The Disgaea series has grown from being a beloved SRPG series with incredibly funny, well-acted dialogue into an anime and manga series, an excellent PSP side-scrolling platformer with Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?, and now, an amusing, but flawed visual novel. As one of the tormented Prinnies threatened with having their wages severed by Lord Laharl, you’re given the task of finding out who would dare try to assassinate him and stop the event from occurring with a thorough investigation throughout the entire Netherworld.

To investigate this attempted-murder mystery, your Prinny will possess characters throughout the adventure using the shoulder buttons and follow their conversations until getting to a point in it where you can change their minds, and their fate with multiple events to choose from - if you quickly press the Triangle button at the right time. Some changes can be small, but others are large, and only one option is the right one to progress the story. As a result, there’s a lot of trial and error, forcing you to repeat entire sections of the game to just correct one mistake. When combined with the already-required backtracking, you’ve got a game that can become tedious very quickly.

Fortunately, Disgaea’s humorous writing and voice acting are continued here. It results in things that may sound boring, like Flonne’s never-ending quest to get the correct DVD from the Netherworld Shopping Network and Thursday the Robot’s Blu-Ray-playing upgrade into laugh riots.

However, some things, like the constant “dood”s from the Prinnies really get annoying. Unlike in the SRPG entries, where you’ve got plenty of gameplay between the “dood“s, that isn’t the case here. You wind up hearing that phrase seemingly a thousand times in rapid succession unless you either change the language settings, skip the event, or mute the dialogue. Aside from that issue though, the cast is perfect for their roles, the writing is sharp and funny, and the soundtrack culled from past entries is pleasing to the ears.

Visually, DI relies on the series’s usual anime-style character art for dialogue and ¾ overhead views ala the SRPGs for major events. Partial animation is used for the dialogue scenes, and it works well at showing what emotions the characters are feeling alongside the voice acting, or in place of it if you’ve got that muted. Perhaps most importantly, this text-heavy game is easy to read on the PSP’s small screen. While hooking up to a TV is still ideal, those without the ability to make use of that feature aren’t out of luck.

Disgaea Infinite is the funniest visual novel I’ve played - even funnier than the Ace Attorney series, and is carried by the strength of its characters, dialogue, and voice acting. However, as a game, Inifinite doesn’t have much to offer, and is greatly hurt by all the backtracking. As yet another view into the insane world of the Disgaea universe, it succeeds. However, I can only recommend it to players who either love visual novels or are such die-hard fans of the series that they must consume everything in it.