Don't blame us. We devils are here to take your soul.
Devils are not allowed to fall in love with humans.
If a devil saves a human, he'll cease to exist.
If a devil saves a human, he'll cease to exist.
10 Days with My Devil is a Romance Game Visual Novel by Voltage, Inc. for iOS and Android devices. In it, the player takes the role of a young woman who, due to an unexpected mishap, misses her fated death, and discovers in the process that she has become a loose end for the demons whose job it is to collect the souls of the dead for rebirth.
Desperate for a little more time to take care of some last important business, the protagonist bargains with the five demons who were handling her case for just ten more days. Although it means breaking the laws of demonkind, they agree - on the condition that she allow one of them to monitor her closely, both to ensure that no other demons learn about the exception and to make sure she doesn't try anything foolish.
Demons aren't allowed to fall in love with humans, lest they start trying to interfere with their fates. But a lot can happen in just ten days.
A Westernized localization of the game has also been released by Voltage's American subsidiary under the title My Killer Romance.
The game contains examples of the following tropes:
- Accent Adaptation: Rein speaks Osaka-ben, which the translators for the English version initially chose to render as a nearly-incomprehensible Oirish brogue. It's eventually toned down significantly, with hints suggesting that he's doing so deliberately.
- Adaptational Villainy: Although not truly villainous, the demons are cast in more antagonistic roles in My Killer Romance than they are in 10 Days. In the prologue they actively attempt to kill the protagonist by various methods rather than trying to give her one last good day before her fated death; where the 10 Days cast are depicted as a somewhat dysfunctional but overall close-knit group of friends who come to care about the protagonist and regret the necessity of her death over the course of the time they spend with her, in My Killer Romance they seem generally less sympathetic to her and to the guy of the route when he inevitably rebels and tries to save her.
- Big Friendly Dog: Played with by Haruhito's dog Cerby (short for Cerberus). Despite his ominous name, Cerby really is friendly and entirely non-threatening, and Haruhito often uses him as a pillow. The "tricks" that Haru has taught him, on the other hand, are a bit problematic - "shake," for example, involves biting someone's hand.
- Bland-Name Product: "Prata" shoes, "Horshey's" chocolate, and "Crackle Jacks". Kakeru's "Dating A Demon" sequel adds "Mouseyland."
- Celestial Bureaucracy: Basically how heaven functions.
- Cloudcuckoolander:
- Haruhito is a very whimsical person, to the point that it's hard to understand what the hell goes on in his head.
- Rein, and angels in general, are also on the kooky side.
- Chocolate of Romance: The protagonist tries giving her guy of choice chocolate for Valentine's Day during the "Black Valentine's Day" side story. Since the demons aren't necessarily all that familiar with the holiday or its traditions, there tend to be unexpected complications - Kakeru, for example, takes a while to grasp that "putting [her] feelings into" homemade chocolate does not mean that it contains the protagonist's actual soul.
- Christmas Episode: "The Best Anti-Christmas" side story.
- Cultural Translation: My Killer Romance styles the demons as "Soul Collectors" and the angels as "Reincarnation Agents." Probably not an attempt at bowdlerization, given that the Westernized version still makes some references to heaven and does not shy away from saying "die".
- Death by Childbirth: Narrowly averted in Kakeru's route; the protagonist's sister Makoto has a history of health problems and nearly dies during her emergency Caesarian section, but pulls through thanks to Kakeru's intervention.
- Divide and Conquer: In Haruhito's sequel, a series of events nearly set off a war between the angels and the demons. When calmer heads prevail and notes are compared, all signs point to an as yet unrevealed third party deliberately fueling the conflict. In Haruhito's wedding sequel, the third party is confirmed to be a faction of angel/demon hybrids.
- Dub Name Change: In My Killer Romance. Kakeru and Meguru Kamui become Xavier and Kieran van der Belt; Satoru Kamagari is Blake Greystone; Haruhito Amano is Raphael Moreau and his dog Cerberus ("Kero-chan/Cerby") becomes "Shadow"; Shiki Kurobane becomes Leo deVille; and others.
- Dude Looks Like a Lady: Nozomu in Shiki's sequel.
- Fake Memories: One of the uses of Shiki's mind-control power is altering people's memories.
- Fish out of Water: The demons are all somewhat ignorant of the ways of the Human Realm. This baffles the protagonist since they're meant to live and work among humans without being noticed. Team leader Kakeru is a particularly bad case, since outside of a few areas of interest, he's supremely indifferent to mortal affairs.
- Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: During Satoru's route, the protagonist's parents describe her and her sister this way, with Makoto as the responsible sibling and the protagonist as the foolish one.
- Foreshadowing: Late in Rein's route, he wishes (paraphrased) that time could stop for the two of them, so the protagonist wouldn't have to die. In the sequel, this turns out to be his actual power.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Both demon/human and angel/human hybrids are explicitly possible. As usual for the setting, the angels are far less forgiving of such things, to the point of killing the unborn angel hybrid and its human mother.
- Heroic Suicide: Attempted, but averted. In a couple of routes, the protagonist decides that the problems her extra ten days are causing for the demons are too severe to justify continuing to live on borrowed time, and asks them to go ahead and kill her ahead of schedule. Naturally, they refuse, insisting that she bargained for ten days and she's going to get the full time she asked for.
- I See Dead People: Part of the job description for angels and demons. In Shiki's route of the summer special, it's revealed that the protagonist has also become able to see ghosts.
- I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: By the end of each route, that route's demon is willing to be executed for the sake of helping the protagonist. None of them end up having to go through with the Heroic Sacrifice, but it's the thought that counts.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia:
- One of the uses of Shiki's mind control power is the removal of inconvenient memories. On Haruhito's route, by the protagonist's request, he uses it to erase Haruhito's memories of the time the two of them have spent together in order to make sure that Haruhito won't have any qualms about letting her die. ...Or so Shiki and Haruhito let her think. The pretense doesn't hold up for very long.
- In Raphael's route of My Killer Romance, the main difference between the Happy Ending and the Good Ending is that in the latter, Raphael is not only exiled to live as a human, his memory has also been rewritten so that he doesn't remember anything about the existence of the supernatural world. As a result, he doesn't remember meeting or falling in love with the protagonist, either, but it's heavily implied that they'll simply begin their relationship anew.
- Living on Borrowed Time: Thanks to her bargain with the demons, the protagonist gets an extra ten days of life that she wasn't supposed to have. Unsurprisingly, getting to know the demons during those ten days and falling in love with them inevitably results in her scheduled death being canceled entirely for one reason or another.
- Liquid Assets: Kakeru has the ability to manipulate the life force of humans, either draining or amplifying it.
- Loophole Abuse: As an angel, Rein is charged with reincarnating souls. In layman's terms, his job is to find new bodies for wandering souls. When, due to circumstances involving a very confused Cerby, he finds himself in possession of the protagonist's soul, Rein simply does his job — and shunts her soul back into her recently vacated body. It doesn't pass entirely without consequences, but as the situation has never come up before, the fallout is little more than a slap on the wrist.
- Lost Pet Grievance: In Rein's route, he and the protagonist help a child search for a pet parakeet which escaped from its cage three days before. By reasoning out where such a small bird would be likely to end up, they eventually find it... dying of exhaustion and exposure, since living all of its life in a cage left it unable to fend for itself in the wild.
- Love Makes You Evil: In Kakeru's sequel, the royal family's loyal maid Remy is in love with Meguru, causing her to try to remove Kakeru and the current Demon King from power so that Meguru will take the throne. To this end, she enlists the help of Central Intelligence agent Kou, who doesn't want to be involved in the plot but goes along with it because he's in love with Remy.
- Mayfly–December Romance: The love interests are immortal, or at least very long-lived. The protagonist is not. This gets addressed to varying degrees in some of the routes. In Shiki's sequel his parents agree not to push the issue of him returning to the Demon Realm for as long as the protagonist is alive..
- Meaningful Name:
- Haruhito explains that his name means "sunny man".
- "Kamui" is written with characters meaning "god" and "majesty."
- "Kurobane" means "black feather(s)".
- In Kakeru's route, the protagonist's sister names her newborn baby "Canon," written with the characters for "angel" and "sound." She chose the name because she believes she heard the voice of an angel (actually Kakeru, in the process of using his power to save her life) promising to protect them while she was giving birth.
- On the same route, Rein says that his name is written with the characters for "temple" and "sound" because he was born in a temple.
- Mind Control: Shiki's power, used to enable the demons to move freely wherever they need to and pass for whatever role is necessary to facilitate their work, such as getting Kakeru into the protagonist's workplace as a new employee.
- Never Say "Die": The word "die" isn't completely avoided, but the demons generally prefer to say that someone is going to be "toast." Demons who are killed are said to be "terminated," although this may be justified by the fact that demons don't "die" in the same sense that humans do.
- Non-Human Humanoid Hybrid: Angels and demons can interbreed, but it's such a rare occurrence that most assume it's just a myth. In Haruhito's wedding sequel, it's revealed that not only are there enough "halves" to form a hidden community of their own, but Haruhito, his sister, and an until then unknown brother are all hybrids as well.
