawn on a map with an innocent or level sphere either, but not sure if this was just my luck).  They can spawn on X5 maps, but not X0 maps.  Always wait till the start of turn 3 as they can arrive late - and if one set arrives, there's a very decent chance another will come the turn after.  Turn the enemy levels down to weakest so they are always easy to kill.  I found Prinny Pirates only on the innocent route, and Red's only on the Weapon route, but I did actually find Commando and Artist pirates on both.

- Fun and (especially) slayer weapons seemed to be *much* more common when I captured 9999 level enemies (to the point where they'd be spawning every other discipline).  Level didn't seem to make any difference for pirate ship parts.

- The worst grind in the game is getting the 12 special skills from the Old Combat Master.  The more common list seemed to spawn (in the mystery room accessed on the 10th floor of the Chara World by destroying all the blocks) about 12-15% of the time, while the rarer list spawned just under 5% of the time for me.  I recorded all my runs and it took 132 runs for me to encounter "OCM2" 6 times.  Make absolutely sure you have a fast set up - Desco + a masked ranger equipped with 3x Barefoot X's to get through the first 9 levels quickly then some characters who can blow up blocks quickly (I had a bunch of Skulls with low level (e.g. Fire or Ice) rank 9 magic, plus some human characters).  If you can find someone to share you the skills on pirates then I'd advise doing so, but I didn't and got through the runs in a week or so.  And you can always just lift an enemy if you are worried they will all kill themselves by getting countered on their turn.

- Destroying chests while reverse pirating high level legendary items in the Land of Carnage gave me a pretty decent spawn rate on level 39 items.  I was nowhere near strong enough to fight the enemies here, but it didn't matter - just create a ship that'll give you enough time to get in, blow a couple of chests up, and then either reset or get out.  A few hours of this and I had all my level 39 legendaries ready for going through (in the normal world until 99) to get level 40s.

 

But as my title implies, my real advice is to not bother with this game; it's a torturous grind filled with resetting.  But if you're reading this that probably isn't going put you off, or you might have already committed to doing it for whatever reason.  Progress comes much more quickly once you understand the systems at work and how to work with them.

 

Well, good luck.  Hope this helps someone, someday.  We're down to 1-2 people per year platinuming this version...

Edited Thursday at 07:32 PM by Ultimate_Rumbler

[A1r4l3x]

i love disgaea games... 4 is the "worst" ...pirate ship parts are no joke

i put this one aside a while ago, always do with 4 haha

but ill plat this and will end up getting another version

 

but reading your post made me wanna sink into it again and finish it, i love the so many layer of mechanics... you should try D3 

 

nice post