I’m currently playing a Disgaea game which means I’m currently in the thrall of my addiction to its grinding. That’s a weird statement because the term grinding normally comes with negative connotations, even I’ve used the term within that context before, but I love grinding in Disgaea. So today let’s look at what Disgaea does to turn its grinding into something positive.

Before that though let’s cover what grinding is, grinding is the act of repeatedly doing an action to give you an advantage. The most common example of this is fighting a lot of weaker enemies in and RPG to level up and gain stronger stats. It’s normally viewed as an arbitrary time waster to drag out a game. If you totally despise grinding you can still play through Disgaea and have a really enjoyable SRPG story mode to go through, but when you get into the post-game content it becomes mandatory so it’s good they pull it off so well.

Firstly let’s look at how it tackles the innate repetitiveness of grinding so allow me to introduce the item world. Every item has a procedurally generated multi floor dungeon to go through and these have an incredible amount of variety within them, this variety is caused by another of the games mechanics geo blocks. In the simplest terms these provide special effects to an area of a stage, effects like a defence boost or causing damage, the vast number of effects and enemy types causes most of the floors you go through to feel unique so you aren’t just repeating identical actions for hours to power up.

The item world is great for allowing you to strengthen your equipment to get a significant power boost but the potential risk here is that when you get better equipment the time you spent levelling up the earlier equipment is made to feel redundant. Thankfully the have a solution to this problem in the form of innocents. These are residents of an items item world that provide stat boosts or perks to the item. If you defeat the innocents within an item you gain the ability to transfer them to another item, so even if the item itself becomes outclassed you are still carrying forward some progress from it into the replacement item.

This is something that Disgaea is fantastic at; it always gives you a feeling of progress and improvement. You go through an item world levelling up the equipment you can then equip that to a weaker character that allows them to tackle tougher stages to level up quicker. Level up a character and you can unlock stronger variations of character classes, there’s the ability to reincarnate characters back to level 1 and upgrade them to this new variation at the same time this gives them better base stats, due to the stronger equipment it’s easier/quicker to get back to the previous level and they’ll be stronger than their previous incarnation. The main way of getting new items is drops from stage completions so with these new stronger characters you can tackle tougher stages to get better equipment, you then can go into this better equipment to level that up. Essentially what this means is the different methods of making progress feed back into each other so you are always making some progress.

Of course if you want the player to grind you have to give them something that they’ll want to grind for. For Disgaea that goal is to overcome the post-game bosses. To make these appealing a lot of these are characters from previous games in the series and from other games that NIS have developed, even if you aren’t familiar with the characters most of the bosses will join your party after defeating them and have unique character models and special attacks making them interesting additions to the team.

In later games in the series beating one of these bosses provides an additional perk; bonus points for the cheat shop. The main function of the cheat shop is that is allows you what to receive as a reward from battles; to explain in the post-game I will use this to significantly reduce the amount of money I receive and to instead get bonus experience in its place. Essentially if you beat one of these bosses you’ll have a permanent boost to the rewards you get for every battle you do.

One last element I have to talk about is the special attacks, NIS have made some of the most elaborate and over the top special attack animations. Obviously if you have to keep watching these again and again is a massive time sink and the wow factor for them will be lost, in an uncharacteristic respect for the player’s time for a JRPG you can at any time go into the settings and turn off the animations. This significantly reduces battle time mitigating the usual feeling that grinding is just in the game to waste the player’s time.

I think that’s enough time spent writing this post, now I can get back to the important things, like grinding Brute Root into a god like tank.