Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories/Reincarnation

There are serveral opinions on how to best take advantage of Reincarnation. Some preach reincarnation as infrequently as possible. This page will be dedicated to Rapid Reincarnation, a method of reincarnating as frequently as possible that can be highly effective for new players playing their first cycle through the game.

There are three main reasons for using the Rapid Reincarnation strategy, two of which are new to Disgaea 2:


 * Leveling up, and thus total stat accumulation, happens a lot faster at the lowest levels.
 * Some character classes in Disgaea 2 have special innate abilities that actually make them stronger as low-level characters.
 * Characters will not lose their class-based specials! (one of the major drawbacks to transmigration in Disgaea: Hour of Darkness).

It's the second part in particular that makes Rapid Reincarnation such a viable tool in Disgaea 2. Adell makes a prime candidate for Rapid Reincarnation thanks to his Innate Ability, which allows him to do more damage to enemies that are a higher level than him. By reincarnating him, you take a way his level and, in effect, power up his attack against whomever you face immediately there-after. When playing through the Story Mode for the first time, a twice-reincarnated lvl 30 Adell can easily be much more powerful than a pure Lvl 80 Adell on the later stages of the game (where many enemies are in the lvl 50-70 range).

The unlockable character Kurtis is the only other character/class that sports an innate ability that activates against higher-level opponents (50% less damage taken from enemies). Reincarnation can be used to help take advantage of his ability as well.

Reincarnation Basics
When you reincarnate a character, their base stats will be higher than originally. This is important since a character's stat gain at each level up is directly tied to their base stats, and significantly so. Additionally, after each reincarnation a character is given extra points to invest into their base stats. By the 4th reincarnation of Adell, Distinguished will net you +13 points to his already gaudy base stats.

There are a couple guidelines to adhere to:


 * Do not reincarnate a character at a lower level than their previous reincarnation! This is very important since it ensures that all of the character's base stats will either match or exceed their values at the start of the current incarnation.  Note that this isn't referring to the Total Lvl stat on the Reincarnation screen; that value is essentially meaningless except perhaps for bragging rights.  All that matters is the level of the character at the time of the reincarnation.  So if you reincarnate Rozalin at lvl 50, wait until lvl 50 (or higher) to reincarnate her again.


 * Reincarnation will lower weapon mastery and special abilities. If a special ability skill level is only Rank 1, it may be lost after reincarnation.  If you have specific skills you really want to stay in-tact, make sure they're Rank 2 or higher before reincarnating, especially when using Skilled or Distinguished reincarnations.


 * Early on in a character's development it's usually best to feed in a couple Skilled and Distinguished reincarnations, simply because new characters don't have a lot of weapon mastery or special ability experience to lose anyway. This applies nicely to everyone in your party during the first cycle through the game.  If you wait for Genius reincarnation, you'll never get to reincarnate, and that's not going to do you any favors.

Rapid Reincarnation: How to Do it
In theory it's quite simple. Reincarnate characters early and often. Do not waste mana on Movement or Counterattack, and do not wait for Genius (until later in the game anyway). A decent procedure for Adell, going from the start of the game, looks like this:

1. Reincarnate as Skilled (200 mana cost)
 * You should be able to achieve this by lvl 15 or 20

2. Reincarnate as Distinguished (1000 mama cost)
 * This one takes a while longer -- Expect it around lvl 45 or so.

3. Reincarnate as Distinguished (again!)
 * By now you should have an Adell kicking enough butt that you'll get to lvl 50+ and 1000 mana in pretty short order.
 * Remember to use Adell's Vulcan Blaze special a few times to get to make sure it's retained across reincarnation. It'll come in handy.

4. Reincarnate as Distinguished (yet again!)
 * Now you're pretty much ready to finish the game with one character rolling over almost every late chapter stage like a Tank over daisies.
 * After just a couple stages he'll have enough mana for Counterattack, and a stage later probably Movement too. Now's finally a decent time to invest in those since they'll be quite useful for the last few stages of the game.

5. Future Reincarnations as Genius. (5000 mana cost)
 * Level at which you achieve this will vary greatly.
 * By this advanced point in the game, Adell probably has enough weapon mastery and special ability experience that you're not going to want to throw it away on Distinguished level reincarnations, and since you'll be dispatching lvl 100-200 monsters with relative ease, amassing 5000 mana won't take very long anyway.

In practice, the most common problem is simply missing the point at which you have enough mana to do a Distinguished reincarnation. After the second reincarnation in particular, Adell will be traumatizing enemies with such brutal efficiency that you won't even realize that you just put 1500 or 2000 mana on him. You can either throw that extra mana away, as any unused mana at the time of reincarnation is lost, or use it to open up some other side quests, or for more expensive items and such. But waiting for 5k mana for a genius reincarnation is not what you want to do. You're better off throwing some mana away, if need be.

An example set of base stats for the 4th incarnation of Adell, as compared to his original base stats:

Results can vary greatly depending on what levels the reincarnations are done, and what stats you invest your bonus points into. But as you can see, this particular Adell went into the last few stages of the game with base stats on par with some of the better Tier 6 character classes, and a 25% bonus to his attack power against every enemy of greater level than him (which was all of them at that point in the game).

Applying it to Everybody
Rapid Reincarnation works for pretty much any character, although it's easiest with the Story Characters thanks to their cheap reincarnation costs. But even the high level Tier 6 characters can benefit in the right circumstances. Many Tier 6 characters must pay 12,000 to 15,000 mana for a genius reincarnation, but can reincarnate as skilled for around 600. A good strategy for these characters is to reincarnate them several times at Skilled at very early levels -- with little regard for whether or not their actual base stats are improving much -- for the purpose of incrementing the Total Reincarnations counter. This will give you many more Bonus Points to apply to future reincarnations, so that when you do reincarnate as Distinguished or Genius, you will be granted with 20+ bonus points to distribute at your leisure each time.

The merits of rapid reincarnation for any newly created character is obvious. Still, if you have an older character who's just getting to Tier 6, it might even be worth while to sacrifice some of their special abilities for several quick reincarnations. The return on high level special abilities is minimal compared to the return on having many more bonus points to invest into future reincarnations.

Reincarnating Many at Once
One interesting way to help take advantage of rapid reincarnation is via the Bonus Gauge. The Bonus Gauge can be an easy source of exp for several characters at once. Any character outside the BasePanel at the time a map is cleared will be awarded the full value of bonus experience. On later story stages this can easily be 3,000 to 6,000 experience. Pull a few lvl 1 characters out of your BasePanel just before clearing the map, and they'll likely be around lvl 10 for the next map.

Normally the bonus gauge xp gain isn't really worth while for just one character. But if you can have three or more lvl 1 characters at once time, the usefulness of the exp becomes a lot more substantial. Later in the game when you'll find yourself on stages with Bonus Ranks 30 or more, it's possible to get a handful of Lvl 1 characters to around lvl 25 from a single cleared stage.

Conclusion
As any good veteran of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness will tell you, Transmigration was best done infrequently -- especially for story mode characters who dubiously lost their special moves every time they transmigrated. In Disgaea 2 however the system has been improved substantially, and there is now plenty of motivation to reincarnate all you characters both early and often. Reincarnation is no longer a feature reserved for use by 2nd+ cycle players looking to build their gaudy level of power to the max. It's also a great technique for improving the strength of your story characters during your first cycle, and can make Adell in particular an elite fighter against the high-level opposition that you will continually face.

While Adell and Kurtis benefit the most from reincarnations, all story characters will benefit from rapid reincarnation, and most other character classes can as well (although to a lesser extent).