Like lots of folks who follow visual novel side stories, I didn’t have much to say when I first heard the premise for this one. Yet another spin-off built around redeeming a franchise’s most irredeemable villain through a tragic romance? Not exactly the freshest pitch in the genre, and my expectations going in stayed firmly modest. But as I’ve learned over plenty of years reading these things, you never really know what a story earns until you’ve actually sat with it start to finish, and after doing exactly that, it turns out this one has plenty going for it. The problem is that its own emotional momentum occasionally outpaces the pacing choices meant to support it, so it’s a good thing the rest of the craft on display here is strong enough to carry that weight anyway.
Dies irae ~Interview with Kaziklu Bey~, developed by Light with returning Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ writer Takashi Masada and artist G Yuusuke, rewinds the clock to Brooklyn, New York, shortly before the events of the main game, framing its entire runtime as an extended interview between reporter Dinah Malloy and the legendary, feared figure known as Kaziklu Bey, coaxed into recounting the one story from his past he’s never told anyone. That figure is Wilhelm Ehrenburg, a member of the Longinus Dreizehn Orden hunted in secret by the UN as a remnant of the Third Reich, and the story he unspools jumps back to 1944 and the Warsaw Uprising, where he inadvertently saves a young hospital nun named Claudia Jerusalem, an albino woman like himself, and chooses to take her along rather than kill her.
That framing device does real, quiet work throughout. Because the entire narrative is delivered as Wilhelm’s own retelling, filtered through hindsight and clearly colored by whatever he’s chosen to share or withhold, the story gets to explore real vulnerability in a character defined almost entirely by cruelty in his other appearances, without ever pretending that vulnerability erases what he’s capable of. Claudia’s warmth and light stand in stark, almost thematically blunt contrast to Wilhelm’s cold detachment, and watching that dynamic develop across a genuinely patient, slow-building romance is where this entry earns its most consistent, enthusiastic praise. The chemistry between the two leads reads as believable specifically because the story doesn’t rush toward it, letting small, lighthearted moments accumulate before asking readers to fully invest in a pairing that, on paper, shouldn’t work at all given who Wilhelm is everywhere else in the franchise.
Fans of the base game get real, additional value here too, with returning faces from the Longinus Dreizehn Orden filling out supporting roles, some with just brief cameo appearances, others, particularly Beatrice and Lisa, getting welcome additional backstory material that deepens context established in the main story without simply repeating it. It’s the kind of side content that rewards prior investment in this universe considerably more than it demands it. This story functions as a complete, satisfying experience on its own even without having played Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~ first, which is a genuinely useful bit of flexibility for a franchise entry this narratively dense.
As a kinetic novel, there are no choices anywhere across roughly eight hours, and that structural rigidity suits the material well. Since the entire story is framed as something that’s already happened, being recounted after the fact, removing player agency reinforces rather than undercuts the sense of inevitability hanging over Wilhelm’s account from the very first scene. A small, thoughtful presentation choice helps keep that recounting easy to follow too, displaying character portraits directly in the dialogue box during conversations rather than relying purely on name labels, though the sprites themselves stay fairly static regardless of a scene’s emotional temperature, a minor but real limitation that occasionally undercuts moments meant to land with more weight than a single fixed expression can carry.
Full voice acting covers the entire cast, including Wilhelm, with Claudia voiced by Noto Mamiko, and the production makes a genuinely nice touch of switching to German dialogue at points to match the story’s setting, voiced by the Japanese cast rather than skipped over entirely. It’s a small authenticity flourish that most productions this size wouldn’t have bothered with. The soundtrack leans into its Gothic, vampire-adjacent atmosphere with tracks built around church organ, fitting given how heavily this side story draws on horror and dark fairy tale imagery alongside its central romance.
Pacing throughout stays tighter and more controlled than the sprawling, occasionally exhausting scope of the original Dies irae, and the climax, while it does stretch on longer than feels strictly necessary, resolves with real thematic satisfaction, tying its central romance back into the specific, twisted man Wilhelm becomes by the time the main game’s events roll around. That’s a genuinely clever piece of retroactive character work, using this side story to explain, without excusing, exactly how someone capable of the warmth shown here ends up as one of Dies irae’s most feared antagonists.
To Light’s credit, the studio clearly understood the risk of this premise going in and built the whole framing device specifically to manage it, never once asking readers to forget what Wilhelm actually is elsewhere in the franchise even as it works hard to make his warmth here believable.
Watching Wilhelm’s guarded, closed-off demeanor slowly crack open around Claudia in small, ordinary moments carries more emotional weight than any single dramatic beat later in the story, precisely because that groundwork gets built so patiently rather than rushed toward.
Verdict
Dies irae ~Interview with Kaziklu Bey~ succeeds at a genuinely difficult task, humanizing one of its franchise’s most irredeemable characters without softening what makes him irredeemable in the first place, and doing so through a patient, believable romance that earns real investment across its runtime. Static character expressions during otherwise emotionally charged scenes and a climax that runs a bit longer than it needs to keep this from being flawless, but the strength of Wilhelm and Claudia’s central dynamic, paired with welcome additional context for returning franchise characters, makes this a genuinely worthwhile side story for fans of the wider Dies irae universe.
