How To Date a Magical Girl Review (Dating Sim)

Warning: Heavy spoilers for How To Date a Magical Girl and Doki Doki Literature Club! ahead!

Despite the amazing success of Doki Doki Literature Club! (including a commercial one, if you consider the 1300+ Steam reviews on the $10 Fan Pack DLC), there have been surprisingly few attempts to replicate its formula within the EVN scene, especially among the titles that could be considered of professional quality. While the plethora of mods kept the DDLC fanbase occupied, arguably no major Western VN even attempted to create a similar experience, or utilize some of the characteristic gimmicks used by Dan Salvato to a comparable effect. This, of course, can be seen as a positive development, as uninspired copycat games rarely make for compelling experiences, but elements such as drastic genre shifts, clever fourth wall breaking and weaving an interesting meta-narrative into the experience are far from being overdone in VNs, especially within the English-original niche.

                Or at least, this was the case before the release of How To Date a Magical Girl by Cafe Shiba, a game that openly featured a very similar base structure to DDLC – a cute dating sim exterior hiding a brutal horror story, in which nothing is at it seems at first glance. Showing up on Steam in January 2019, it promised 5 romanceable heroines, nearly 40 CGs and over 10 hours of content – rather impressive statistics, especially for a game that originated from a humble, $4000 Kickstarter campaign, and ones that make it hard to dismiss it as a cynical cash-in trying to exploit DDLC's fanbase. In my opinion, however, it managed to fail quite spectacularly, only in small part due to its mimicry of Dan Salvato's game and much more because everything it added to the table was deeply underwhelming. But where exactly did it go wrong?

The mediocre quality of the game’s sprites and background art give the whole experience a rather cheap feel and contrast with the genuinely pretty CGs

 

How To Date a Magical Girl starts with our protagonist (you can choose both their name and gender, but the difference between playing as a male and a female is nearly non-existent), a painfully-average person with no idea what to do with their future, being enrolled by their best friend, Hikari, to an academy for magical girls. While having nearly no powers (their latent magic only activated once in the past, in a somewhat random and uncontrollable outburst), our lead decides to accept the offer and starts their new life of studying magic, quickly meeting a bunch of highly-dateable and surprisingly willing girls. Sadly, the seemingly-idyllic scenario is quickly disturbed with a tragedy – a murder of a student. From there, things pretty much only go downhill, with every new tragedy affecting the protagonist in a more direct manner and turning the whole scenario into a living nightmare, the meaning of which stays hidden under multiple layers of mystery.

                From the technical standpoint, the story is told through some rather robust dating sim mechanics, in which you grind four main stats (magic, alchemy, perception and expertise), engage in creating potions and earn money, all in order to effectively court the girls. As you spend time with them, give them gifts and raise affection, you unlock unique romance scenes, up to the slightly-fanservice’y culmination near the end of the story, while the main plotline progresses automatically at its own pace. The game gives you quite a lot of time to work with and various opportunities to optimize your playstyle (like skill training having a double effect on rainy days), so it’s not out of question to maximize affection of a few girls and max out your attributes on a single playthrough, making it reasonably easy to experience most of the content without replaying the game. Even though the plot-related events often come in the way of your stat-rising and dates, taking out time slots unexpectedly or skipping whole days, if you play competently you’ll never be under enough pressure for that to be a real problem. Dialogue choices, while present, are mostly meaningless, really starting to matter only in the very last moments of the game, where you can branch into three different endings (with slight variations to one of them, depending on which girl you romanced – if you finished the game without a girlfriend, it simply won't be available).

