Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories/Reincarnation

There are several opinions on how to best take advantage of Reincarnation. Many guides preach reincarnation as infrequently as possible, and while ideal for certain brands of power-leveling, is simply not applicable to first cycle strategies for beginners. 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 away his levels 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), although by the time you've acquired much later in the game, the usefulness of rapid reincarnation is debatable.

Reincarnation Basics
When you reincarnate a character, their base stats will be higher than they originally were. This is important since a character's stat gain at each level up is directly tied to their base stats, and significantly so.

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 Adell and the other story 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 mana cost)
 * This one takes a while longer -- Expect it around lvl 45 or so, unless you are lucky enough to find Item World shops with Mana Potions of grade 3 and have the cash on hand to empty it.

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 after reincarnation).

Applying it to Everybody
Rapid Reincarnation is applicable to the Story Characters thanks to their cheap reincarnation costs, but it's usefulness for all other human and monster classes is debatable. With the exception of some mages (for whom spells and staff mastery are slow to learn), it's probably a good idea to reincarnate most of your classes to the next available tier at some point.

Side note: a good strategy for the first cycle through the game is to create two characters of each class that you really like, so that you can play "Reincarnation Hopscotch." Use the first character to unlock the second tier, and then create a second character at that new tier. Use the second character to unlock the third tier, and the reincarnate the first character to that new tier. Now use the first character again to unlock the 4th tier so that the second character can transmigrate once more. It's not unreasonable to expect to have the 4th tier unlocked by the time you get to Episode 12. The drawback of this strategy is that your main party won't have as much variety as it might otherwise, since you'll have a couple duplicated classes in its main battalion.

Reincarnating Many at Once
One interesting way to help take advantage of rapid reincarnation during the first cycle of the game is via the Bonus Gauge. 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 and mid-rank Item Worlds this can easily be 3,000 to 6,000 experience (and even more if you're lucky). Normally one of the drawbacks of reincarnation is that a Lvl 1 character is very frail and difficult to level up until they've gotten to lvl 12+. The Bonus Gauge can be an easy source of exp for that reincarnated character. But where one is good, several is even better: If you reincarnate multiple characters at the same time, and pull out your team of lvl 1 wimps out of your BasePanel just before clearing the map, they'll likely be around lvl 10-13 for the next map, and ready to join the fray.

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 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.