- No-Sell: The protagonist is immune to Shiki's powers, making her quite possibly unique among humans. On his route, he alters her memories twice (first after confirming her as a toasting candidate, and later to make her forget him and move on with her life). Neither of these attempts stick.
- Our Angels Are Different: They are responsible for cleansing the souls of dead humans of the memories of their life and reincarnating them into new lives. Although they're associated with "heaven," no mention is made of God being in charge: instead, they have a king and a royal family comparable to those of the Demon Realm. Notably, while demon society is very much a Decadent Court, it's the angels who pose a direct threat to the protagonist, and are far less tolerant of human interference in supernatural affairs.
- Our Demons Are Different: The demons are not inherently evil, but are instead more of a supernatural bureaucracy responsible for keeping track of the fates of humans and making sure both that humans die at their appointed times and that their souls are handed over to heaven to be reborn. Although they don't get along with angels very well and the two races are often antagonistic to one another, they are not actively at war and serve complementary purposes in maintaining the cycle of souls.
- Paranormal Romance
- Parental Marriage Veto: Shiki's parents agree to let the lovers stay together, but marriage is out of the question. Hilariously, Shiki then proposes a Shotgun Wedding
- Precognition: Satoru's power is to see the future of people he touches, which he uses to learn the circumstances of how they are going to die.
- Pronoun Trouble: The translation of Shiki's sequel runs into this with Nozomu. The protagonist is the only one who doesn't know he's male, yet everyone else also uses female pronouns to refer to him until the reveal.
- Psychopomp: The demons play this role. More specifically, transporting souls to heaven is stated as being Haruhito's power, which makes sense given that he is a demoted angel.
- Race Lift: My Killer Romance redesigns Shiki into a black man, Leo. The others, who appear Japanese in the original, become Caucasian.
- Reset Button: At the end of Haruhito's route, he becomes human and is exiled from the angel and demon realms. Because this state of affairs would make it extremely difficult to keep him and the protagonist involved with the rest of the cast for subsequent routes and side stories, in his sequel he's reinstated as a demon courtesy of Kakeru.
- Romantic False Lead: Akane, a demon who appears during Satoru's route and is clearly interested in him. Satoru treats her nicely enough that the protagonist concludes he must be in love with her. In actuality, he's nice to her because she's a demon noble who could contribute to his advancement, but he has no feelings for her personally.
- Romantic Runner-Up: Both Meguru and Shiki fall for the protagonist during Kakeru's route.
- Schrödinger's Gun: Although the broad strokes of the protagonist's life are consistent from route to route, details such as the nature of her relationship with her sister and the specific reason she wants ten more days of life differ depending on which route you're on.
- Sequel Hook: The epilogues of each characters' main routes drop hints regarding issues likely to come up in their sequel routes. For example, in Kakeru's epilogue, Rein makes a passing reference to someone breaking into the angels' armory; in Satoru's route, Shiki mentions concerns about unusual activity in the Fate Database.
- Shout-Out: Satoru's main route contains an extended shout to Pirates in Love when, in return for a favor from Shiki, the protagonist and Satoru set out to find a particular limited-edition toy from a box of "Crackle Jacks." The toy is a pirate ship, from a set which includes pirate characters matching the descriptions of the Sirius and Rika pirates in PiL.
- Sibling Triangle: Kakeru, Meguru, and the protagonist in Kakeru's route, with Kakeru obviously the winner.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: At the end of Satoru's route, after Satoru has broken the law of the demon world twice over by falling in love with a human and by preventing a plane crash scheduled to kill everyone on board, a messenger from the demon world appears... to congratulate Satoru for realizing that the fated plane crash was an error in the Fate Database and taking steps to correct it. Satoru opts to just roll with it.
- Time Stands Still: Rein can freeze time, but only at point blank range.
- Unishment: Haruhito's punishment for failing to collect his assigned 10,000 souls, and for breaking the laws of the Celestial Bureaucracy twice over in both falling in love with a human and circumventing her fated death, is... to be banished from both the angel and demon realms to live as a human. Which leaves him free to be with the protagonist. He is, not surprisingly, totally okay with this.
- Valentine's Day Episodes: The "Black Valentine's Day" side story.
- Wildlife Commentary Spoof: The protagonist's inner monologue when she finds herself watching Rein and Haruhito in the former's epilogue.Protagonist: (Observe the common comedy duo: one is the straight man, and the other is the funny man.)
