So I started the first Disgaea for the psp some days ago, im about 19 hours in on chapter 5 or 6, something like that. Im loving the game,but the more i read into it outside of the game, the more overwhelmed i start to feel (and the game itself already does a pretty good job of that). Etna Mode, lvling characters to 999, Item World, Dark Assembly ending, New Game +, special items, etc etc... Dood (sorry couldnt resist), I just want to play the game.

So my question for this, and future Disgaea games I play is, can i just play them as any simple jrpg, focus on the story and be done with it, and not worry about all the other shit in the game, which while deep, just kind of overwhelms me like I said. Im really enjoying the characters and universe, but anything more than the usual strategy gameplay, and creating the monsters to use (and im pretty happy with my 10 or so dudes I use so I dont even particulary care about going much deeper into that), the game starts to lose me. So Disgaea fans, should I just resume enjoying the game and stop worrying about extra layers around it (and especially stop reading about it on sites >_>), or am i doing the series a dis-service by doing that?

Also, I was going to ask what the fuck is up with leveling Clerics, but ive found out they dont get XP from healing, only from killing monsters, which is of course horrible and aparently fixed in later games thankfully.