Phantom Brave

[E. Randy Dupre]

Gah. Those limits are far too low for my liking. Going to have to chuck loads of items away, and also abandon my play to teach Marona every A and B ranked ability she can learn. Boo.

Think I might have to end up buying the guide - I suppose that it being available as soon as the US version came out is what's led to there not being as useful a selection of FAQs for this as there were for Disgaea. The posters on the Doublejump forum don't seem to care much for spoiler warnings, and I'd like to leave myself some surprises.

[MartyG]

Yeah, the FAQs are more walk-throughs rather than the detail analysis stuff that was available for Disgaea, making them largely pointless if you don't want spoilers. I'll do my best to answer questions about the game, but like I said I didn't hammer this as much as I did Disgaea.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Found out what that Combo Fish thing is all about, I think. It seems that you get items with the Combo title as a random reward for clearing random dungeon levels, and the type of item relates to the items that were on that floor - I nabbed a couple of Combo Dead Trees out of one dungeon earlier on today.

They're for fusing, basically. They've got more mana and can provide a larger stats boost to the items they're being fused with than other items.

Getting a bit fed up with having to summon items to Phantom Isle just so that Marona can delete them. D'you know if there's a way of getting rid of items from the status screen, or something?

Currently trying to resist the urge to pull the Failure Dungeon trick for easy EXP.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Oo! You can transmigrate characters! Mint!

That's for later, though - much, much later.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Well, I did it. One failure dungeon for power levelling madness.

Like Disgaea, you seem to end up with two or three characters who are massively overpowered compared to the rest of your team, but the remove system makes it a problem here - it's all well and good having Ash and Marona be powerful enough to take on the next battle, but as soon as Ash's four or five turns are up you're screwed if the rest of your team aren't up to scratch.

I was replaying story battles and going into standard random dungeons to get the rest of my team strong enough to take on the story, now that I've started to hit the difficulty spikes, but it was taking forever. So failure dungeon it was.

I guess everybody already knows this, but still...

Have Marona banish an item or character with the Failure title so that your titlist has it added to his list. Then get your dungeonmonk to create a dungeon with high level enemies. Pop over to the titlist and have him assign the 'failure' title to the new dungeon - the title knocks most stats down by 80%, which means that you've now got a dungeon full of high-level enemies that are a piece of piss to kill. You get sod all EXP for killing them as the -80% applies to this too, but you get the full amount of EXP for clearing a floor.

You need to limit its use if you're going to leave any challenge in the story mode, though. It would have been seriously easy for me to razz through the dungeon I created and come out of it with all my team at or around lvl70, and I'm still only at episode 8 of the story, where the enemies are in the mid 20s. I did just enough to ensure that all my team were at or around lvl20 (Marona and Ash are both a little above this, at lvl30ish, but there wasn't much I could do to prevent that), then got my dungeonmonk to pull us out of there before we were over-levelled.

Later on, though - once I've got the story under my belt - I'm going to be abusing this stuff like mental.

[E. Randy Dupre]

I guess I'm the only person still playing this here, but anyway.

I don't really understand the complaint about the story having horrendous difficulty spikes. I mean, it does, but I don't get why people who didn't complain about that in Disgaea feel the need to do so where this game's concerned. There were plenty of points in the earlier game where you'd hit a sudden barrier to progress and either had to spend a few hours refighting battles from earlier episodes or delving into Item World to level your characters up. It's not any different here, unless it's just that the main method of power levelling - failure dungeons - isn't as immediately obvious as the options availables in Disgaea. But really, boosting characters' levels is very easy and very quick - a couple of minutes work, a couple of floors, and you're laughing.

It's also a dead simple way of getting lots of mana extremely quickly - I've got a lvl150ish failure dungeon at the moment, every floor of which contains items that have in excess of 5,000 mana. Just confine a Bottle Mail to one of those and it's yours.

Noticed the other day that the official guide is now only about a fiver direct from the Doublejump shop - go for the cheapest shipping option and it comes to around ?12. Bargain, really.

[MartyG]

I thought that Disgaea only really had one difficulty spike, on the Gargantua Battleship - and even that wasn't too bad.

Phantom Brave on the other hand had some really annoying difficulty spikes, and coupled with design layout meant that even levelling quite a lot didn't help that much, especially considering that phantoms can only stay on the map for a limited amount of time. I find Disgaea a much more enjoyable game to play.

The failure dungeon trick is quite useful for gaining mana and levels - something you will need for the hidden levels later on.

[E. Randy Dupre]

I've done alright with the extra levels so far, mainly because I'd had my Bottle Mail nab some superb pieces of equipment from a couple of failure dungeons around episode 14 or so.

Maybe that's why I've not had the same problem with difficulty spikes as you, Marty. Ash has had a high level sword for a while now, complete with some decent attacks which cover a wide area, and I've got one Witch kitted out with a high level book, fused with a couple of others to give her the full range of elemental attacks. So Remove hasn't been an issue, particularly - between them, those two were able to deal massive amounts of damage to enemies over a large area in a single attack. Had a Valkyrie with a high level starfish (and an absolutely insane SPD stat as a result) to polish off any leftovers. Also made sure that these three, along with Marona, were given rank 6/7 titles as soon as possible.

Basic effect was that I could rip through battles in a matter of seconds if I wanted to, but didn't have to - because it was largely the weapons that had the real power, rather than the characters, I could either go for the lesser attacks or swap equipment over to make sure that no battle ever became too easy and the story still provided a decent amount of challenge.

Gargantua Battleship - argh. That was a broken level, imo. Either power level your characters up enough to take out the gun turrets, in which case they were then over-levelled for the subsequent battles, or realise that you're not even supposed to fight them and instead just pile up your characters and throw one to the entrance to the ship. But not actually *on* the entrance panel, because otherwise the game didn't recognise that you'd got there - instead, throw the character onto the panel in front of it, then have them walk over it. It was less a difficulty spike, and more a matter of... I dunno. Lack of playtesting? A particularly perverse attempt to put the player off?

I wonder if the reason why Disgaea didn't appear to have the same sort of spikes as PB was simply because Item World was better integrated into the whole than random dungeons are in the sequel? In other words, you're still having to power level to get yourself past certain bits in the story, but you don't notice that you're doing so.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Does anyone know how you level up the innate, automatic skills? Things like EXP Riser and Mana Monger?

<edit> Figured it out now anyway. Only way to increase their level is to keep on fusing extra copies of those skills onto your characters.

[E. Randy Dupre]

Well, I'm glad I didn't abuse fusion too much before I finished the story. Just opened up the hidden battle against

->Open Spoiler<-

Scarlet the Brave

and managed to take her down in two hits - one from my horrifically powerful Empath SacredSword (complete with 25K attack and a 95% equip on that stat), then a flick in the nose from an unarmed character to take off the last 650 of her health.

But couldn't save afterwards, unfortunately, as my main Bottle Mail isn't quite at the right level to give me a 100% guarantee of stealing her

->Open Spoiler<-

Soul Saber

.

[MartyG]

The next couple of hidden battles ramp up in difficulty quite a bit. I guess I didn't over-level my characters as it left things a little more challenging for me.