PANDORA VOXX was a multi-media vocaloid series by doujin group KEMU VOXX (composed of vocaloid producer kemu, artist hatsuko, and pv editor ke-sanĪ², and... suzumu.) the series somewhat abruptly ended in 2013 when kemu abruptly retired from vocaloid, though briefly came back in 2017 with one last song. kemu also released a song in 2021 that is debateably a part to the series, though none of the other KEMU VOXX members worked on it and I'm not sure if it counts or not. Pandora Voxx received 3 albums, 9 mvs (1 animated), and 4 novels, though there were originally supposed to be 6. Every song released has made it to the Vocaloid Hall of Legend.
I have been a little obsessed with this series for about 8 years now. The novels are admittedly pretty nuts, there's little plot to begin with, and it's been 10 years since the series got more than 1 song every 5 years, but I can't help it, I love it so much. Sometimes things reverse your brain chemistry forever at age 13. And the songs and art are really good. I like it.
SUMMARY..?
Pandora Voxx is about.. The Pandora Voxx, a device that grants wishes, and Maki, a god who searches for people with strong desires, to grant their wishes. Most of these wishes, of course, go wrong in some way. Not necessarily on purpose, there's just usually strange catches to each wish granted that can result in physical injury or death. It happens. Most songs and novels follow a single person who gets a wish granted by Maki, and how it eventually ruins their life. There's not really much of an overarching plot, but I still find it fun.
LIFE RESET BUTTON |
The first song in the series, follows Yuuto Hashidate (not pictured to the left- That is Gumi.), who, in his quest for perfection, acquires a "Life Reset Button". It does not actually reset his entire life (only moments), but it does mess with his memory a lot. One of Gumi's most notable songs. It rules |
INVISIBLE |
A song about Souhei Shima, who wishes to... become invisible. I don't have too much to say about this song as the novel never got a full fan translation and the song itself is pretty straightforward. Like yeah he becomes invisible. |
LIFE CHEATING GAME released February 8th, 2012 |
Makis first appearance! Though this song isn't actually about her. It's about Natsuhiko Shidou, a traumatized boy who wishes to avoid any danger that may befall him, and receives a card that warns him of those dangers. After his wish, his life seems to becomes much more dangerous... |
A TALE OF SIX TRILLION YEARS AND A NIGHT |
Probably IA's most notable song (just barely loses in views to night sky patrol of tomorrow by orangestar). Follows Riku, a boy who's spent most of his life in a prison, who meets a girl named Ai and escapes the prison with her. His wish is for everyone to die. This song has also gained a reputation for being a Hard Rhythm Game Song, being both in bandori and project sekai. |
EARTH'S FINAL CONFESSION released june 26th, 2012 |
A song about a young girl who wishes to live forever, only to fall in love, watch her love die, watch the world end. the only song to not feature a novel character (aside from reincarnation, but reincarnation is weird.) They just never made a novel for it, I've always assumed its one of the two planned novels they never made. I didn't even know the protags name until today. It's Yun. |
WIND-UP GOD |
A Maki-centric song! Just a song about Maki, her need to grant wishes, with her seeing what goes wrong with these wishes as simply invetiable before realizing, Oh this is fucked up I need to die. |
REINCARNATION |
The one fully animated mv the series got. Follows Yui, a girl with no wishes, who turns down the Maki's offer for a wish. This is the first song to show all the actual characters (aside from Maki and Yun in their songs), I love this mv to this day. |
THE DEFEATED BOY released may 6th, 2013 |
The "final song" of Pandora Voxx, a lot more vague than some of the others. Generally about Maki ending things. After this one, kemu ceased all vocaloid activity... |
DEAR DOPPELGANGER |
until this song released out of the blue! this is the only song where the character(s) are unnamed, but it's basically about someone who wishes for another them and loses themself in the process. song has a lot of references to other songs from the series. i went fucking insane the day this dropped. |
released may 31, 2017not until making this page did i fully process just how quickly these songs were being released. every 2 months. WOW.
ALBUM EXCLUSIVE FLASH ROUND
most of the album exclusives are much less dire than the ones with pvs. It's a nice change of pace. The wishes still don't go right but no ones dying.
sorry for the shitty low quality reuploads I'm linking here.
