[Drama CD] Corpse†Heart 3rd Night Qoo – Summary & Impressions

****SPOILERS AHEAD****
If you don’t want spoiled then either click the following link or manually scroll down to the “Final Thoughts”  section.

Label: Rejet
Release Date: 27th September 2017
Cast: Toyonaga Toshiyuki (豊永 利行)
Official Site

This is the third volume in rejet’s Corpse Heart series, this time featuring the genius zombie Qoo.

Track Listing

1. チェンジリング
2. Яeplicant
3. 優等生のカレ
4. 研究教室の秘密
5. 大切な友達
6. キャストフリートーク

The first two tracks in this CD are songs and the CD’s total runtime is 40 minutes (although the cast free talk is over 11 minutes long by itself 😮 )

The CD opens with the heroine and Qoo studying together and he reminds her that he promised to help her catch up with her studies since she transferred into the school halfway through the academic year. He admits that he enjoys spending time with her and wishes for their study sessions to continue but worries that he might just be bothering her and apologises. They continue with their lesson and start studying about transmogrification potions so, using magic, Qoo summons the tome that they need to help them. While flipping through the pages of the book, the heroine suddenly stops at a page, prompting Qoo to ask if she’s seen something interesting. It turns out that she’s landed on the page about the “undead” and he explains that they’re creatures that can pass as living humans even though they’re dead. He continues by saying that ghouls and zombies are pretty well-known, having been in many famous movies and TV shows. She asks him for his opinions and he states that he’s not sure they exist but they’d be pretty scary if they’re real but promises to protect her even if any of them came to attack her so tells her not to worry. After getting side-tracked, Qoo tries to get back to studying and says that they can go for their usual crepes at the park if they get finished on time.

Later that evening and the pair finally end up at the crepe shop and are having trouble deciding whether to have strawberry or cheesecake toppings so they decide to order both and share them. Being a gentleman, Qoo tells the heroine to go ahead and find a bench to sit on while he orders their crepes. He eventually arrives with the goods and asks which one she’d like to eat first – she ends up picking the strawberry one. She jokes that he, as a tutor, probably isn’t so kind to all of his students and Qoo admits that she’s the only one of his students that he’d like to get closer too, telling her that she’s special to him. He then laughs and calls her cute when she starts to blush. After this exchange, they get back to eating their crepes and Qoo says that his is pretty delicious before attempting to feed the heroine some so she can try it. This doesn’t go that well and the heroine is super nervous but Qoo reassures her that it’s okay and that he really wants to feed it to her so she lets him. She ends up agreeing that the crepe was indeed very tasty. Qoo then brings up the fact that the Easter Festival starts the following day and asks if he and the heroine could go to school together; she agrees and he tells her that he’ll come and pick her up from her house. He’s pretty pleased and says that he hopes the two of them will have fun at the festival.

The following day and Qoo ended up being late in picking the heroine up so they arrive at school after classes had started, leading Qoo to ponder if they missed the fireworks. He realises that the heroine knows little of the festival and explains that there’s fireworks that go off to tell everyone when it starts. He continues by saying that it’s not some silly school thing but a really serious once-a-year event where everyone gets really fired-up searching for the “Jewel Heart” so they can become human again. He quickly realises his mistake and tries to make light of it, joking that he’s making it sound as though everyone is dead already before just admitting the truth to her – that literally everyone in the school apart from her is actually a member of the undead. Confirming that they’re the very same undead that she read about in the library yesterday. The heroine tries to run away but he stops her, trying to explain that this is a misunderstanding and that even though he’s undead; he doesn’t want to scare her. Suddenly, they hear the sound of fireworks – signifying the start of the Easter Festival…

Qoo is kind of startled but tells the heroine that everyone will be after her now and asks her to run away with him;  he explains that she’s the owner of the Jewel Heart and that if she’s found by another student then they’ll definitely kill her. He tells her that he knows of a place that no one else is able to get into. The heroine is obviously dubious but Qoo reassures her that even though he’s undead, he made a promise to protect her and doesn’t intend to break it, begging her to go with him. She agrees and the pair head off to a room that is apparently off-limits to students.

