Where Grinding Is A Pleasure

Why, spambots, why is this crap so much fun?  Tell me!

I've poured over 70 hours into Disgaea:  Hour of Darkness now.  That's more than enough to make pretty much any non-Nippon Ichi SRPG cry and give you its lunch money.  And I'm not even close to done with the main storyline yet, much less the grindfest insanity of the bonus content.

Maybe I'm just not grinding efficiently enough.  It took me a while to realize I need to be using grind-focused specialists to get going (Armsmasters, Statisticians, and to a lesser extent Managers), and got a bit too hung up on grabbing and taming them in low-level loot to realize that I was leaving the higher-level stuff alone.  This resulted in me wasting time farming really crappy mooks.  While this can be entertaining, my agri-combine of death just really wasn't getting any better at harvesting the unworthy.  All of this was a bit exacerbated by my horrible little habit of playing stuff late at night, after a full shift at work; I simply wasn't registering that things weren't being done just right.

But, hopefully, I've corrected the flaw in my plan, and now the Harvest has gotten a good jump-start.  Soon, the foolish enemy hordes will be laid waste, and their shinies will serve to fuel further conquests.

Final Fantasy Legend 2 is also proceeding fairly well.  There are some hiccups, but nothing that I didn't anticipate, really.  The biggest problem is that stat growth can be influenced by character actions, but still has a large degree of randomness.  You can sit there and grind for a good while, but never get much of anywhere (except HP boosts, usually) if the game's RNG decides it doesn't like you.  Some luminous soul at Square tried to punish grinding techniques by including breakable equipment, but cash is Final Fanasy-level plentiful, so its merely annoying without the controller-breaking rage later SaGa games could induce in the unprepared.  But things are going well all things considered.  I managed to get through the first real boss fight without getting flattened, which is a big deal for a my pack of nooblets.

In any case, things are going fairly well overall.  We shall see how much they progress, and hopefully I can put Disgaea to bed soon.  Then the Reckoning begins!