Welcome!

I've recently found IMO a decent setup for some hardcore grinding while I was going through Axel's story for the first time. Finding that Dark World stage was an accident. But coming up with the strategy would be the challenge here. I decided to share this to make things easier for anyone who needs to power up a single member or two by just literally punching a high level enemy.

Before proceeding, I'd like to mention that it's best to follow the other guides to get decent levels and equipment to proceed with early on (especially if you're currently in Adell's story). Otherwise, move on to the next section.

Use this for Adell mode grinding spots and unlocking Dark World:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=853511911

Use these for a different sort of grind using the bonus gauge to get decent equips:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=858345961
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=873077339

What's that? You decided to proceed? Alrightly.

First and foremost, you need to unlock access to the Dark World in the first place if you even want to do this. You must find five hidden switches in the hub world (in either mode) and then find a hidden gatekeeper. Talk to her like five times to fight. Win the fight (she's level 100 by the way), and access to the Dark World will be permanently yours. You'll know this is true for both modes when you'll see a Mk. II version of the gatekeeper next to the normal one.

If you're the impatient and/or you want a video version of this guide, there's a section to that all the way at the bottom of this guide. Else, read on for specifics.

You'll need the following party members to use this trick:

• At least one Level 20+ Thief (knows Consciousness and Freedom)
  
• At least two units (three recommended) with good movement and throw range/height.
  
• A Healer with Espoir.
  
• Any other unit (or two) you want to grind with. (Unfortunately, characters exclusive to Adell's story cannot be used here.)

To access Dark World Stage 3-4, have one ally be defeated in the normal stage 3-4. You will be sent to the stage immediately after fulfilling the condition. However; on your first playthrough of the stage, you will not be sent to the Dark World stage right after. It's best to do this the first time so you could prepare yourself for the stage instead of sacrificing someone for it.

If it's difficult to level up a Thief, use tower attacks. If you need a good suggestion for movement and throwing units, use Heavy Knight with three shoe items equipped.

Are you finally prepared? If yes, save your game beforehand and enter the stage!

Start the stage.

You'll be greeted with a Level 2,000+ Archer just three panels away from your base. You can't lift characters on the blue panels, excluding the base panel.

Also note that there's a Deathblow Geo Symbol at the "stage" of this map. This will be used to kill the Archer in one hit.

The first thing you want to do is check the Dark Sun's effects. Pay attention to this. If there is one to immobilize your throwers (paralysis/sleep), reset by quitting and reloading the save.

Get your thrower to throw another unit to the left side of the stage.

Well. of course you can't because the No Entry panels are in your way. However, there is a known glitch to let you throw across one-panel wide No Entry panels. Simply move the position back towards the thrower and press the Confirm key/button at the same time...
...and you've done the glitch correctly.

(Throwing the unit three panels away is much harder than two panels because it's a frame-perfect trick.)

Now move the thrown unit towards the Deathblow Geo Symbol, but unless you want either unit killed do not end the turn yet. Send out your Thief and use Consciousness to prevent the Archer from acting.


Now end your turn. On the next turn, notice that the sleep ailment disappeared. That's because the Level Up Geo Symbol will additionally remove ailments. This means your Thief has to actively use Consciousness to keep the Archer down on her knees, but don't use Consciousness immediately if you have plans to kill the Archer on Turn 2.

For now, have the thrower throw another thrower. Move that just-thrown unit to the first unit and throw 'em towards the Geo Symbol. Move that thrown unit to the Geo Symbol, pick it up, and throw it into the blue panel in the center. Use the No-Entry throw glitch again for this. It should look like this.

And congratulations! You can now kill the Archer at any point in the stage. If you want to proceed to kill her immediately, proceed to step three. Otherwise, move on to step two.

This part is for keeping the both the enemy Archer immobilized and your Thief healthy as long as possible. The main reason is to increase the Archer's level to yield more EXP, HL, and Mana. Optionally, you can also send out Beast Tamers to increase the bonus gauge.

This following procedure is to be done repeatedly, but is actually harder than it sounds:

• Have the Thief use Consciousness on the Archer.
  
• End turn.

Why is this the case?

Well, remember what I said earlier about noting the Dark Sun's effects? They will mess up your Thief as you pass more turns, unless you got lucky somehow with less harmful effects for her.

The ones worth noting are as follows (in order from least harmful to most):

• Female HP/SP damage (can be ignored unless there's a lot of them)
  
• Female Paralysis (for moving the Thief back, not as bad as it sounds)
  
• Female Amnesia
  
• Female Sleep
  
• Female Curse (instant 0 HP after 4 turns, cannot be removed with Espoir)

To take care of these, prepare a Healer with Espoir and as well as spare Thieves for Curse effect.

Once you decide to kill the Archer if you meet one of the following conditions, proceed to Step Three:

• Enemy Archer has reached Level 9,999.
  
• There are several Amnesia and Sleep Dark Sun effects in a row after the current turn.
  
• Curse is on one turn left on your only Thief/all Thieves.
  
• You have other things to do IRL and have to stop immediately.

So you want to kill the Archer right now? Fine, let's do this.

If your Thief is well and alive (and should be), have her use Freedom to paralyze the Archer.

And what does paralysis do? It decreases the unit's SPD stat to 1, which means ANYONE can literally punch the Archer bare-handed and get away with it.

