No Seiyuu No Life: Daisuke Ono

Life from Japan keeps on being the same as usual. I go to work and come home from work and go on dates. Well OK, my life is not normal, it comes straight from a shoujo manga.

Which is why today we are going to talk about a shoujo manga hero, the kind of person who makes every girl swoon with their voice, and the name of this person is Daisuke Ono.

Known for: Shizuo Heiwajima (Durarara!!), Sebastian Michaelis (Black Butler), Itsuki Koizumi (Haruhi)

My favorite role: Shizuo Heiwajima (Durarara!!)

I keep on saying for years that Durarara!! has been the anime that brought me into the wonderful world of seiyuu. And again it’s true for Daisuke Ono. To be fair I heard him in Black Butler first. And I didn’t like him that much.

I thought he had a voice way too smooth and normal. Thinking back about it, it was obviously true, I mean, we’re talking about Black Butler there, we’re talking about the character of Sebastian who is a demon so obviously he would have a seductive and smooth voice, it comes with the characters.

Still, I disliked the way he talked and I disliked how it sounded.

My dislike extended to other anime I had watched that he was in. I think it was mostly apparent in Haruhi. I love Haruhi and I still think it is a great anime in term of voice acting but for some reasons Daisuke Ono sounded boring in Haruhi. Again, thinking back about it, it has more to do with the character himself than it has to do with the seiyuu.

But I was young and foolish and I disliked Daisuke Ono for his normal sounding voice which I thought to be flat and uninteresting.

So, when I read the cast list for Durarara!! and saw he was voicing one of the main characters I really wasn’t happy.

No one would be happy to realize that one of their most disliked seiyuu would voice such an important character in an anime you’d been so eagerly anticipating. So no I definitely wasn’t happy.

And then I heard Shizuo and I changed my mind instantly. Daisuke Ono wasn’t bad as Shizuo, quite the contrary actually. I loved his yelling, I loved his cluelessness sometimes and I loved how he voiced the character and I loved it a lot. It totally changed my mind about Daisuke Ono. He changed from a seiyuu I believed could only voice smooth and normal people to a seiyuu I believed could voice anyone.

So now when I hear him as another smooth or normal character I get sad. I wish he could get more roles as a psychopath but I guess that’s not going to happen.

But one can dream right?