Disgaea Infinite

Disgaea Infinite is a Visual Novel for the PSP, modeled after a 2008 Japan-only game called Infinite Loop: Kojou Ga Miseta Yume.^[1]

It takes place sometime after the events of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. Overlord Laharl, while scheming to steal one of his vassal Etna's favorite snacks, becomes the victim of an assassination attempt. Etna and Flonne are initially accused of trying to kill him (given that they had actually tried to do so in the past), but are cleared of suspicion when Laharl turns his wrath on the Prinnies. Since none of them are willing to come forward and confess, Laharl threatens them with the most heinous of punishments a Prinny could ever receive—a salary cut!

One of the Prinnies stumbles upon a magical pocket watch called TickTock, who grants him a chance to go back in time and find out who tried to assassinate the Overlord. The Prinny is also granted the ability to possess the other characters so that he can see the events from their perspective, and limited mind control abilities, which he can use to make them say things they wouldn't normally say (with sometimes hilarious results). He'll have to use the powers granted to him by TickTock to save the Overlord, and most importantly...his life savings!

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Tropes used in Disgaea Infinite include:

• Better Than a Bare Bulb
• Black Comedy Rape: Mao's response to Flonne calling him a pervert and fleeing?

I see, so this is that "no means yes" situation I've read about in the comic books!

• Bland-Name Product: The name of Netherworld Shopping Channel's mail-order branch? Amazombie.
• Body Surf
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Not only does TickTock refer to the Prinny as a game mechanic, but she even offers 'tutorials'.
• Cannot Spit It Out: The main element of the Best Ending. Etna actually goes out of her way just to fix this.
• Captain Obvious: TickTock, BY A MILE!

Gordon: Evil spirits hiding within the flames...Taste my burning fist of justice! Gordon Punch!
TickTock: Gordon used his super-strong punch on the fire.

• Continuity Nod: Some of the endings will reference the cast's cameos in other games. If Laharl manages to eat the pudding, Etna will quit and go to another Netherworld to fight another Overlord. If Etna uses the strange bottle on Laharl, Flonne will drop it and it'll find itself in another far off land.
• Curse Cut Short

Gordon: What's with that attitude towards a hero?! This bi...wait, no...no, calm down, Gordon.

• Evil Laugh: Although it's nothing new to the series, one scene has Laharl and Mao trying to out-laugh each other.
  • Hilariously referred to as "the Guffaw Battle" by TickTock.
• Event Flag
• Fate Worse Than Death: The harshest of the 108 punishments Laharl threatens to dish out is the dreaded "negative salary". Since Prinnies already work for peanuts, this effectively means that they will pay him for their labor.
• Funny Afro: Jennifer briefly grows one after Thursday's power-up unit malfunctions and she gets caught in the explosion.
  • Etna gets two when Laharl blasts her with a flamethrower when he realises he's putting up posters.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Subverted. Flonne wears her Angel Trainee costume from the first game here. Turns out that this is quite a plot point in one of the endings.
• Got Me Doing It: Whenever Prinny uses his mind control powers, the character he's possessing will end their sentence with "dude" (instead of the usual Prinny Verbal Tic of "dood"). Laharl quickly gets annoyed by this when other characters do it, and tells them to "stop talking like the damn Prinnies".
• Groundhog Day Loop
• Imagine Spot: Happens very frequently.
• Lampshade Hanging: The database entry for "assassination": "We know, we know, he's not really dead. We just have to go with it."
• Multiple Endings: A total of 14.
• Mythology Gag: During one of the endings, two characters fight each other using Humongous Mecha. One of them is one of the vehicles from Makai Kingdom. The other is Raksha's body.
• Narrator: TickTock regularly narrates, apologizing for her tendency to do so. "Jennifer initiated a sex-ed course!"
• Nigh Invulnerability: Laharl.

Etna: Assassinated? The hell are you talking about? You look healthy and, uh, alive.
Laharl: Of course I am! An assassination couldn't possibly be enough to kill me!

