Writing a story with huge cast of characters is hard. To succeed, you have to write characters that are interesting, that stand out, that the reader will actually care about and, very importantly, that the reader will remember who they are. Durarara has some problems. Will, it works for the first few volumes, but later becomes too tangled for its own good. Sure, entangled lives of the city dwellers is the idea, but concept is one thing, its execution is another one. Most of the cast feels like one-off characters, even if they have multiple appearances. They don’t have personalities, they have quirks. And even thoseare easily forgettable. If I’m being honest, the only ones that actually stand out from the crowd of these backgroundish characters were Shizuo, Izaya and Celty. Which for me meant that if a scene didn’t have at least one of those, my interest dipped instantly. I imagine this kinda ruined the whole final arc of the novels where my issue was not remembering much about most of the characters present. And while my memory might not be the best, I’m still blaming the author for that.

This certainly isn’t helped by how the refuses to focus on anything. It jumps from story to story, from character to character, and with each jump it makes me care less about the whole thing. Now, this isn’t to say that multi-thread plot with huge cast of characters can never work. We have To Aru Majutsu no Index. We have Baccano from the same damn author as Durarara. And from outside of light novels, we have fucking Pulp Fiction. To compare Durarara with the novels, Durarara’s problem is that it doesn’t have any focus point. With Index, the focus is the protagonist – he might not have a big role in every arc, but he’s always somehow related to what is happening, willingly or not. With Baccano, the focus is on the story, as despite being told across times and characters, the novel actually builds one large storyline and every arc progresses this storyline, even if it’s chronologically set sooner than the previous arcs.

Durarara lacks any focus like this. It’s lacklustre, with no central character and no overarching story. It feels more made up on the spot without much planning. The pacing suffers thanks to this as lot of the volumes feel just like a filler. Sure, writing some side stories to further the feeling of hustling and bustling city is good, but too often I felt what should have been a short story of chapter or two got stretched into a whole volume. Durarara is unfortunately another light novel that could have benefitted from cutting down the volume count and condensing its story more, and I feel at times writing another volume was more important goal than having something interesting to fill that volume with.