Dani’s Anime Corner

Diabolik Lovers: Review

Danielle Judka

I wish there was a way to see how studios select the shows they plan to animate, because honestly, Zexcs really lost it. For a moment there I thought they redeemed themselves with “Sukitte Ii na yo”, which is a favorite series of mine, but I was sadly mistaken.

To be honest, I have no clue where to start with this show. The details of Diabolik Lovers weren’t too foreign to me, given the popularity of its visual novel and based on the small previews I’ve read. As sadistic as this series got, I still believe the visual novel was more enjoyable than this. This was even worse than “Brother’s Conflict” and “Amnesia”, and that’s saying a lot.

The animation was detailed and kind of nice. The gradient colors and gloomy atmosphere matched the show’s content at least. In some parts, I felt like they zoomed in unnecessarily and even reused some scenes, which is common to see for Zexcs shows overall.

It was a pretty short show, about 12 episodes actually, but it became almost painful to watch by the time I hit episode 3. As to why I kept going with Diabolik Lovers, the reason is beyond me. After a while I had this creeping feeling that I needed to watch this show in the deepest, darkest closet I could find, wearing ear buds, with relatively low sound levels, to really avoid the awkwardness this show gave me.

But despite my efforts to get through this show, there was no substance to it at all. It was exactly what you could take of it at face value. Some poor helpless girl walked, literally, into a vampire’s den. Everything you could imagine happened between several vampires of different and quite odd tastes. Of course the “reverse harem” favorite vampire won her over in the end, but it was barely anything romantic in the slightest. The ending plot of this show is definitely up there on “worst possible way to end a series” ever. I’ve seen shows jump the shark sometimes with reverse harem shows, oh goodness have I, but Diabolik Lovers really took some liberties with the whole “being possessed by the mother of the vampires who everyone wanted to bang/ kill at some point”. I really wish I was kidding.

Sometimes reverse harem shows are just plain stupid overall. And that’s because they are otome games where the female can let loose whatever the hell she wants to do with the characters in the game with whatever options. “Uta no Prince Sama” basically mastered this by taking some liberties on the already lighthearted series by making it as fun as possible to enjoy. “Amnesia”, while the progression was quite bad, admitted in the ending how the character went through the equivalent of “routes”, which is kind of cool to see. “Brother’s Conflict”, while being a fairly high budgeted show by Brain’s Base with a high tier voice cast, flopped because of the absolute lack of content anywhere. It was just that every brother introduced in the show had an irresistible need to bang this girl – the only one who didn’t was the squirrel. The only thing these shows had in common was that despite how potentially terrible the show could be in terms of content, they had quirks that made it funny or ridiculous. As long as it had something along those lines I didn’t really mind the show, since otome games were never meant to be taken seriously.

Now, Diabolik Lovers? It was just a painful watch…every moment of it. If there’s a season two, which I doubt there will be, I would never pick it up. There was no comedic factor to it to save it. No character to redeem all the bad ones. No prospective plot to give you hopes that was anything to look forward to. It was just a terrible show.