Disgaea: Hour of Darkness

Make sure Laharl learns to heal himself (and pals). Do this by making a Cleric pupil for him and have them stand right next to each other, this allows Laharl to access all the cleric's spells. if he uses the spell enough times while standing next to the pupil, it will level up and he will be able to use it on his own.

Anyone can steal, provided they use a stealing hand item, However almost everyone is absolutely DREADFUL at it. except Rogues! keep one good and leveled up to steal things; as the chance to steal an item is reliant on the level of the person using a steal hand, and the steal hand's accuracy.

You can, and probably should, just focus on Laharl for the main game. When equipped with your best gear and levelled properly, he can molest anything the game throws your way.

Don't bother with the item world or transmigration until you start doing the bonus dungeons and have beaten the main story. It's really not needed.

When making powerful classes, transmigrate instead of creating from scratch. That way you don't need to get approval from the senate.

To get Mr. Gency's Exit items for the item world, buy the cheapest item you can, like fairy dusts. The enemies will be a joke, and you can stock up on Exits just by reaching levels 10,20 etc. It's a good idea to have several exits in your inventory.

To get through the item world quickly, have your characters pick each other up in a chain until you have a giant tower, then just throw over and over till you reach the exit.

If the enemy is more than a turn away from your base panel, try bringing out an unwanted character to lure them in, then once they're within range, have your main team pop out and alpha strike them.

Learn to cancel moves to your advantage. Assemble your fighters into a T formation to do a team attack, then cancel the moves of the three who didn't attack and form another T to get another team attack.

In dealing with narrow passages blocked by an enemy, you can lift that enemy up with one character, send whoever you want through, then cancel the first character's move. It's like rewinding time selectively.

You can throw diagonally. Just hit the confirm button as you're changing directions.

Transmigration lets you start a character over at level one. If they belong to a generic class, you can change their class as part of this process. A good time to do this is when your character is pretty high in level, and you can afford to do it at "Genius" level. This will give you the highest possible stats to start out with. The higher a stat is at level one, the faster it will grow, which lets your character get stupidly powerful fast.

Against MidBoss for the first time, Lose to him purposefully. You will be allowed to make a second cycle, and from there you will be able to get Pleinare (the NPC with the blue hair and white dress). She is an extra character, a really damn good one. Her Speed allows her to dodge almost everything if she's the same level as the target. You can give her fist weapons and she'll pretty much solo the game.

Don't worry so much about all the things you can do on your first game. Transmigration, leveling up items, specialists, passing bills (except for the more expensive stuff bills).

However the item world is a great place to level up your dudes. Keep an eye on the bonus list for +EXP entries. Every character on the field at the end of the battle gets that much EXP. It's a great way to keep your healer(s) leveled.

Try to avoid creating characters at good for nothing, and aim for at least average. It's also not worth it to create at distinguished or genius, because of the mana cost and requirement to pass bills at the Dark Assembly.

Don't worry too much about stat aptitudes. But be sure to give your characters weapons they are proficient with.

Also take advantage of the techniques that reposition the user or target. Most fist specials will move the target, while most spear specials will move the user.

Disgaea is very different from other SRPGs, but if you want to have an easy time of it, use less than a handful of characters. You can bring out ten, but you'll never have that many at a decent level anyway. It's easiest if you just focus on Laharl, teach him Heal and have him pretty much solo everything, although that may not be much fun.

To teach Laharl Heal, have him create a Cleric, then in battle position the Cleric next to him and have him cast it several times until he gets to level 1 in it. Note that you can bring out Laharl and your cleric, have Laharl cast Heal and Execute it, then cancel the Cleric's move to put it back in the base before you End Turn, keeping it out of danger.

Never do Item World runs early on. If you can kill/move Gatekeepers in two hits on the same turn and clear all 10 floors (10 is all you need for story missions) in around 15 minutes, then you are not wasting your time.

You only need to kill the tenth floor leaders of Item Worlds to get a large bonus increase. Skip all the floors.

Fists moves Gatekeepers off of the panels and giving your Fist users three shoes, is very efficient.

Reload the store to get specialists (or two) that add to the main stat of an item and forgo buying the next level item.

Have you team move in a Turtle formation where they can combo attacks and allow on enemy to hit your guy at a time.

Higher elevations allow more damage and reduces your damage from regular attacks.

Level on maps that have lots of Exp squares or have multiple enemies that can be killed very quickly from the start.

Stealing is very helpful, capturing monster classes (and their items) is even better, if you have lots of disposable guys in your panel. HP is very important (greatly weaken your target) for this and the post game is downright unfair with capturing 5-6 digit HP monsters.

Always attack from behind or the sides if you use regular attacks.

Never balance your guys and fill them with equipment that magnifies their skills.

