Part 4: Violence
Chapter 3: Violence
Hello children, and welcome back. Last time I promised the story would get more interesting, and today I shall deliver, for I shall tell thee of our first battle.
Finally! This might actually get interesting.
Careful, Prince. She's going to clean your clock again. That was just a fluke. She caught me unawares.
Oh, Laharl. You don't have to pretend she didn't get you good. It's not like anyone's watching. Now that you mention it, though, I do feel oddly... observed... Yeah... This is just going to take longer if you don't shut up. When we last left our noble heroine and her companions, they were preparing to enter the Devil's Stomach and battle the nefarious forces of evil...VIDEO
The Devil's Stomach was an old sewer system outside town. When we were kids Culotte and I used to play around there. We'd never seen any zombies, though. This investigation turned into our first real mission with La Pucelle...
Alouette decided that we might need a refresher on the basics of battle. She was always big on lectures. Of course, she trusted Culotte to demonstrate, which was a big mistake. He managed to go out and get himself surrounded by bats almost immediately, and I had to bail him out. Again.
La Pucelle is in many ways the precursor to Disgaea in game mechanical terms. Characters are deployed from the Base Panel, as in Disgaea. The first of the three tutorial levels is on basic combat. After a character is deployed, they can move and attack. After attacks are locked in, we Begin Battle or End Turn. Battle screens look something like this:
Enemies and allies attack in order based on speed. When a character's action comes up, there is a chance that their special abilities will activate. Special abilities do things like raise your attack and defense, give you critical hits, and avoid attacks. When you gain experience points you also gain experience in stats (how much and in what stats is determined by your equipment). As those bars fill, you gain newer and more powerful specials. Characters also have spells and special attacks. These are cast immediately, not when you select Begin Battle or End Turn. When you initiate a combat, every enemy and friend not directly involved but adjacent to a direct attacker gets a support attack. This does not use their action, so you could have one character move in behind several friends in turn, canceling their move each time after the attack. 
La Pucelle's specialty, what separated us from others who might try to battle the forces of evil, was purification. Purification? We didn't know why at the time, but portals of dark energy were overflowing all over the world. If left unchecked, monsters poured out from the Dark World. Streams of energy would flow out of the portals. Standing on the streams would weaken us, but would also allow us to direct their flow. While the streams themselves weakened us, if we sealed the portal by purifying it enemies in the stream would be injured. But not you? No, we remained unharmed. What's more, if we closed a loop of dark energy above a certain size and purified the feeding portal...
...A miracle would occur. A miracle? A miracle. This description of yours sounds awfully familiar...
It's the same principle behind my ultimate attack. But now, the only one who'll answer my call is me...
In the Netherworld you have it easy. An Overlord can just convert Mana power into demons to do their bidding. But we were not so lucky.
We were forced to make do with whatever enemies we could purify and convert to our side. Unlike you, all our allies used to be enemies. Here was also where we first unleashed the ultimate power, that of the Goddess herself: Ragnarok...
That looks somehow familiar... I like you. So I'm going to very nicely ask you to not continue that line of discussion. What, she was just pointing out that it looks a lot like your---- ughhh! Prince, you're not learning from this. That seems a good time to stop for today, children. Next time, I will begin the tale of what we discovered deep beneath the earth.