I lost to Mid-Boss! Third encounter, and it was my own fault entirely. I was relying far too heavily on Laharl and Plenair, and easy mistake. This was still ~1/4 into the base story, long before any of the true item-world or reincarnation madness. Laharl and Plenair almost level 20, with several other characters more like level 10. In some games that level disparity would mean I only had two characters, but one can accomplish a LOT with 8 characters of "chaff" - and at this point they can even do low but meaningful damage.
In particular they can help the "heavy hitters" attack several times a round, potentially, using the team-attack system. What a beauty of game design. I wonder if I can describe it: You have the low-level character approach the enemy and schedule them to attack, then you move a core character or two next to them, and "execute". The newbie attacks, and is likely assisted by the core character who deals their massive damage. If the assault succeeds, the newbie shares in the XP!
The kicker: You then "cancel" the core character's movement, and then maybe move them next to a *different* newbie. With good strategy and a lot of luck, Laharl can "assist" 3-5 other characters in the same turn. The odds are a lot better if they're his pupils.
It reminds me of Homestuck's Dave Strider flash-stepping. It makes a complete mockery of linear time, and that's clearly the goal. There's a good realtime flashgame out there which recreates the mechanics of spawning time-clones to fight with, but this does something similar in Turn-Based-Tactics.
anyway Mid-Boss's minions landed sleep and paralysis on both Laharl and Plenair lol. The AI tends to go after weaker characters first (making them particularly useful as strategic chaff) so Laharl actually survived, and things got really close. At the end it was just him and Mid-Boss, and it was down to one turn's worth of damage. very close.
I respectfully enjoyed a very pleasant Aria over the end credits - bit of a secret ending, as Overlord Mid-Boss surveyed his Netherworld.
Disgaea 1 PC
(Disgaea 5 used to run fine on this laptop, but now it very much doesn't. Concerning. The thing is falling apart in many ways, it isn't the games' fault. I suspect I need to clean out the air system primarily. On the plus side, the upper-right portion of the keyboard has mysteriously restored itself! 890~)