Trusting Koujaku to the end was what got me the good ending, although on retrospect, many of the choices I made were naive, passive and overly trusting. I decided to trust him over the other random weirdos I met, even though he wasn’t my favourite character. Koujaku is the childhood friend character. Personally speaking, I had no trouble roleplaying Aoba and making choices according to my own gut. On my first playthrough, I got Koujaku’s good end. Aoba came off as a very respectable hero for being open-hearted and expressive but also physically and mentally tough. During the sex scenes, he looks almost indistinguishable from a woman. The most interesting thing about DMMD is how it deliberately blurs the line between femininity and masculinity. He maintains enough masculine assertiveness to be desirable in his own right as a man, but he’s also the submissive uke. He’s easy for female players to identify with, I think. When he takes them off, you can see very clearly how slender and feminine he appears. You don’t actually notice his long hair at first glance, since they’re cleverly obscured by his jacket and headphones. He’s dressed entirely in blue, which is a masculine colour, and his jacket makes his shoulders seem broader than they actually are. I found Aoba’s character design to be really interesting in the way it toys with and reflects feminine and masculine imagery. The power dynamics between the protagonist and his love interests were fairly equal outside of intercourse, though of course it’s still clear that Aoba is meant to be a stand-in for the female player. Other than Mink’s route, the relationships depicted in DMMD felt pretty tame. The story is almost entirely plot-driven and the hardcore BL stuff happens only towards the end when you’re already invested in the characters and story. I’ve been told DMMD is a good “gateway” VN for BL newbies. But I’d never actually seriously attempted to engage in the genre, so playing DMMD was an eye-opener in that regard.
Sometimes, I’ve participated myself in yaoi shipping, mostly for a good laugh.
I always imagined myself as being highly tolerant of BL. I would recommend this to pretty much anyone older than eighteen, male or female. Playing it pushed me out of my comfort zone – in a good way, for the most part. The homoerotic romances were handled tactfully enough, but one route was basically rape porn, which kind of soured my impression overall. The character routes are a good deal less interesting than the common route, and they suffered a lot for being repetitive and rushed. The storyline, too, was interesting, though it suffered for cramming in too many ideas and not tying them together cohesively. The technical aspects – i.e., the art, the voice acting and the music – are faultless. If I were to assign an arbitrary numerical rating to the game, I would give it a 7/10.
DMMD did. While I enjoyed the story, the PLOT (if you know what I mean) left me mildly traumatised. I had played VNs targeted at female audiences before, but none of them featured adult content. Here are my spoiler-free thoughts.ĭMMD (as it shall henceforth be referred to in this post) is the first BL visual novel I have ever played. So I decided to cut the middle man and just play the game instead.
#Dramatical murders visual novel full#
Instead of contributing to society in any shape or form, I have been spending the last couple of days playing a BL visual novel called DRAMAtical Murder. I looked into my crystal ball and foresaw that the anime (which is airing this season) would be full of QUALITY like the above image implies.