I went on Amazon the other day, and purchased two Diabolik Lovers drama CDs for a really cheap price, as well as the first game for the PSP. Even though you can just listen to the CDs on YouTube, I wanted to support the company by actually paying for it. Except I technically haven't supported them really, because I bought everything used.
They were shipped all the way from Japan and came super quickly. For used items, they were in almost immaculate condition. In fact, one of the CDs was still sealed in the plastic wrapping, meaning that I would be the first person to properly touch the disc and the case.
The drama CDs I picked were volumes one and two of the original series, featuring Ayato and Subaru. These were released about a year or two before the first DiaLovers otome game came out. So far I've only managed to listen to one of them, and I thought that it would be a nice idea to share my thoughts on them here, just in case anybody's interested. This blog is primarily an otome blog, but drama CDs are related to them so I might as well talk about them.
Since I've only listened to one of them so far, I'm just going to dump my thoughts on Ayato's CD and write about Subaru's at a later date.
I know that Ayato isn't actually a very nice person, but I chose his CD anyway because I kind of like him. In real life he'd be somebody that I would absolutely hate, but this isn't real life, is it? There were a billion different discs to choose from, but a lot of them had really crazy prices, and it's better to start from the very beginning of the series.
I'm writing this outside of my house so I can't really post a picture of what the CD case looks like, but it's basically just your regular jewel case with a picture of Ayato on the front. The cover opens up to give you a bit of info on what kind of character he is, including his age, blood type, favourite food, all that stuff. I could understand a bit of it, but there was a lot of kanji there. Apparently he's supposed to be like sixteen years old or something, which I find super hard to believe sometimes. There's also a bit which explains what the dummy head mic they use to record this is.
If you don't know what a dummy head microphone is, it's just this massive microphone shaped like a human head. It makes it feel like surround sound. Since it's kind of hard for me to explain, I'll give you an example. If the voice actor puts his lips close to the left ear of the head, the finished audio track is going to sound through the headphones like someone's whispering in your ear. I'd never heard of this before discovering these drama CDs. It's quite an interesting bit of kit. In the Diabolik Lovers drama CDs and some of the games, they use these microphones to make it sound like they're actually sucking your blood and that they're actually whispering in your ears. I think that it works quite well, and it makes things more immersive. Listening to these without headphones doesn't really do it justice, because you can't feel the surround soundyness.
These discs are entirely in Japanese, a language which I am not quite fluent at yet. I'm only halfway through Genki 1, yet I'm buying stuff that's really hard to understand. I wouldn't have bought these if there weren't online fan translations. You just go onto the DiaLovers Wiki and there are links on there that take you to various blogs that host them. I'm quite grateful for these, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to experience these CDs or games at all.
What I do once I get my CDs is: Rip them onto iTunes, put them onto my iPod Nano, then find the translations, edit the data for the audio tracks on iTunes and paste them into the "lyrics" section so that I can see them on my iPod. Luckily each CD contains just one long audio track, so it doesn't take much time to paste the translations in.
Then, to listen to them I lie down on my bed with my eyes closed, put in my earphones and press play. I could listen to them when walking to school or something, but I prefer to be lying down with my eyes closed so that I can immerse in it more and not have to concentrate on anything else. The only problem is, if I want to read the translations, I need to be looking at the screen. What I did today with Ayato's CD was just listen to the audio without translations, then read the translation afterwards to see how much I understood.
To be honest, I didn't really understand much but some of the time I could get the gist of the conversation. The blood-sucking scenes are the bits I where I can understand the most words. Sometimes I had no idea what was going on, and the sound effects didn't really help my comprehension either. I still enjoyed it though. The audio went on for forty minutes, but it went much quicker than that. Near the end, Ayato started sucking the listener's blood, and it actually sounded like there was someone next to me whispering in my ear in real life. I felt super immersed. Then it ended and I really wanted it to keep going on because it felt like it had only been on for ten minutes.
After that, I went online and read the translation to see what was actually happening. Ayato was acting a lot more abusive and sadistic than I thought he was. At one point he even choked the listener, which I didn't hear at all. Whilst reading it all, I could point out bits that I recognised from the original Japanese audio, which made me feel like I had achieved something in my language studies. To be honest, I get a bit bored of the Genki textbook at times. A lot of the words that I've picked up have been from visual novels or these drama CDs. I know how say more romantic stuff than I do actual useful phrases.
There wasn't really much of a plot to this, but I knew that going in, and I was fine with it. Some of the Diabolik Lovers CDs I've heard on YouTube have full on sexual scenes in them, but this one didn't have too much of that. Near the end there was a bit of it, but nobody's clothes came off or nothing, it was just a bit of biting. Basically this entire drama CD is Ayato fooling around with the listener and treating her like poo, but that's what I came in for and I enjoyed it. I'm excited for Subaru's CD next because his runs on for twenty minutes longer than Ayato's, and because I think that he's slightly nicer to the heroine than the others, but that's not really saying much.
I understand that the way the player/listener/Yui gets treated in this franchise isn't normal and is just really abusive, but I still really enjoy this franchise. It looks like the PSP game's going to focus a lot more on the "romance" and the character interactions than most of the otome that I've played so far, where it's all about the plot.
I've actually known about Diabolik Lovers since before I started otome games. It was a few years ago, during my anime phase (which I will most likely never repeat) when I was watching one of those "TOP TEN WORST ANIME" videos. They listed Diabolik Lovers, and even though the YouTubers really shat on it, I thought that the character designs were pretty, so I decided to watch just one episode. It was the first episode that I watched, and I thought that it was so bad that it was good. Then I looked it up and found out that it was a video game, but stopped being interested when I found out that it was a PlayStation handheld exclusive, because I didn't have one at the time. Then I just forgot completely until I started getting into otome. I thought that the game had an English translation, but was super disappointed when I realised that it didn't.
Right now I'm only really familiar with the basic plot of things, since I'm not playing the game until I've finished Collar X Malice. I know a fair amount about the Sakamaki brothers, but the others I don't really know much about other than their names. My favourite characters so far would have to be Subaru, Ayato and Reiji, for reasons unknown. Laito I initially had no interest in, but he's starting to grow on me now, Shu is alright I suppose, and Kanato, even though I like his voice actor, I still think that he's a weirdo.
In conclusion, this drama CD was quite good. Even though my Japanese is rubbish, it was still an interesting experience that you can't really find much of in Western media. The closest thing would have to be those BBC radio dramas that you can buy sometimes, but other than that, there's nothing like it. There are quite a lot of drama CDs I can buy, but I'm more interested in the otome ones than the actual plot based ones. I'm probably going to get more of the Diabolik Lovers CDs in the future, or just listen to some on YouTube, which I'd still feel bad doing, especially after I heard that Rejet has a lot of problems with people pirating their stuff.
If you want to listen to these and you're worried that your Japanese is too bad, don't worry. I'm rubbish at it and I did quite fine. Even if you can't find translations for all of them, it's still worth listening to them, even if you only understand a fraction of what's going on. With Diabolik Lovers it might even be better to not understand all that's happening, because some of the things the characters do to the heroine are really nasty.
I know the next post that was supposed to be coming was on Collar X Malice, but since I've been listening to this I haven't been playing it as much lately. More of that stuff will be coming up soon, so stay tuned!
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