My experience with Vampire Hunter D

Introduction – I first found this series when I picked up the anime OVA from Virgin before all of them disappeared and became HMVs. I think they were called Virgin Media Stores, had all the same purchasable media that HMV does now. I found the OVA to be pretty decent, but my expectations were exactly as I found them, not surprising considering it’s literally called Vampire Hunter D, so I figured it would be about some dude hunting vampires called D before even reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case. Its been a good number of years since I’ve seen the OVA, should really give it another look at considering I remember pretty much nothing from it besides that fact that the animation was really nice, and the character models were very aesthetically pleasing. It wasn’t until later that I learned that the artist for Vampire Hunter D is the same as it is for Final Fantasy, Yoshitaka Amano. I hear the dude is doing his own anime at the moment for Netflix, will definitely give that a watch.

Then I watched the Bloodlust movie and was like woah…I didn’t watch that until some years after and picked it up for cheap from CEX but seriously woah…the animation from that movie was god-like for the time it came out in like 2000 or something. Another movie I need to give a rewatch, because like the OVA, the animation is all I remember about it.

Next on the chopping block was the video game, yes there is a Vampire Hunter D video game, for PlayStation 1 no doubt. I played a little bit of it for the channel and found it to be a bit too clunky for my liking, it plays like Resident Evil with tank controls and the whole shebang. Difference is you don’t have guns like RE does, instead you have a sword among other things at your disposal and don’t think the world of Vampire Hunter D doesn’t have guns, it does, it’s just that D don’t use them. D don’t need no sticking guns when he has cold…hard…steel. I’ll put the video below so you can gauge
for yourself.

My YouTube video on the PS1 game - Vampire Hunter D for PS1

Now we get onto the main subject, the books. I find the books to be a bit on the expensive side for me considering they’re from Japan. The first book is like 200 odd pages and they want £12 for it. Maybe it’s just me but I pick up all my books for as cheap as possible, main reason I frequent charity shops here in the UK, you can pick a book up for as little as 10 pence in some of them. So to my surprise as I was having a gander on Humble Bundle of all places, I found they were doing a e-book bundle for Vampire Hunter D. Managed to pick up 28 or 29 volumes for like £20. What a steal. So earlier this year I started the first book and here’s how that went.

Vampire Hunter D – The first book is by far the worst written of the 3 that I’ve currently read and I know that’s not a great start to my experience with it but I thought it should be front and centre. You will possibly find issue with how the book is written but considering it could be the translation not necessarily its author – Hideyuki Kikuchi – it’s hard to know who’s to blame. Now why do I say what I say, well it’s because at times it feels the author is waffling on about describing something to such a descriptive degree that I find the describing of said object or scenery so descriptive that it leaves nothing to the imagination (see what I did there, I waffled on), but this actually dies down with books 2 and 3. Book 1 is more of an introduction to Ds character and the world of the Frontier, going with a more by the books story of a vampire, or noble as they are referred to here, kidnapping a human girl and the valiant D saving her while battling monsters and human adversaries. How humans behave in this world reminds me of the dynamic of good and evil that’s on display in Fist of the North Star, you have the poor village people and the bad mercenary type characters that live in the wilds of the Frontier. What I’m trying to say is the world is interesting but at the same time how it’s described can be a little too inflated for my liking. I haven’t actually got much else to say about the book as it’s been almost a year since I’ve read it and my biggest takeaway from it was the way it was written and that the story was a bit too by the books, no wonder a few online have mixed feelings about it if they’ve only read the first book.

Raiser of Gales – Book 2 is by far much better than the first but not by a large margin but still by a hefty amount, book 2 from what I remember is about a bunch of children going missing from a village for a good number of years then suddenly a decade later miraculously returning to the village as adults. D is there because I don’t really remember but I think it was because he was hired to find the one child who didn’t return to the village or something. Also there is this big hill with ruins on top of it that is hard to reach due to some mystical energy that surrounds the hill…or something…I know I’m not describing the story all too well but I’m going off of memory here and it was like 6 months ago that I read the book, my memory is a brittle thing. All you need to know is that the second book is quite the improvement of the first and it only gets better with the third book.

Demon Deathchase – Book 3 I have just finished, so I should be able to give an accurate account of the events of the book, at least I hope so. Forbidden love has sprouted between a noble and a human and they are trying to run away to a safe place, all the while they are being hunted by the man called D, forgot to mention the dudes a dhampir which is a cross between a human and a vampire/noble, as well as a family of hunters known as the Marcus family. This time D has to contend with not only the vampire he’s hunting but also other hunters trying to get in on the gig. All of the Marcus family are interesting characters and the whole forbidden love thing is an interesting angle, as you think to yourself during the novel will D strike this noble down like the rest even if their love is real and not have a change of heart from learning their intentions. It’s a good read and by far the most well written and interesting of the three novels I’ve read so far. I was going to stop here and drop the D series but seeing as I have 28-29 of the books digitally and I quite enjoyed this third book I think I will continue reading Vampire Hunter D, at least for now…