Netherworld War Chronicles: Disgaea (First Impressions)

When I told my friends that a Disgaea anime was in the works a while back, they (okay, I only told one friend, so he) said that it's going to suck. Well, I just saw the first episode. It does suck in some aspects. However, cute loli Flonne being cute and loli, and hot loli Etna being all, um, hot and loli with a bunch of penguins as well as the intrisic silliness of Disgaea makes this show watchable, and fun. Right now, I think of it as a "guilty pleasure"…

Let's start with the opening: it's mediocre. The song is okay, but the animation is rather bad. In fact, it wasn't really animated at all. It felt like the Soul Society arc Bleach opening: pretty awesome with static characters moving around (in this case, Flonne and Etna) with some minor asskicking footage. The first thing I noticed though was that the CG and the bold, solid hand-drawn art of the game/show don't go together very well. The action also seemed kind of lackluster. In fact, they seemed dull compared to even the lowest-budget Bleach fights animated by Korean sweatshops. Of course, I could just be spoiled by action series like Samurai 7, so I watched on.

Nope. The fights suck. This is actually really appearant in the first fight scene: destroyed scenery do not get… destroyed. When someone was punched through three pillars, they still stood undamaged. It was as if they animated it without changing the background: they just added dust clouds when the character passed through the pillar. On a related note, the animation really, really sucks when it comes to portraying depth.

Now, we could say that they're being faithful to the game—in a stereotypical Japanese console SRPG characters do just get slapped over static backgrounds, and they move in very limited, two-dimenional ways as if they were cardboard cutouts. But that's an established artistic choice. It's clear that in the anime they tried to make this a real, fluidly moving three-dimensional world and just failed. These characters don't really lend themselves to a work like this anyway. Which brings me to the next point:

The characters and dialogue are awesome. One of the best things about Disgaea (I actually have not played it yet, but I did play La Pucelle Tactics and am playing through Phantom Brave now) is its character design. The bold, flat look works marvelously in the game, since most of the drama unfold via text and splashes and snapshots of the characters performing exaggerated gestures. It doesn't work very well when they have to move a lot, but it isn't too bad. The best parts of the show were points where the characters were simply conversing with each other without moving too much—going into a 5-frame cycle of a stereotypical anime "emote" doesn't count as moving—or when they are just standing there posing for battle. In other words, when the game translates well to the show: it works.

It seems that they switched the plot around a bit, which may keep the fans of the game in suspence or just make them hate the show. Gordon shows up in the first episode, and it was almost surreal. Sadly, the random humor wasn't too funny—this may have to do with the fact that I saw this right after watching episode 57 of Yakitate! Japan, and was already jaded by random hilarity—though there were a few good moments. Flonne shows up in episode 1, before Etna, actually. Flonne makes me happy, because she is just so adorably cute, especially when she wields an anti-aircraft missile launcher. The two (and by the next episode, three) main characters can pretty much carry the show.

The ending pretty much blowed. The song was below-average, and the animation was… um… Flash-made motion tweening. While the opening wasn't too animated, it did have an overwhelming number of awesome drawings of the main characters. But the ending was just boring.

Overall? It's fun, and it's cute, and it's got two of the best loli-girls in anime/gaming history. I will definitely keep watching it, though it'll be at a lower priority than some shows that I need to finish first. Maybe it'll tank in an episode or two, but as of now it's not too bad, once I ignore the bad animation and just focus on the characters themselves. Good thing it has the characters and the wacky plot to carry it though.

As far as game-based anime goes, though, Disgaea is one of the best I've seen. It's infinitely better than the Ragnarok Online anime, at the very least.

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