Today's Mystery Meat is Makai Senki Disgaea. I downloaded it because Etna looks like Agito in Nanoha SlayerS and I wanted to know if the characters were at all alike. (They're not.)

This series is loosely based on a video game, and I gather it tries to tell about the same story. I don't know what kind of tone the game sets, but the anime is pretty much purely a comedy.

Here are our main characters. On the left is Laharl, son of the king of Netherworld. (It's makai, "kingdom of demons", but everyone seems to translate it as "Netherworld" and that's fine with me.)

On the right is Etna, another demon. She was a servant of the king, and now serves Laharl. She isn't totally trustworthy.

And in the middle, there's Flonne. She's an angel. She wears a powerful amulet that allows her to stay in Netherworld and operate normally.

The series begins with Flonne. She's been sent to Netherworld to find the king and kill him. She finally locates a large crypt, or something like that, and inside she accidentally falls through the floor and ends up in a garbage pit, where there is also a coffin which bears the king's sigil on the front.

Thinking that the king is sealed inside, she uses various attacks (including a 4-barrel rocket launcher that she conjures up somehow) and eventually manages to break a hole in the case.

It doesn't contain the king. Laharl is inside it. He started taking a nap about two years previously and someone sealed him inside that coffin. How it ended up in the garbage isn't explained.

Once Flonne finds out who he is, she apologizes for attacking him, because he isn't the one she's after.

They both manage to get back up to ground level. As Laharl tries to exit, two statues of ogres by the door come to life and attack him. He tries to fight, but his body doesn't move the way he's used to and his power isn't fully there. (Eventually they learn that he's been poisoned. Flonne cures him, and then he can fight the way he's supposed to, but that's a bit later.)

Things are looking bad, and then a spaceship (!) crashes through the roof of the place, and some clown named "Captain Gordon" (presumably a take on Flash) comes out, accompanied by a gorgeous babe named Jennifer and a Robbie-the-Robot clone named Thursday.

And then it starts to get silly. (Ahem.)

Flonne tries to talk to Laharl about kindness and love and caring and he says those things have no place in the life of a demon. They discover that the king has been dead since shortly after Laharl began his nap.

But the king didn't die gloriously. He wasn't assassinated. Turns out he choked to death on a meat bun.

So since Laharl wasn't around, then a whole swarm of folks have tried to proclaim themselves as the new king. Laharl sets off on a quest to defeat them all and to become king himself.

And he tries to be heartless and uncaring, but somehow a hint of goodness begins to peek through. Flonne spends a couple of turns alternating between protecting him from others and trying to kill him herself, all the while dying because she'd lost the amulet. Via circuitous routes the amulet makes its way back to her, but is nearly destroyed except for Laharl saving it. He then gives it back to her.

So she becomes his servant and traveling companion.

Etna shows up at one point and declares herself to be his servant, as she was for the king before him. But she's actually plotting to become king  (queen?) herself and has plots and plans to get him killed.

And then we spend several episodes running around fighting against various people trying to kill Laharl for a 10 million Hell (a unit of money) reward that's been placed on his head, and various people who have declared themselves king or hope to do so.

I watched through ep 5 (of 12) and was decreasingly entertained by it as it went along. The first episode is brilliant, but it started to get in a rut by ep 5. And after I stopped watching it, suddenly I had a flash and figured out the story. Maybe.

The king isn't really dead. In fact, he changed sides. He's in heaven, under an assumed name, and he's the one who sent Flonne.

Or at least, that's what I expect it to be. I think I'm going to watch the last episode to find out, but I doubt I'll watch any of the rest of it. In the end it's a two-joke pony, and I gather its main reason for being was to pimp the game.

Recommended? Mixed. It's not crap. But it's far from being the best thing out there. The biggest recommendation for the series is that Laharl has the same seiyuu as Yuuno Scrya, and I love her voice. This role gives her more opportunity to stretch.

But the story itself is a meh.

UPDATE: I was completely wrong about how it was going to end. Very strange.

I still don't quite recommend the series, though.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Mystery Meat at 05:33 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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