This may well be the dumbest review I will ever write because, to be honest, I didn’t understand a bloody thing that went on in Mai HiME Destiny: Ryuu no Miko Drama CD, Volume 1. And it basically followed the book, so there’s really no excuse for me, is there? ^_^
If you’ve read the Light Novel, Mai HiME Destiny, you know that the focus of the story is Kagura Mayo, a girl who wanders onto the campus of distant Fuuka Academy, a school for young people with extraordinary powers, wearing a pair of unbreakable dragon handcuffs and bearing an uncontrolled and uncontrollable ability. The first novel was mostly expository, re-introducing for the umpteenth time the characters that inhabit Fuuka. Shizuru is cooler and more adult (and favors black,) Natsuki is a bit more sociopathic, Haruka and Yukino are as we remember them, Nao is a troublemaker (duh,) Chie and Aoi watch everything and comment like a Greek chorus on events, Nagi is annoying, etc, etc. The only other new item is another student with a mysterious past, Shion, who Mayo claims to know but who insists she’s never met Mayo before.
In between the random bits of pointless service, a story slowly develops: the clubs are battling it out for supremacy and Nagi, for reasons of his own, is trying to pull strings. Shizuru, the Principal and the Chairman (one of whom is Fumi and one Reito, but I can’t remember which is which) all seem to know that something else is afoot. Mayo’s mysterious powers, which she can never remember using, and her handcuffs, are never explained, although the author quite exhaustively speculates on how she gets dressed and goes to the bathroom and other important stuff, with those handcuffs on.
The Drama CD covers much of the same material as the LN, without most of the plot. That has been sacrificed, because it was obviously too complex for the audience, in favor of the panty battle between Mayo and Nao and the kissing scene between Shion and Mayo. There’s a lot of screaming too, and some sound effects that lead me to believe that there is fighting.
What makes this DCD so hard to follow (aside from the sneezing and coughing on my part) was that every other track is a *commercial* for something else. These inserted tracks are so jarring – and so full of screaming – that it made it almost completely impossible for me to figure out what anyone was saying. Threw me off every time. The other thing that made it hard to figure out what was going on was that there’s was an awful lot of silly voices being used. Natsuki was practically barking her words, and Chie – what on earth was going on with that voice? I have no idea what she said at all.
The Light Novel stopped just after all the players were introduced (or, I should say, all the players from the original Mai HiME anyway) and I kind of wondered where the story was going, if anywhere. Looks like the story continues in the Drama CDs. The end of this DCD covers a bit of Mayo and Shion’s back story – in a frameless memory kind of way. Looks like, if we want to know what’s going on in this universe’s Fuuka A., we’ll need to tune in once again.
Ratings:
Story – 6
Characters – 6
Yuri – 2 (1 point for Shizuru pursuing an especially passive-agressively closeted Natsuki, and 1 point for the faux Yuri Shion x Mayo thing)
Service – 4
Overall – 6
It’s nothing as traumatizing as the one Mai Otome DCD that I listened to, or as blatantly disgusting as any of the manga series. But other than a lot of screaming, I’m still not sure what actually *happened*.