• Not Himself: Anyone's reaction to being mind-controlled.
• The Glomp: You can mind-control Laharl into glomping Jennifer. She makes a remark about him going through puberty after he regains control over himself and freaks out.
• Overly Long Gag: "Laharl, absent-minded and confused, puts up the posters like a zombie!"
• Out-of-Character Moment: The prinny can cause some temporary, though really hilarious, ones when it mind controls the characters. The ones where Etna and Laharl are made to act all nice and like good guys take the pudding!
• Rule of Funny: Almost every time someone gets mind controlled, a very bizarre sequence is shown in addition to the altered dialogue that no one seems to comment on. For instance, in one scene, for no apparent reason Flonne and Laharl both jump into two Humongous Mechas and run into each other.
• Serious Business: Guffawing according to Laharl and Mao.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness: This game is very silly, even by Disgaea standards.
• Shipper on Deck: Jennifer for...well, almost any young demon that passes by her.
• Shout-Out: LOTS:
  • Thursday before getting his power-up unit installed: "SAVING THE PLANET... IS THE THING TO DO. THIS IS An Inconvenient Truth."
    • After the unit is installed, the unknown-to-Jennifer speech modification program makes him talk almost exactly like C3P0.
    • Also said right before was, "A TRUE TWIN DRIVE SYSTEM! ENOUGH ENERGY TO LEAD MANKIND!"
  • Check the entry for "cabinet" in the database. Seeds, medals, and junk.
  • Laharl, with sword and shield, finding a heart and some hexagonal gems in pots within a small top-view house...
  • The scene of Laharl ceasing to think after putting up too many posters, complete with a shot of him frozen in space, is a reference to one villain's Fate Worse Than Death in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
  • In one scene, Laharl and Etna fight each other as though they were in a fighting game. The HUD? Straight out of BlazBlue.
    • Some of the moves from the pre-battle animation also look like ones of a certain pair of characters from Guilty Gear (specifically, Laharl being Ky-like & Etna being Sol-like).
  • Flonne's apparently a fan of The Princess Bride.

Flonne: I don't think that word means what you think it means.

• Stalker with a Crush: Mao acts like one upon first seeing Flonne. Of course, it's For Science!.
• Stock Footage: The game uses mainly Disgaea: Hour of Darkness portraits and sprites, though the portraits are now animated.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Etna doesn't have a bottle fetish.
• Talking To Herself: Chiwa Saitou provides both Jennifer and Raspberyl's Japanese voice.
• The Talk: Jennifer offers to give this to Laharl, since he's "at such a complicated age." He refuses, but the prinny can mind-control him into accepting.
• Title Drop

Laharl: Savor the flavor of my super-ultimate, most secret skill...Corrupt World Regeneration! Disgaea!

• Trailers Always Lie: The Attract Mode trailer is a very loose recap of Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.
• Tsundere: Laharl has a very hard time congratulating Flonne or telling her that he'd miss her even though it's pretty clear that he would. There's also an entry about the term in the game's database, depicting Adell and Rozalin.
• Violation of Common Sense: At one point, you can possess a Geo Symbol. Getting stuck in this form at the end of the first loop triggers a bad ending where Etna destroys it out of frustration, trapping his soul in limbo.
• What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome?: Just before his "assassination", Laharl uses a super move to get rid of a small pile of garbage containing what he thinks is Etna's favorite Super Rare Pudding.
  • Happens very often in this game. Another example is Laharl "straightening posters" by going into SEED Mode, targeting the posters, and performing the Freedom Gundam's Hi-MAT Full Burst. And then let's not forget the over-the-top reactions of whoever eats the Super Rare Pudding...
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Captain Gordon, 37th Defender of Earth and Hero of Justice can handle demons, monsters and aliens with ease, but put him in the same room as a cockroach, and watch him go spastic.
  • Similarly, Jennifer can't stand Sea Cucumbers.
• Yank the Dog's Chain: You just had to end the game with Asagi losing yet another chance to become a main character, didn't you, Nippon Ichi?
  • Also, in one of the endings Flonne finally receives her Prism Rangers vs. Effort Ninja Gorillian DVD with Beryl even going out of her way to get the limited edition version with the soundtrack and figurine. Unfortunately, she's unaware of the fact that said DVD is actually a Blu-ray and all attempts to have it play in her DVD player are in vain. It got better with Thursday's help - the one time that his upgrade actually WORKS!

1. ↑ (translation: The Fortress that Gives Dreams)