“A Prinny is a small, usually blue, pouch-wearing penguin-like creature with disproportionately small bat wings and two peg legs where its feet would normally be. When thrown, it explodes on impact.”

Wikipedia, whatever its other shortcomings, can always be relied upon for obsessively detailed entries on bit-part characters from obscure Japanese videogames. The above summary, concise and efficient, gives the measure of the Prinny, a bird that has in recent years become something of a mascot for its creator, Nippon Ichi.

It’s debatable whether the developer planned for these creatures to become its poster-penguin when they debuted in the brilliant strategy-RPG Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. But since then, Prinnies have appeared in almost all of the studio’s games, providing comic relief from the serious business of statistical battling and bringing their own sentence-closing mannerism into the nerd lexicon, “Dood!”

Still, surely not even their creators imagined the Prinny would one day venture outside the confines of the strategy RPG to star in, of all things, its very own side-scrolling platform game. After all, Prinnies have peg legs where their feet should be and, more troubling, explode when they fall over. These are hardly the kind of idiosyncrasies that make for a suitable platform game hero, where jumping and not-combusting are usually baseline requirements for consideration. Then again, a pudgy plumber and a blue hedgehog made it. Perhaps a Prinny really could be the hero…

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.