MAKAIPUNK - Manga Senki Disgaea INTRO

insert art (courtesy of minitokyo)

... the joke is the japanese title for the Disgaea series (Makai Senki Disgaea).

that aside, welcome to the first installment of MAKAIPUNK, a segment where i talk about stuff and media related to the Disgaea games and other games developed and published by Nippon Ichi Software (NIS). why does this segment have the same name as the url for my art tumblr? because i think MAKAIPUNK is a cool word. adding "punk" to any word just increases its coolness.

i beared mention of both NIS and Disgaea back when i did my readthrough of Tsubame the Ninja, but i didn't go too heavy on them since that wasn't the main focus of the review. plus outside of the publishing label's name ("Prinny Books"), it didn't really have much to do about Disgaea, which is why i didn't feature it under the MAKAIPUNK category. taking that into consideration, i guess now is better than any other time to explain what the heck Disgaea is.


while it's not NIS's first strategy game (that honor would go to La Pucelle Tactics), Disgaea is by far their most popular series. fans have said that the series is similar to that of Final Fantasy Tactics, though honestly i think it's because of the graphic style more than the gameplay. while there are things like Geo Panels and the Dark Assembly along other things later installments added, the gameplay thing people most remember Disgaea by is the fact that character levels have a cap of 9999. it got an official world record for this.

screencap from IGN. back from when IGN was okay.

though, what made Disgaea stand out from amongst the crowd is its cast, setting, and oddball humor. each of the games takes place in the Netherworld, a evil world of demons, monsters, and exploding penguins. the protagonists of the games range from the likes of a young demon prince set to rule the netherworld, to a sardine-eating vampire who wants to overthrow the presidency. though i think my favorite out of the main blokes is the geeky mad scientist kid who harasses a weenie hero on a regular basis.

none of this i am making up.

saying which of the games has the best story is all up to personal opinion. despite the demonic cast and goofy antics, there's many moments in each of the games' stories that can be emotional and even downright heartwrenching. not going to spoil any details, but for those of you who want to see the stories for yourself, you can look up the cutscenes on Youtube.

so far there's five games: Disgaea 1, Disgaea 2, Disgaea 3, Disgaea 4, and Disgaea D2. also Disgaea 5, which will be released in 2015. there's also various spinoffs such as Makai Kingdom and the PSP Prinny games, and quite a number of NIS's other titles have Disgaea folks making cameo appearances.

while Disgaea still seems to be a rather underground series, it garnered enough popularity in Japan to spawn off various adaptations and merchandise. manga, figurines, drama CDs, light novels, and even an anime. apparently it also got enough recognition in the west for some of them to be localized and released here.

official english cover (also hi my wyvern buddy)

the manga for the first Disgaea game is the very first merch of the game i ever owned, hailing from 2006/07. due to my lack of a PS2, i wasn't able to play any of the games, and nobody on Youtube had the cutscenes uploaded, so it was pretty much my only source of knowledge about the game's cast and story for a few years.

the Disgaea manga was drawn and written by Arashi Shindo. while i'm not sure if she's authored any notable stuff (Baka-updates says she's drawn and written for some of the Arcana series), Disgaea is her first manga. it was first serialized in 2003 in Comic Zero-Sum, a manga magazine in Japan geared towards female readers. the Disgaea manga would later get a book release. the manga consists of nine chapters and is very noticeably different from the game in terms of story (the game featured 13 chapters, one of which was a two-parter), but we'll get to that at a later point.

while scanlations of the manga do exist on various manga reader websites, the Disgaea manga did see an official release in mid-2006. the now-defunct Broccoli Books handled the translation and publishing of the manga in the west, and also handled publishing the first two volumes of the Disgaea 2 manga before they ceased operations at the end of 2008.

original japanese cover (courtesy of minitokyo)

manga/anime adaptations of games are tricky territory; the Dangan Ronpa anime got mixed reviews from fans since it rushed over a lot of character development and details, the Higurashi anime (well, the first season, at least) is infamous for missing a lot of important details that were in the original soundnovels, and the Tsukihime anime... well... there's a reason people say that there is no Tsukihime anime.

reason for this is because games and visual novels can be pretty hard to adapt in manga/anime format, though it's arguably moreso difficult with anime due to budget reasons and how much episodes an adaptation is limited to. Disgaea was the worst about this for quiiiiiiiite a few reasons (especially the animation like holy SHIT), but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. suffice to say for now that the anime was pretty crap.

so yeah, it'd be a feat to squeeze in 13 game chapters in a near-200-page one-volume manga. like i said, the manga is very different from the game in story, though the cast and general premise remain the same. i would call it less of a partial/full adaptation of the story and more of an alternate retelling. it's kinda hard to distinguish the two: an alternate retelling has the same premise and main cast as the main work, but the events throughout the retold work are very different even if the general plotline is the same or not; the Legend of Zelda mangas fall under this. as for a full/partial adaptation, the plotline is pretty much the same as it was in the original work, though some details may be left out; things like the Dangan Ronpa anime and Higurashi manga/anime adaptations fall under this. it's a lot of confusing and boring dingus, but that's the best way i can explain it. words.

while i'll save the first part of the readthrough for the next article, let's cut the background stuff and get to previewing who we'll be goofing around with during our stay in the Netherworld. granted, you probably know of these blokes if you've played the first game, but there's got to be some of you guys who know nothing of Disgaea and happened upon this article by curiousity.

not much i can say as far as character introductions are concerned; they're not too far off from the game descriptions. only major thing i can kinda say is that despite being a seraphim, Lamington's wings are not drawn at any point in the manga. maybe it's because threewinger angels would be hard to draw, but for the longest time i thought seraphs didn't have wings at all until i actually got the game. then again, i was a pretty dumb kid back then, so yeah.

directly after the character introductions, we get our first glimpse of one of our main blokes: the young angel trainee Flonne. someone's rather new to the Netherworld, it seems. her profile on the manga says she's here for a secret mission, but what could that be?

well, if you've played the game, chances are you already know. if you haven't, well, we'll find that out next time on MAKAIPUNK, when we actually start reading this thing and delving deeper into the Netherworld. and maybe i'll probably ramble about things in the manga that are different from the game. October and Halloween are coming up, so maybe i'll actually get some drive to work on the rest of this review. maybe some other thingers as well.

until then, stay rad, folks. we're in for one hell of a ride. puns.

table of contents (courtesy of minitokyo)