Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories

Just because you can field 10 units doesn't mean you need to. 3-5 of your favorites will do fine and save you some grinding

Ignore the item world until the post-game if you want. Same goes for reincarnation

Cast some piddly heal or buff with your cleric every single round and she'll never need to mooch kills to keep up with the rest of the party

It's not worth it to perfect an item (level 200), let alone 1 character's entire inventory versus just maximizing the levels naturally, which will probably get it to around level 100-120. For those of you who don't know, the process takes a whole lot of luck and resetting just to get certain random events to show up in the item world. Whereas just going through an item's item world all the way will probably take about 2 hours if you just breeze through it.

Each character and monster has a class/type special attribute so make sure you check this out first before storming into battle. For example, dragons are immune to fire attacks, so even if one has a -50% fire resistance fire spells won't do squat.

There are no statisticians in this game, instead the felony level you have counts as a semi-permanent experience booster (allbeit an incredibly fucking tedious to get exp boost)

It's ok to use exploits to cut down your grind time. Look up the Neko trick for details. From what I've read online, I've spent a fraction of the time (under 100 hours) accomplishing 99% of the game's goals compared to most people.

Thieves being next to useless in the last game (apart from stealing) can now invoke status effects on enemies. That's fine, why is that any good? THEIR STATUS EFFECTS NEVER MISS REGULAR ENEMIES. Yes, this means a lvl 10 thief can sleep a lvl 9999 Neko, and even poison it. The female ninjas are even better in the sense that their status effect skills like the Sleep one can target up to 5 enemies at once, and it's ranged to boot. Sleep incapacitates an enemy for up to 4 turns (unless it's hit with a Physical attack) and Poison will damage the enemy for 20% of it's max life per turn. Poison damage won't wake an enemy up, so you can easily deal with stuff like Pirates. The drawback is no one gains exp or money from a poison kill.

If you collect all 16 pirate maps you get access to the Land of Carnage, which pretty much just ramps the difficulty up of any map you access from it. Also the enemies inside the maps' item worlds tend to be pretty high (200+) and a lot of people reload for invincibility/reverse damage tiles so they can kill/rob high-level guys easily.

Another trick let's you bump your level up to godliness within 10 hours of beginning the game, and it doesn't leave a bad taste in your mouth like the Neko trick. It also ties in to the above mentioned strategy to deal with the more difficult enemies. First thing you'll need is to get a Treasure map, and to do this you need to defeat a group of pirates in the Item world of any item. Then, you can go into the item world of that map, where you'll likely find lvl 250+ enemies, as well as loot. The trick here is to try and grab one of the higher end weapons, which will let you deal with the enemies, and this can be done through end-stage Bonuses (poison/sleep all enemies to kill them) and treasure chests (which will require you to chain a combo, basically designate everyone to attack it and Execute, the last persons in the chain will be dealing considerably more damage). You can also combo-kill the enemies, but you'll need to watch out for counters. Placing mage spells at the end of a combo REALLY fucking hurts them too, so keep a mage around or a magic knight. And, of course you can always steal from enemies, whereas the thief will always have a 1.0% chance to steal, regardless of the level difference. Once you get a weapon, you'll be able to combo-kill allot easier and get more equipment. It's challenging, but this is a fun way to break the game.

As for felonies, you can transfer Bailiffs from Subpeonas to other items. Portals to the court appear on the item world level that is the Bailiff's level. So if you put a bunch of low (but different) level bailiffs in some item, you can go to the court multiple times in one spin of the item world. Also make sure you get a tower of people into the portal and they'll all get the felonies that the bailiff gives. It is still as slow as hell though, each felony only gives 1% bonus EXP and you can't even see the real felony count of a character as what you see is limited to 99.

Pirate Maps

Here's the run down for getting map peices:

There are sixteen pirate groups and each one has one map peice. Getting the map peice from that group means you can never get a map peice from that pirate group again.

Pirates can show up in the first three turns of any item world level. Don't move on to the next level until you're sure no pirates (who you haven't taken the map peice from) will show up.

Pirate groups have a minimum depth before they'll even consider showing up. Some only show up deeper than level 20 in the item world, others after level 80, ect. . Check Gamefaqs for what pirate groups show up when, keep track of what pirate groups you've gotten the map peice from, and only stick around on floors where there's a chance a new pirate group will show up.

Do runs in low level items. When you're on level 80 and a Pirate Z shows up its level will be huge (2000 minimum iirc), and the last thing you need is a new pirate to show up that you can't kill (or worse, die after collecting map peices).

It still takes a bucketload of luck to get all sixteen pirate groups to show up. Ambling Priates are all over the damn place and all you get is a higher level version of every map in the game, a new item world where you can get rank 40 items, three new characters (with no felonies or stored levels and you can only use them in the World of Carnage), and access to Baal.