What is a “prinny”? Everything I know about the “Hell Chronicles Disgaea” video game series comes from seeing my brother play different entries from it. That’s the long version of “Nothing”. I personally find Japanese games that half play out like visual novels too strange to get into but I can see the pop culture appeal in their style. Take the prinny for example. This is a prinny:

You might not know what this little penguin guy is but it feels instantly familiar, doesn’t it? Prinny, boiled down, are lowly servants in Hell made from the souls of humans who were thieves, murderers or otherwise low-life scoundrels in life. They do the grunt work and menial tasks that higher devils deem beneath them. They’re also prone to explode when struck or thrown. Once. They explode once. This Prinny, charged with retrieving the Ultimate Dessert by Master Etna, is “gifted” with a scarf that makes it a little more resilient. Little.

So our Prinny that came with Prinny: Exploded and Reloaded, Just Desserts Edition is a Nanoblock set. I like the idea of Nanoblock set; in practice, they drive me crazy. There is a lot of finger pinching, especially with the two hinge pieces you are required to put together in order to build this thing. Hinge pieces were never intended to be this small. Now clearly our Prinny is brighter in color than the canon Prinny but it works very well on the little 8-bit-looking model. Putting those knives together was also more fun than I expected from Nanoblocks.

Most of the details work head-on but as you can see, he got no eyes.

There are those two hinges I mentioned that allow the wings to flap. I’m a grown man and it took everything I had to snap the two halves together. The issue was too small a hole and peg with not enough surface purchase to press down on, causing the top bit to tilt over sideways. When I finally did get them perfectly lined up with my fingers in proper position both pieces snapped together, taking a nerve-packed piece of my thumb along for the ride. I tore the tiniest piece of skin off getting myself free. Pretty fitting given that Prinny’s a little backstabber.