In celebration of Disgaea's 10th anniversary and their announcement at making a direct sequel of the first game (and possibly because I hate myself), I decided to sit down and -finally- watch the Disgaea anime. I tried watching it when it first came out, and it blew me away at just how -bad- they managed to make it. I made it through 3 episodes before stopping and never looking back. Tried again about 2 years ago with similar results.
This time, I made it all the way through. Glad it only took 10 years.
The first few episodes are still painfully bad. The pacing is bad, the world-building is bad, the jokes fall flat, Flonne is the main character, The Defenders of Earth get introduced super-early as some kind of Team Rocket-esque sideshow. It basically manages to botch all the things that worked about the Disgaea story. They even drop meta-humor pretty much entirely until episode 9, where they sorta-kinda make it work with Flonne/Etna/Laharl acting like the two old guys from The Muppet Show to the main storyline going on with the human world characters.
Basically, what I'm saying is "It gets better, but they screwed it up from the beginning so much that it never really recovers." As a dedicated Disgaea fan, it was an interesting bit of media to watch how some animation team envisioned the way things work in the Netherworld and such, but without the humor and the solid writing between main trio, the anime just doesn't work. It doesn't help that the animation itself makes its characters look like their made out of melted cheese.
As a counterpoint, this time I actually watched the dub of the anime, and the localization really helped a lot. In general, Disgaea localization >>>>> Disgaea original, but it's especially true of the anime. They retain the full voice cast from the localized games which is a treat that I wasn't really expecting, but it was a pleasant surprise. The music, too, is ripped directly from the games and Tenpei Sato even composed the new original opening song, so that was definitely a high point for the series. I think I listened to the opening and ending every episode. Episode previews are still narrated by Etna, too, though they aren't nearly as off-color and weird as their in-game counterparts.
The serious parts of the story (the last four episodes, basically) suffer from being a lot more overt than the game. Both the anime and game hit the same notes, but they are far too blatant with the identity of Laharl's parents and the somber scenes drag on too long for the emotional impact to hit the mark. I did kind of like the very very end though, which covered the game's actual ending sequences, which I felt were a little -too- clipped in the game itself, and so the extended sequence was a welcome change, showing how Etna and Flonne were adjusting to their new roles in the Netherworld.
One last thing to note is that a lot of the ideas the anime had weren't -bad-. They could have worked the Flonne-as-a-viewpoint character thing provided they made her more goofy and more of a punching bag to counteract the over-the-top Love Freak stuff (y'know, how they do it in the game). They -could- have capitalized on Gordon and Jennifer being around earlier in the story, provided they got proper screen-time and an introduction that didn't break the flow of the rest of the narrative. And honestly, the jokes in the anime itself weren't bad on paper, but there's a lot of instances where the timing of the animation or the music are completely off from where they should be relative to how the joke is told. It's hard for Etna to work as a deadpan snarker when the animators don't know how to use a proper jump cut. It's all in the presentation, and the Disgaea anime team missed the basics there.