I would also suggest throwing the fight at the end of Chapter 1. You'll start a new cycle, and you can get a hidden character Plenair the mascot with a fairly rare weapon proficiency.

If you die against Midboss, even in the first chapter, it unlocks new game+ and you can add Plenair to your team. A lot of people recommend it. Otherwise focus on leveling up Laharl. You sorta have to cheese a little bit to get anywhere.

Classes

With the exception of the magic-based classes, all classes do in Disgaea 1 is determine a character's aptitudes, which determines how equipment affects them. A class with a 110% ATK aptitude, for example, will get 110 points of ATK from a weapon that would normally give 100, while they'll only get 50 points if they had a 50% ATK aptitude.

Skulls, Mages, and Clerics are the ones who can learn spells originally. There's extra ways to have other characters learn spells, but it's not quite as "basic" as this explanation will get. Spells are learned by character level by these classes and by the Rune Knight and Angel secret classes .

Finally, levelling up one class will unlock 'upgraded' versions of that class, which have increased base stats and aptitudes compared to the basic class.

Stats

Stat growth on level-up is based entirely on a unit's base stats, the ones it ends up with after you create it. Leveling up an out of date character becomes trivially easy later on and it's worth it to 'transmigrate' a character's soul into a newer, better, upgraded class every 2 or so tiers. This starts you off at level 1 again, but it gives you higher base stats, and you end up with a much better character as a result.

There's no intricate job tree or anything to memorize, just some classes open up every once in a while when you get a high enough level in other classes, usually they're just straight up higher ranked and better than the previous class.

Characters also keep track the total number of levels they've ever gained and you get even more bonus stats from these, but they're not something you really have to care about unless you really want to do the bonus bosses and stuff, which it seems like you don't. Powergamers will pick a single map, abuse it in a way they can get 200 levels at once, and repeatedly do that and transmigrate the character back to level 1 repeatedly until it's stored thousands of levels and is stupidly powerful. It's pretty time consuming and almost completely pointless. To simply beat the game, you don't have to do this.

Weapons

Swords are versatile, the skills using swords vary from single target, multi, and a few interesting ranged attacks.

Axes deal much damage to one target. All the skills using axes usually require only an adjacent square that is approximately the same height as your character.

Lances are weaker, but have 2 tile ranged specials and a "all units adjacent" AOE.

Guns are long range axes. See above.

Fists are also like axes, but some skills move you or the enemy's final resting location. I recall one projectile skill using fists.

Bows cause status ailments, useful when you want to disable or weaken foes.

Staves raise the base spell casting stat for the magic user, and increase the range and area of effect of your spells.

Grinding

You don't really have to grind in Disgaea if you just want to play through the story mode. Grinding is a necessity, however, to deal with the sidequest dungeons and to get some of the cooler character classes unlocked. Moreover, Disgaea is sort of, at its heart, about the pleasures of grinding (at least that's how I find it to play, and I'm not big on grinding in other games). That is, it's fun just to tinker with character classes, boost up weapons in the Item world, etc.

All that being said, if you do want to grind, wait until you have access to the Item World (Chapter 3, I think?), and then concentrate on hunting for Item Specialist in low level items (these are basically enemies that exist on certain weapons/items, and when you kill them, you are able to move them around to different weapons until you can build weapons that provide you whatever status boosts you need.

Early in the game, it's a good idea to concentrate on Statisticians, which increase the rate at which you gain EXP. You can combine up to 300 points worth of Statisticians on a single item, which nets you experience at 400% the normal rate (more than 300 points of Statisticians doesn't provide an greater EXP gain).

If you want to get a really powerful weapon early on, work on collecting Armsmaster specialists (which boost the rate at which you develop weapon mastery), and give them to Etna on a spear (I think the effective limit on Armsmasters is like 1400 TEMPORARY-DASH-CHARACTER far more than 300, anyway, so keep collecting them to speed up the process). When Etna has raised her Spear master to Level 26 (I believe), you can go talk to the Loginus character in the underworld, main map area, and he'll join you as a weapon. Equip him on Etna and you can get a weapons that a lot more powerful than anything you'll be able to find or create for a long time. Note that as you're doing all this, you'll want to be beating the first 10 levels of item world on these levels, so you can collect Mr. Gency's Exits (or whatever it is they're called) that let you jump out of items before levels that are multiples of 10. Also note that once you have enough Gency's saved up, you don't need to play through level 10 to get out with your item specialists, you can just capture him and them exit the level, and then you're free to move the specialist to a different weapon.

All of that probably makes more sense once you've put some time into the game, so it might be best just to dive in. You can't really mess anything up in the early going of Disgaea, so there's no harm in just fumbling about until the mechanics all click.