The room they end up in has a bubbling cauldron filled with a strange potion and lots of little potion bottles lining the walls. Qoo remarks that it’s almost like a laboratory and pretty creepy. He goes onto explain that it’s a place for researching black magic, specifically that which has been “forbidden” and admits that this was the room in which  he was “born”. He realises that by being created by forbidden magic he’s different from the other students, who were human to begin with. He explains that he was created by the chairman of the school’s board by combining the body of a dead human who was bludgeoned to death with the brain of someone murdered at gunpoint using black magic. He was created to be the perfect example of a model student and has gained a huge amount of knowledge over the hundreds of years that he’s been there but, almost in return, lost any memories of being a human as soon as the original spell was cast on him.

He then tells her that her brother Aron probably knows about him since, even though Qoo’s existence is meant to be a secret, there’s always bad rumours about Aron circulating so he probably knows a lot more than he lets on so reminds her to take care around him. Qoo goes on to ask if the heroine actually has memories of her childhood before laughing and apologising for asking such a weird question, saying that he’s just jealous that she a brother. He then says that since he’s a being born from black magic he doesn’t have any siblings and remarks that it must be nice for Aron to have such a cute little sister. The heroine goes silent on him so he asks if she’s okay, before realising that she pities him.

Qoo approaches the heroine before grabbing her and saying that if she pities him that much then she should just give her heart to him. He admits that he did promise to protect her but then says that was a complete lie and he’s under direct orders from the chairman to kill her and bring the Jewel Heart to him. He explains that these orders were the sole reason that he offered to help her with her studies and hoped to get close enough to her to steal her Jewel Heart easily during the festival. The heroine is obviously pretty upset about this and tells him no but he reiterates that if she really, truly pitied him then she should just die. She pushes him off and manages to escape. Qoo then worries about what will happen to him, an easily-replicated “tool”, if he doesn’t manage to complete his mission to get the Jewel Heart before running off to find her.

Qoo quickly locates the heroine and tells her not to bother running away again, laughing about the fact that she’s hiding in the girl’s toilets because she thought he wouldn’t want to check them. He explains that as she’s the only one with a beating heart in the school he can quite easily hear her heartbeat so there’s no point in running. He then approaches her and is preparing to kill her, warning her that if she struggles too much then she’ll die painfully – he’s got a knife, knows a lot of powerful magic and could probably find a whole bunch of more chilling ways to murder her. He tells her to stop being annoying and that he needs to kill her so that he can get the Jewel Heart; explaining that he doesn’t particularly want to be a human but he has orders that he must follow otherwise he would be kicked out of the school and given that he was a being created solely for the sake of the school he would no longer have a reason to exist. It is for this reason that he must fulfil his orders since he is only a “tool” that can be thrown away when it has surpassed its usefulness.

She tells him that surely it would be okay to live the life that he wants but Qoo snaps at her, telling her to stop speaking nonsense and tells her that he’s always lived to follow the chairman’s orders, managing to fashion himself into the most useful of tools. He prides himself on being able to answer any question on a test straight away and manages to be pretend friends with many of the other students – making himself into a perfect high school student and fulfilling the role to which he was assigned. He explains that even though his days can be boring, he’s managed to find a place where he belongs so is fine following orders and doesn’t even know how he would even begin to “live freely” as the heroine suggested earlier. He refuses to even consider living a life with no one to accept him and with no place to call home.

She tells him that she would be there for him; this leads him to say that even though he’s an easily-replaced tool used by the chairman, she must not throw him away and would instead give him somewhere to call home, asking her to say that even at the very end she won’t abandon him. She agrees to his demands but he’s dubious and tells her that she’s just saying what her enemy wants to hear in the hope that he doesn’t kill her. He goes on to say that he was just helping her study for the sake of the Easter Festival so doesn’t understand why she would feel so strongly. She responds that she sees him as a dear friend and so he finally realises that’s the reason why she won’t abandon him. He calls her strange before giving up on killing her, citing the reason that if he were to kill her then there’d be no one left to accept him. He reminds her that she promised to accept him and stay with him until the very end, even if that’s just a day or even a year he tells her that he won’t accept her running away no matter what he does to her and will kill her if she does. She agrees and they seal their promise with a kiss.

