What is your favorite among Diabolik Lovers? anime, game, manga

oh the games, absolutely. the songs and drama cds are worth giving mention to as well!

I was kinda shocked to see that the anime is winning this poll before I remembered what site we were on lol. I consider myself a big fan of diabolik lovers as a whole, but I can say with absolute certainty that I think the anime is bad. the art is good, the voice acting is great, and the music is amazing, but everything else not so much. the pacing is super wonky since it’s always difficult to try and condense a multi-route game into a single 12-ep anime (which is the same problem that other attempts like Amnesia had). the anime is mostly focused on trying to squeeze in as much fanservice and character depth as possible in its short runtime, so it just kind of feels like a mess. granted, I wouldn’t have eventually gotten into the rest of series as a whole if not for the anime though, so it did do its job of promoting the title at least. it’s just not a very good representation of the entire series.

I’ve found that the manga varies wildly in quality, and that’s probably because it had a lot of different iterations and different people working on it. the best manga installation by far though is Young Blood—the art is gorgeous and the plot actually feels really substantial as it gives us more insight into the sakamakis’ childhood and how things work in the world of vampires. aside from it, the manga content we have is just kind of eh. not terrible, but not anything special.

the games and such just aren’t as widely consumed by fans outside of japan due to accessibility. you can easily find the anime translated and dubbed, but getting your hands on everything else takes a bit of digging, so a lot of it unfortunately goes unnoticed by everyone who casually watched the anime and carried on. I do own the grand edition for switch and intend to get chaos lineage at some point as well, but it sucks to know that rejet probably isn’t going to port the rest of the games on the switch. (I think I heard a rumor about them having money issues?) it’s actually really fun to use playing the game as an opportunity to improve my japanese and practice reading kanji with the occasional help of translations, but purchasing a game in another language is understandably not a desirable choice for everyone.

at the end of the day, diabolik lovers caters towards a very specific audience, so it’s going to get a lot of hate altogether from those who aren’t included in that demographic, and I get it. but it does a really really good job of that catering to those it was made for, and it has a lot of content out there for people to enjoy. if you consider yourself a fan and you haven’t yet, I highly recommend checking out the drama cds! you can find both translations and audios uploaded online, and there are a bunch to listen to! and if you’re interested in the games but don’t really feel like purchasing them yourself or can’t, I think it’s worth letting you know that the actual “gameplay” is minimal; the selling point is definitely the voice acting, so you could just as well look up the gameplay and/or the game translations and get a relatively similar experience.

if you’ve only watched the anime, please know that there’s a lot more to diabolik lovers that you’re missing! and even if you maybe didn’t enjoy it so much but liked the concept, it’s totally worth giving the other non-anime content a shot!

@EllTeeZee I'm glad to see someone mentioning the music! Dialovers surprisingly has a pretty banger discography... and a lot more songs than I originally thought. Haven't checked out many of the audio dramas yet. Do you have any that you specifically recommend? 😊

I agree that the anime is pretty meh for basically all of the reasons you stated and I really wish the games were more accessible! Not really sure why Rejet games aren't getting localized in general. It seems like there's a genuine interest for them in western otome communities so I don't think it's a case of "snowflakes", as someone else in the thread mentioned. To be honest, I feel like there are other official English localized otome games that are darker than DL too but oh well. Maybe some day!