Prologue

Hello traveler. Welcome to the Tales of Arcaneum, a re-telling of the events that happen during my progression in both the section events this year as well as other gaming journeys I may embark on during 2023.

For those unaware - the two events happening are the Game-Along and the Gaming Challenge. In the Game-Along, themes are chosen each month in which you can pick a game that fits and try to complete it before the month is over! In the Gaming Challenge, you set yourself a goal of how many games you plan to play this year.

Chapter 1

PokéCommunity Game-Along IV Entry #1 - Disgaea 2

This month's theme is Free Choice, so I thought I'd go with something that will fill up a lot of my time over the month and also something I have wanted to revisit for a while, that being Disgaea 2! I've done a lot of runs for Disgaea 1 recently and after the disappointment that was Disgaea 6, I wanted to revisit the games again without doing yet another run in 1.

So I decided to play Disgaea 2 (it's nicer anyway imo, bit more QoL in terms of grinding etc.) and this time I decided to limit myself in classes I can play; I picked 5 classes at random that can be used, along with the 2 story characters Rozalin and Adell, throughout the whole game. Those classes are:



So with that out of the way, it was time to get the show on the road! After going through the tutorials, I immediately got Athena to create three more Magicians - one of each element (Fire/Ice/Wind). To quickly explain why - in Disgaea you create characters by having an existing character essentially recruiting them from the Dark Assembly, thus you get a Mentor (the person who made the character) and a Pupil (the created character). Any spells the Pupil learns can be learned by the Mentor, meaning that my magic-based Cleric can now learn some offensive magic options to help with early levelling. After getting her to learn each of the basic spells, I've essentially just been cruising through the story, getting some levels. We're currently on Chapter 3, as we've been a little slow just getting some characters up to speed.

The other exciting venture though is that I have already completed some steps in the Item World! The Item World in Disgaea is where you can go into one of your items, completing procedurally-generated 'Floors' to further boost the stats of it, as well as some other stuff that I'll leave out for now. With this, I managed to pump 10 levels into a legendary (items have 3 rarity levels in Disgaea - Common/Rare/Legendary) Wooden Bow, which has gone straight to my currently fairly weak Hades to help bolster those stats a little.

As it stands I now have all the classes I can use, so I'll be using my merry little band of 7 to try and get some stats/levels/etc. before then considering adding more of these classes in.

And that's mostly been it so far, the early game is always a bit of an eventless grind really, but hopefully next update will have a bit more zing to it (and I'll provide some actual content on my Gaming Challenge entries so far too!).

Current Event Progress:

Chapter 2

PokéCommunity Game-Along IV Entry #1 - Disgaea 2

So with not long left until we reach February, it was time to start kicking things into overdrive a bit, as unfortunately due to both physical and mental health issues I've been somewhat waylaid! As I didn't get too far initially... this meant flying through 10 chapters to get to the game's end in about 4 days, this is definitely going to be a challenge! Before we dig in, I will just post a reminder about the conditions for this Disgaea 2 run.

In this run, I've randomly selected 5 classes, which will be the only classes I can use (alongside the two story characters Rozalin and Adell). These classes are in the spoiler below:



Now to start things off, I got some good hauls from my last jump into the Item World, so I decide to start the progression upwards and pick an item with levels around the same as my party, this time choosing one of the spears I have (as Buddha was looking a little weak and that is his primary weapon). As is usual in Item World, what this mean is that I managed to get to floor 10 and get even more hauls... so the grind starts to begin. As time IS an actual constraint here, I stop after a few items, decidely a rare Imperial Seal. These items are good for the early game, as they increase all of your stats and this has certainly helped as I put it on Hades who was starting to fall off a bit. After all of this, I was rocking an average level of about 18 or so, which was way higher than what I was facing in the story, so I decided to just power through until I got to a point I felt I needed to stop and grind some more.

This actually ended up being quite a way it seems! Chapter 3 was an absolute breeze as expected... until the horror that is Tragedyland. This is where the game, poorly I will add, explains the Felony system of Disgaea 2. Felonies are essentially stacklable on characters, built up from Subpoenas you get for things such as having too high a stat, lots of money or even just destroying Geo Symbols in the game. With each Felony on a character, you get things such as EXP boosts and the like. Tragedyland, the last level of Chapter 3, requires you to have obtained a Felony on a character before proceeding. UGH. Thankfully the Subpoenas themselves are fairly easy to do - go into the Item World and go to the same floor number as the level of the Bailiff in your item, enter a portal and you're in the Dark Court where you obtain your Felony.

So now we've been extra naughty, it was time to complete Chapter 3. But first, we meet an old friend of ours...


Etna!!! She's one of my favourite Disgaea characters and it seems she's made an appearance here in Disgaea 2 as... a boss?! DDD:

Now again this was just more of a timesink, as this is a battle you can infact not really win (at least in a fresh game) so you are supposed to lose. With that out of the way, we then fly through Chapters 4 and 5, with our levels still sitting comfortably above the average of the enemies. I did do a LITTLE grinding in Chapter 4, as it features the first "power-levelling" map of Disgaea 2. This map has a Geo effect in which any enemy on the coloured panel has their level increased by 10% every turn. So after some careful setting up, I managed to get one enemy on their own and tied down enough that they got to about level 60/70 and didn't kill my whole team, whilst netting Buddha a whopping 6 levels, bringing them right up to speed with the rest of the party! After that I did then stop the playthrough, as I know Chapter 6 is a bit full on both in content and story, so I wasn't quite ready to tackle that this evening.

However, that stint alone has us at the halfway point of the game now, so I think we're well on track to get this completed before February!

Current Event Progress: