Disgaea Volume 1   Starring (voice): Kaori Mizuhashi, Tomoe Hanba and Yuko Sasamoto MVM RRP: £15.99 MVD2270 Certificate: 12 Available 08 June 2009

Flonne is not a very successful angel in training from Celestia. Having been given the task of hunting down and killing King Krichevskoy, it's has taken her two years to track down what she thinks is his coffin, in a garbage dump. The problem is that having broken into the coffin with a rocket she doesn’t find Krichevskoy, but his son Laharl. When Laharl discovers that his father is dead he determines to travel to his castle and claim the throne...

Disgaea (2006) is a twelve part anime series based on the successful series of Playstation games. This alone should guarantee the death of any show, but for some reason I found Disgaea amusing in the way it lampoons many of the mainstays of this type of show.

Laharl is a demon lord, in waiting, of the netherworld who tries to be as evil as possible, however his age and inexperience work against him. Flonne isn’t much better; between the two of them they represent the shallow pool of celestial talent. But fear not, they are not alone in their adventures and soon they are joined by Captain Gordon the Defender of Earth, his idiot robot and his buxom sidekick who seems to be able to gyrate her assets independently. The group is completed with the arrival of Etna, a scantily clad mischievous female demon, who is backed up by an army of penguins - I kid you not!

This disc contains the first four episodes, the first two of which act as an introduction to the show's premise and its characters, with a heavy slant towards humour. The third episode sees Laharl demanding some place to sleep and he, Flonne and Etna end up spending the night at the Hall of Treasures where Flonne and Etna have their personalities switched. The last episode and Laharl is hired to kill one of his father's old servants.

The disc has a clean and crisp picture with the option of 2.0 English or Japanese, with subtitles, audio track. For extras you get textless opening and closing sequences plus the English trailer (4 min, 54 sec) which is almost like a mini episode. In the same vein you get the Japanese trailer (37 sec). There are a couple of trailers and a piece entitled Special Talk (4 min, 16 sec) which isn’t as sexual as it sounds as it turns out to be a small discussion between Kaori Mizuhashi (voice of Laharl) and the show’s creator Sohel Nikawa.

The show is fun if you disengage your brain, and at twelve episodes long it’s unlikely to outstay its welcome. One word of warning, unless you particularly like English dubs, I'd go for the superior Japanese audio track.

8

Charles Packer