In the epilogue, Qoo comes to visit the heroine in the room that he’s chained her up in and asks her if she still thinks of him as a dear friend today. She replies that she does and he remarks that he’s super glad he didn’t kill her back then and couldn’t have imagined just how much fun they’d have together every day. He promises to be with her forever and says that he wouldn’t be able to cope without her so she had better not “break” before kissing her, leaving and locking the door behind him. The End…

 

Omg Qoo, I’m so damn angry with you right now! You were doing so well until the little epilogue! I was so happy that they weren’t shoving the romance in super, duper early like in Rizzi & Valerie’s CDs and when he was going on about how he was just a “tool” I could totally understand his reasons for hunting down the heroine (especially when you consider how, almost, reluctant he was when he was pursuing her). However, his actions at the end with him chaining her up and seeing just how far he can push his little “toy” before she breaks seemed really out of  character??? I was hoping for some cute ending where they run away together or something but I should’ve known better 😛

As with the other releases in this series, the story is just too damn short (~23 minutes) to actually develop much between the two leads but I strangely feel as though there was a tad more content in this CD compared with the first two? You really get the feeling that the series is attempting to build up to something interesting in Aron’s volume though – and it’ll probably be really disappointingly short so I’m trying (and failing tbh) not to get my hopes up. I’m going to guess something stupid like Aron and the school’s chairman are in cahoots and implanted the Jewel Heart into the heroine when she was just a child in order to save Aron in the future or something along those lines, haha.

Anyways, back to this CD and the voice acting by Toyonaga Toshiyuki was really, really great. Then again I’m super biased lol. The songs in this CD are also top-notch and are personally my favourites in the series so far. They’re both definitely worth a listen. I don’t say this often but the cast commentary in this CD is absolutely amazing – is Toyonaga like drunk when he does these? It’s also pretty rare to hear a voice actor diss the characters they voice but he was going on about how he seems to end up voicing  assholes like Qoo and Momochi (from Dear Vocalist) when working with rejet (although Shy from Lagrange Point is really nice so not all the characters he voices for them are mean). TLDR; the cast commentary is so funny it had me in tears so it’s definitely worth a listen! He also mentions there that Qoo’s name is spelled Q-O-O as opposed to Ku(u), which is what I’ve been calling him for ages, whoops~ (I wonder if he’s named after the soft drink?)

Final Thoughts

My Score: 5/10

While this series continues to mildly disappoint, especially with Qoo’s ending, at least the first 90% of this CD was reasonably good + the songs are super. There was definitely better character development for Qoo in this CD compared with the others in the series and they *did* manage to pack in a fair amount of content into just over 20 minutes. I don’t know if I’d recommend this CD though since the series really isn’t one of rejet’s best…

I just keep getting the feeling that this series would work a lot better as a game but then I have a great fear that rejet probably would end up making something like this into a game as opposed to one of their really good drama CD series. Would I buy a game version of this? Probably but that’s only because I’m pretty much rejet trash at this point lol.

This summary took far longer than Valerie’s to write for some reason so I hope it reads okay. I’m always nervous/lack confidence when it comes to translating or anything like that so if you notice any mistakes then please let me know~ ^_^

Oh well, with this we’re officially half way through the Corpse Heart series! Kirumi’s volume should hopefully arrive by the end of next week so I’ll begin working on that in a couple of weeks. I’ve not really got enough time to play any Otome Games in the next couple of weeks so might do some more drama CD posts. I was thinking of maybe doing summaries for the Marginal#4 Idol of Starlight Kiss CDs (including the animate bonus CDs) so maybe that’ll be up next week~

Thanks for reading 😀

Advertisement