Yotogi HoLiC vol4 Arata – Impressions

Company: Rejet

Release Date: 27th July 2016

Voice Actor: Tachibana Shinnosuke( 立花 慎之介 )

Official Site

This is the 4th instalment in rejet’s Yotogi HoLiC drama CD series, featuring the princely eldest brother Arata. Will this CD continue the improvements that Izayoi’s made?

Track Listing

1. 夢の中でも
2. 優しい温もり
3. 君のための子守唄
4. 秘密の時間
5. ココアのおまじない
6. 新月に誓う
7. キャストフリートーク

The CD’s total runtime is 48 minutes, with a 7 minute cast free talk at the end. Welp, surprisingly Arata’s CD is not the shortest in the series, poor Yumihari gets that honour haha.

Continuing the trend of the previous CDs, it starts with Arata and the protagonist lazing around in bed where they end up talking about the dreams they had the previous night. Then they go back to the day when the protagonist moves into the Yotogi-kei to help with their sleeping issues. They are assigned to Arata and thus begins their peaceful days together.

Being the oldest of the brothers, Arata tries his best to be kind to his siblings and gets on well with them. He’s generally a gentle soul (his official description of “princely” fits well) and enjoys drinking hot cocoa. He’s very talented at playing the piano and won a bunch of competitions when he was younger. He realises that he’s falling in love with the protagonist when he decides to be “selfish for a change” and tries to keep them away from his brothers and all to himself.

I don’t really mind princely characters either way but omg Arata was so BORING. His character is so under-developed its ridiculous – I was struggling to write more than a few sentences about him! Even the fact that they removed most of the whole “Yotogi-kei” set up from this CD did absolutely nothing to help, I don’t even know where to start with this. The absolutely unforgivable thing is that this entire CD is so dull and boring that it would literally put you to sleep (which is maybe the point????). This CD should have taken me 1 hour to listen to but I kept getting bored and distracted so it took me almost 3 hours. That’s just plain ridiculous! Normally when listening to a drama CD, I casually recline in my chair and just enjoy the story/fluff or maybe play a game of solitaire/2048 if I feel like it but I got so distracted that I managed to order 3 CDs, bookmark a bunch of auctions and consider whether or not I *really* need to buy a Tsukiusa – like, do I buy Koi’s [my birth month] or go for a character I like more? You see! When you’re listening to a *good* drama CD, you shouldn’t have the time to think and do these things, you should be focused on the CD but there was literally nothing going on. 90% of the dialogue felt like useless filler and the only remotely *doki* moment was in the first track (which was actually decent). I am so disappointed right now it’s ridiculous. The literal best thing about this CD is that they play chopin’s nocturne op.9 no.2 which is a beautiful piece of music.

Tachibana Shinnosuke’s voice acting was good – he has a lovely soft quality to his voice that I like so rejet should have used his lovely and calming voice to help us all sleep! But instead we get absolutely no “whispering sweet nothings” kind of scenes in the main part of the CD. The cast commentary was okay but I had pretty much lost the will to live by that point.

Final Thoughts

My Score: 1/10

This CD is actually a disgrace to rejet. It’s completely boring and not worth the money, even if you see it for 100yen and are a big Tachibana Shinnosuke fan! As much as I disliked the almost “dishonesty” of some of the “whispering” scenes in bed featured in other releases in this series, not including any really removes the main selling point of this CD and there are literally no redeeming fluffy scenes. It’s pure generic filler all the way. And the fact that Arata’s character is non-existent really means this CD is a massive waste of time.

I think what makes it worse is that rejet can make such wonderful fluff! I personally consider the Lip on My Prince & Happy+Sugar series’ to be the absolute pinnacle of the “fluffy, all-ages” drama CD genre which makes this poor rip-off even more painful to bear.

I literally would not even recommend this to my worst enemy.

I don’t even want to look at the other 2 in the series now, even though I have my favourite seiyuu in the next one (Hanae Natsuki) *sob*

Oh well, I am done thinking about Arata now~

Thanks for reading as always! Sorry about the rant though~

P.S. I’m probably going to go and buy that Tsukiusa now, I think I deserve it 😛