I think the "I" is a typo?
realized it wasn't so much
Fixed, thanks!
As an odd aside, something weird was up with trying to edit Chapter 7, not sure what. Safari crashed repeatedly trying to open the edit screen on that one, and I had to resort to switching browsers to get it to work.
If anything looks weird, formatting wise, let me know, because it means the browser switch & saving edits under different circumstance might've borked something. Shouldn't, but you never know.
By the by, if this is working off of some unholy combination of all Disgaea games, what units are unlocked from the get-go for hammering out new demons out of mana? Assuming you aren't going with 5's frankly boring change to just being recruitment of randos, but the core question remains
I'll answer these in reverse.
For the second, yeah, I'm afraid I'll be using Disgaea 5's explicit recruitment-from-elsewhere version. At least for Ash; from a technical perspective it's 'still possible', for powerful Overlords to do so, but not for her.
For one thing, recruitment is more 'canon' these days, but more importantly I couldn't figure out a good way to make narrative use of just manufacturing life out of nothing that didn't lead to massive problems down the line. It works for crackfics where lampshading isn't really necessary, but Worm is a setting where being able to whip up literal armies from nothing is a big no no.
Also has the issue of explaining how and why you can suddenly create entirely new species of monsters, or where they came from, has a lot of ethical implications and questions, and a whole bunch of other issues. So rather than deal with that, I figured I'd stick with the more comedic side that Disgaea 5 introduced. Trashcan Pete's 'original' name in chapter 2 being literally 'Insert Name' was an extension of that, as that's actually one of the namelist results you can get if you press the button for a random name.
—
As for the first question… I don't actually have a
solid answer, but there's actually a somewhat buried/hidden page on the wiki that lists all the available starting classes for each game, and so I've leaned towards just allowing most any class that's available at the start of any game.
Also i kinda wonder what is going through QA mind right now and the much more [DATA] she has just gotten, if of cause taylor is still connected to
Not much, really. Beyond what others pointed out, there's already been a bit of foreshadowing regarding the shards, if you put the pieces together and think about it, and the chapter that got cut from the rewrite is still technically more or less canon, albeit that reveal is to be put off til later in the story (see: author notes on my snippet thread) and hints quite heavily as to what's going on.
Ot to put it simply: this is a society that idolizes being cartoonishly evil.
There is a bit of nuance, though. Demons idolize being schoolyard bullies. Genuine monsters are rare and not looked kindly upon last I remember.
"Cartoonishly evil schoolyard bullying" is definitely the way to look at it. There's a lot of slapstick and lampshading of real-world consequences, and truly monstrous killers are actually pretty rare.
So killing someone really only means they at worst end up in debt with the hospital, same for any sort of maiming.
not exactly, there are a number of characters that do canonically die
that or them "dying" is basically kicking them into being reborn as some form of living creature like a human or alien or something and if they are extremely unlucky losing their memory and power and becoming a prinny
So, the subject of what actually happens to characters who 'die' in combat is really vague in Disgaea. There are a lot of examples of where people get blown up by bombs or huge explosions and are fine… and plenty where they
aren't, too.
Think the whole Final Fantasy 7 memes of "Why did they not just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith?" and "You know a Soft would fix Red 13 right up, yeah?!"
It's the result of a disconnect between game mechanics and actual lore, and the lore
itself is kinda all over the place in this case too.
Take Disgaea 5's Marjorita, vs Disgaea 3's Raspberyl.
We see a fight with the former where the formers victim's very much do die, brutally —
and get permanently turned into zombies afterwards. Hell, she kills and Usalia's
parents just to be a bitch to her and force her to kill them.
But we
also see a fight with Raspberyl, where the victims there get the shit kicked out them but are all entirely okay afterwards — she was just KOing them, because she wanted 'volunteers' for a blood drive and they weren't cooperating, and the party was just misunderstanding or something.
Meanwhile, it's implied in a couple places that Prinnies
actually die when they explode from being thrown, and the hospital is actually sewing them new bodies. (With, ofc, no explanation of what happens to other party members when
they die.)
And yet the fight mechanics are all the same for all 3 cases.
This kind of variance is, incidentally, where Ash took her "I'm gonna think
really hard about not killing them" from in Stage 1-1, and why she doesn't trust the Prinnies enough to bring them yet — it's precisely
because the games are very inconsistent that she wasn't sure how or if she could control that.
There's a lot more to the question than that as well, including what happens to demons who do die — I could go on at length about it for some time, complete with examples and counter examples, in all honestly — but the long and short of it was that I decided it's a lot easier to play up the comedy and slapstick elements of Disgaea if I take the stance that combatants actually have some influence over how 'real' combat is, as a means of tying together why things
are so inconsistent.