OUR REVENGE POLICY |
This one got a pv but it was album exclusive, it just got reposted to youtube. It's about someone who wants to get revenge and create a perfect world, or something. IDK. Despite this song not having a novel, it is assigned to a side character(/antagonist) in a completely unrelated novel. this is the only one with an image and release date. it might look strange from here. |
| about a young boy with an active imagination. Becomes a hero, uses a mop as his weapon. It's a simpler song. | |
| KIMI NI MOTETAI | About a guy who really wants a girl to like him, and wishes to become more attractive. ends with the reveal that the girl liked him before he changed his appearance but thinks he's ugly now. It's interesting |
| TIME MACHINE AND CUMULONIMBUS | A song about someone who wishes to travel back in time to when they were 19 and confess to the person they like. |
| GENIUS SINGER, MEDIOCRE SINGER | About a singer who wishes to be famous. |
| EMPEROR OF FINAL EXAMS | A student struggling on his final exams wishes for time to stop so he can have a little more time to think. Has no idea to resume time. |
| LIAR SHOOTING STAR | From the lyrics this does seem like the only song where the wish doesn't go horribly wrong. About someone who wishes for a passed loved one to return. |
april 30th, 2012There are some other songs, but they don't have much of a plot.
*kemu released the song "Tower of Rubble" in 2021, which does feature the Pandora Voxx device in it, but I'm uncertain as to whether or not I consider it a Pandora Voxx song, or if it's generally considered a part of the series by others? Just due to how different it is, and the fact that the rest of the KEMU VOXX team was not a part of it, I didn't put it here. However, it's still a good song, so you can listen to it here.
DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT THINK THE NOVELS ARE "GOOD".
And personally, I'm not really sure if I would recommend them, unless you're just looking for something to kill time. They've never been officially translated, but there are full fan translations of all of the novels except for Invisible (sorry Souhei), and they're... interesting. The plots in all 3 fully translated novels just go completely off the walls crazy, for no reason, they're just kind of messy and strange. I think the quality of the novels can be summed up by the fact that the main inciting event for everything in the Life Reset Button novel is the moment when the protagonist shits himself in front of his entire class. And that they refer to him as "Poop boy" and "Pooman" in later novels. Why??????????????????????
Despite my opinions, I'll do my best to summarize the novels here. It's been a while since I read most of them in full, but I did make sure to double check everything here before writing it as fact. I apologize for any vagueness in my summaries though. I will be spoiling the novels. I know you aren't going to read them, and that's okay. Almost recommended, even.
(Thank you so much to tumblr users raspomme and natsuhikoshidou for their translations of the novels! While I rag on the novels themselves, the translations are great and I really appreciate the work that went into translating them.)
LIFE RESET BUTTON.....
Life Reset Button follows our protagonist, Yuuto Hashidate, a (at the start) middle schooler who idolizes his older brother, wanting to be perfect. Following the previously mentioned "Shit Incident", he is approached by Maki and given the opportunity to make a wish- his wish, of course, is to reset to the past, and he is given the titular "Life Reset Button". (Yes this is an insane set up for a fairly basic concept.)
Yuuto proceeds to abuse the hell out of this reset button, though soon realizes there's a price to it. Excessive use of his resets has degraded his hippocampus, and his memory has started getting worse. It probably wasn't a good idea to reset 3000 times to try and get his childhood friend to date him. Which doesn't even work! She dates their mutual friend!
The novel ends with Yuuto's older brother trying to release a virus that kills everyone on a train station, Yuuto reseting a final few times to try and stop it and save everyone, and then forgetting most things in his life. I really don't know how else to summarize the end of the novel. It's a bit crazy.
This novel is... It's something. It's definitely the most boring out of them to me, which is crazy considering how much happens in it. I think the characters were just boring to me, and that's kind of what makes up 80% of the novels.
INVISIBLE
Invisible unfortunately did not receive a full english fan translation, so I'm unable to truly summarize it here. It's about Souhei Shima, an orphaned and bullied boy living an utterly miserable life, who wishes to become invisible. There's some sort of Invisible City, or something, and so he goes there, for some reason, and that's basically all I know about it... Sorry! The one thing I got out of this novel is the really cute outfit they gave Maki on the cover. I like it.
LIFE CHEATING GAME
Life Cheating Game follows a completely new protagonist: Natsuhiko Shidou, a traumatized high schooler whos parents were killed in a car accident 7 years ago. Terrified of an incident like that occurring again, he simply wishes to live in peace. Maki grants this wish by giving him a.. card? It doesn't have a name like the life reset button, but it does give him warnings about the most unfortunate event he will experience the next day, and how he can avoid it. Using this card, he's able to live a peaceful life, avoiding any misfortune, even getting together with his childhood friend (There's a theme to these novels.). However, once again, his wish comes at a cost- the bad luck he dodges gets passed onto another person. This ends up resulting in the death of his girlfriend, which is the big event of this novel, basically. For some reason, the card begins warning of his imminent death every day. As he keeps avoiding it, more misfortune begins falling upon the people around him...