This is the point that you can send out any unit to finish her off. The unit will gain EXP and Mana from her.

• If it's a ranged/magic unit or a tower of two, just attack from the base panel or behind the Thief.
  
• If it's a melee unit, have a thrower throw the unit behind the Archer. Have that melee unit backstab the Archer.

If you have monsters, you should use Magichange beforehand so that both the humanoid and the monster units will gain 100% EXP and Mana EACH. Additionally; if you have access to Magichange 2, this would definitely be on top priority to use.

Win and collect bonus reward.

In fact, it can.

If you pass a bill to increase enemy level to the highest beforehand, the stage starts with a Level 9,999 Archer instead.


This means you can finish the stage in a minimum of just two turns instead of waiting for the Level Up to kick in. Note that the ailment removal from the Geo Symbol still takes in effect.

By killing a Level 9,999, the unit will receive 9,999 Mana with tons of experience to level up over a hundred times from Level 1. This is perfect for reincarnating to better tiers of a class as fast as possible. Felonies/Gross criminal records do take into account too if you want even more EXP per run. Unfortunately, of all things, the Triple EXP bill does NOT work here because it's not a "legit" kill (I've tested this three times myself already, feel free to correct me here).

Keep in mind that the unit's weapon and skill masteries are still low from just attacking the enemy only once. This is of course remedied by frequently revisiting normal stages and using Armsmaster and Mentor item innocents.

Even though this is exclusive to Axel's story, you can do this to get through Cave of Ordeals and other stuff pretty quickly once you're back in Adell's.

Zedrin pointed out the following in the comment section regarding the exact amount of EXP one unit will get from the method (with zero felonies/criminal records), and as well as comparing it to normal Cave of Ordeals stages:

Originally posted by Zedrin:

A level 9999 max-tier archer from this method yields 12,199,642 exp.

From CoO 1, which also uses archers (bow masters), if you're using full stronger enemy bills (since it uses status debuffs) it'll yield around 2,195,736 exp, x2 from the geo panels. (Stack all 8 of them up and you get in the 2400 level range)

CoO 4 with no stronger enemy bills will yield 266,632 x8, or 2,133,056 exp, + x2 from the geo panels.

LoC obviously will yield a lot more EXP but from the looks of it, this might be a great grinding spot if you can't kill all 8 marionettes in a single go yet. It just requires a bit more setup than CoO 4, but it gives about 6x the EXP until your able to start passing stronger enemy bills.

Just keep in mind that if you plan to use characters exclusive to Adell mode, you'll still need to rely on CoO for them.

Additionally, Zedrin came up with this neat idea while doing this:

Originally posted by Zedrin:

One addendum as well that people might find useful: if you have a fist user, especially one that's a bit higher level (or even just use Axel) it can help a ton to knock the target back one or two spaces, just so you have more room to arrange your units. Very useful if you plan on using magichange to get some monster XP as well, or have to deal with status effects.

Dark Pulse himself gave a tip with using Kunoichis:

Originally posted by Dark Pulse:

Something else also worthy of note: Kunoichis here can be immensely useful, if you've got them unlocked (Level 5 Fist & Staff Mastery, pass "Make a Kunoichi" bill) and up to at least Level 15. They can't paralyze the Archer (Kagenui will hit the space BEHIND them) unless you push them back one space with Axel or some other Fist user, but you can sleep the Archer with MinMinMin and save your solitary Thief for paralyzing with Freedom.

So if you've got them, don't forget to use them when Curse comes out from the Dark Sun! Could give you those few extra turns you need to level the Archer up to max, if you don't want to pass the SEBs.

To make things better, they even made a new guide to have up to eight members level up at the same time based on this one. Definitely have a look here:
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=896149312

If you need the video version of this guide, I've made one specifically for this. I tried to make it as detailed as possible so it would serve as a standalone guide.

First of all I'd like to thank the following for specific reasons:

• sardine - The one behind the 101 guides for the first two Disgaea PC games.
  
• Xeetos - The one who made a guide about risky but worthy early grinding spots.
  
• Dark Pulse - The one who improved one of Xeetos's grinding stages.
  
• Zedrin - The one who pointed out the EXP figures from this method and as well as comparing it to normal CoO.
  
• Nippon Ichi Software - The ones who made the Disgaea series in the first place, along with other nice titles. And then porting them to other consoles, including PC.
  
• Valve - The ones who made Steam so NIS can put their games on it.
  
• You (the reader) - The one who read my guide to begin with.

If you have anything worth pointing out, either send me a message or comment here. I will kindly tweak the guide with your name on it.

Thanks for reading and happy grinding!

April 2, 2017

• Linked Dark Pulse's recently-made guide here. Look at the Other Notes section to find this.

April 1, 2017

• Added Dark Pulse's comment regarding the usage of Kunoichis.

March 20, 2017

• Reversed the order of this log.
  
• Minor additions and edits regarding felonies/criminal records, the Triple EXP bill, and Magichange 2.

March 19, 2017

• Added another useful note by Zedrin.

March 18, 2017

• Added Other Notes section. From now on, this is where I will put any contributions to this guide.
  
• Added Zedrin's useful comment regarding EXP gain from this method and comparing this with Cave of Ordeals' stages.

March 17, 2017

• Added Dark World access requirement in the Setup section