This novel is interesting because it ties in another song from the series; Our Revenge Policy, which does include a reference to Life Cheating Game in its lyrics. This is shown through the character Akito, Natsuhiko's good friend, who has a very strong sense of justice. He's somehow made contact with... Maki's assistant(??), Ruma, and has her kill people for him, who he's deemed have done wrong in some way. He starts trying to get Natsuhiko killed, as he realizes he's basically responsible for the death of his girlfriend, who Akito also had a crush on. It's messy.
I have the most to say about Life Cheating Game because I actually kinda like this novel. It's probably the best out of all of them, I find the character writing to be a little absurd at times but most enjoyable. If you for some reason somehow read any of them, I recommend this one.
A TALE OF SIX TRILLION YEARS AND A NIGHT
This fucking novel.
A Tale of Six Trillion Years and a Night is about Riku, a boy who has lived his entire life imprisoned.
The actual events of this novel quite literally do not matter to me. They aren't interesting, they follow the song lyrics basically 1:1, it's whatever. What this novel has that I find interesting, however, is the worldbuilding..? Unlike the other novels, this one takes place in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, 120 years after some Huge Event. The creator of the Pandora Voxx, the wish granting device, lets basically anyone make wishes of whatever they wanted. Instead of this causing the world to explode in some way, the main problem this causes is that people start duplicating due to contradicting wishes...? Because of all this chaos, a literal Noahs Ark event occurs, where a flood happens and only the people left on the boat survive, and that's why the world is an apocalyptic nightmare wasteland. Maki, as a result, now only grants wishes of those who were descended from the original creator. Riku is one of these descendants, which is why he is kept in jail and isolated his entire life, in hopes of making him devoid of any wishes. This backfires because the second he gets to make a wish he wishes for the world to end. I'm not sure what they were thinking.
For my sanity I generally consider this one in a different canon from the other novels. There's no translation of the afterword, so I'm not sure if that was the intention even, but I'm choosing to consider it to be that.
I'm not entirely sure what to call this section.
ALBUMS
Pandora Voxx had three albums, PANDORA VOXX, PANDORA VOXX -COMPLETE-, and PANDORA VOXX -REBOOT-.
PANDORA VOXX
|
First album, the only 'album exclusives' in this one are Our Revenge Policy and Mop Heroism, as well as a few instrumental tracks. Features 3 discs, with one disc of.. suzumu.. remixes**, and a dvd of the music videos. Pretty straightforward. Released April 30th, 2012 |
PANDORA VOXX -COMPLETE-
|
Second album, this one includes every song from the series, and this album is fortunately spared from the suzumu remixes. This one is, if anything, even more straightforward than the first album. Pandora Voxx. Complete. Contains the complete series. We've got it. Released March 27th, 2013 |
PANDORA VOXX -REBOOT-
|
The third and last Pandora Voxx album, containing all the songs from -complete-, but covered by notable (at the time) utaites. Some of them are still notable, like mafumafu is on it multiple times but there are some who only came back for this album and then vanished again. This is by far my favourite album. Like, ever, not just for Pandora Voxx. Here's the -REBOOT- version of Reincarnation. I just find it important. Released June 12th, 2013 |
I actually mostly made this section because I DO physically own Pandora Voxx -REBOOT-. I got it as a gift in 2015 and it's been my most prized possession since. It's always on display. 
 |
 |
 |
I will try to make them modal eventually but I'm not working with javascript again rn. You can click on them to see them better, though. sorry for the shitty images
**it should be noted that while I generally make fun of suzumu simply for the fact that he was an actual plagiarist, most of the suzumu panvoxx remixes are also just, not good. I'm not a coward, I can admit when a suzumu song is good. I literally have his albums downloaded. But man, some of the remixes are awful. There's a strangely slowed down Six Trillion Years, and the Earths Final Confession remix makes Gumi sound like she's singing through the fog, or something. The 8bit(?) Life Cheating Game is pretty fun, though.
MERCH
It's kind of hard to find any archiving of old Pandora Voxx merch, as it is clearly not being sold anymore. One that I've always wanted is this little keychain that exists of Maki 
It's kind of ugly, but I would buy it. I would do anything to own something physical of Maki. There's also this keychain of Life Reset Button Gumi that I also dream of owning. I wish they still sold these things so everyone could know I'm insane. And there's a Kemu Voxx Bag for some reason. I find that one quite funny.
 |
 |