There are fun aspects to the game’s magical girl theme, but all of it falls apart due to the setting and everything you do in it acting essentially as a distraction

 

The giant problem of this whole setup is that the dating sim mechanics and the setting the game builds are basically one giant red herring and are turned mostly meaningless by the final reveal of the story. Not only all the girls, including the one you romanced get killed off (in an admittedly disturbing final sequence, where the protagonist’s sanity simply breaks from the overexposure to violence and losing everyone he cared about), but the world itself is revealed to be a simulation, created to assist with waking the protagonist from an accident-induced coma. Also, the protagonist’s homeroom teacher, Satomi, is revealed to be the perpetrator behind everyone’s misfortunes – an AI, that was meant to help him recover and still claim to be doing that, but actually went rogue and started working on her own, somewhat unclear goals (one of the endings suggests that her ambition was claiming the protagonist's body for herself, but her actions are hardly consistent between the alternative scenarios). This premise does a pretty poor job of explaining everything that happened earlier, but most importantly undermines everything the player worked for up to that point. DDLC’s game mechanics worked well specifically because they were brief and unusual, never making you feel like you were wasting your time and producing interesting feedback, even if the romance plots of the first act were obviously all dead ends. Here, the gameplay far overstays its welcome and while the final horror twist uses the dating sim mechanics as a build-up, it’s hardly good enough to justify all the effort on player’s part. Seeing the whole cast of the story you’ve spent many hours reading as mutilated corpses is surely unsettling, but the shock value here was mostly a goal in itself, rather than leading to some interesting plot developments.

                You could argue that even with a twist ending, experiencing the heroine arcs themselves could be a reward in itself, even if they were labelled fake and nullified later on. However, this is another aspect of How To Date a Magical Girl that turns out seriously disappointing. While the setting itself and the way the game uses the magical girl tropes is rather fun, with girls' transformations and powers playing a real role in the story, their personalities and backstories are basic at best. Also, while the unlockable “dates” give some slight spins to each of them, they are simply too short to add something really important and especially the heroines that play lesser parts in the main plot (the deredere childhood friend Hikari, shy Yui and school celebrity Miyu are clearly the most important characters here) feel heavily underdeveloped. This also means the game never really manages to create an emotional connection that would make the later development of killing off the whole cast that meaningful. The SoL content is never very compelling by itself, with writing being consistently very average and humour rather uninspired – Hoshi, Hikari’s magical dog familiar she dumps on the protagonist, is a prime example of that, as a comic relief character that barely does anything genuinely funny or interesting throughout the whole game.

The game’s excessive violence does not completely lose its shock value, especially when it extends to the main heroines, but still feels heavily overdone

 

Presentation is also something I have a major problem with, although it’s not on a particularly low level – it just underperforms in areas that I rarely see quasi-professional VNs having problems with. While the CG art is for the most part quite good, even if generic, character sprites look flat and unappealing. Same goes for background art, which lacks personality and detail. It’s pretty much a full reversal of the situation typical of EVNs, where good basic assets are often coupled with very few, or underwhelming CGs and honestly, as you spend most of your time with How to Date… on stat grinding and short dialogue sequences, better character and background art could do wonders for the overall enjoyment factor of the game. In the later parts of the story, the game introduces visual and sound gimmicks representing the protagonist’s waning sanity and glitches within the VR setting, quite reminiscent of some tricks used by DDLC. However, most of them consist of rather basic colour filters and changing the ways of displaying text and while writing accompanying them can be decently disturbing, these are the moments when the VN really does feel like a poor imitation. Also, some stylistic choices, like the “real form” of Satomi, are rather laughable and undermines the game’s climate even more.

                How To Date a Magical Girl is a strange game, as it doesn’t look terrible when you look at its production quality or various parts of the story, but somehow it manages to consistently undermine itself and turn out as less than the sum of its parts. Decent stat management mechanics are wasted by being made irrelevant through the twist ending. The heroines are proclaimed figments of the protagonist’s imagination and then unceremoniously killed off after hours of investment from the player. It wastes its setting and emotional buildup through a set of underwhelming endings. Playing through it is not without its share of fun, but in the end, it mostly just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. For all these reasons, I can’t really recommend buying this VN, but I hope the developers can learn from these mistakes and create something more memorable in the future – considering the technical competence shown in How To Date a Magical Girl, they're clearly capable of doing so.

Final Score: 2/5

Pros:
+ Good CG art
+ Fun use of magical girl tropes
+ Well-crafted and reasonably fun dating sim mechanics
 
Cons:
- Dating sim elements are ultimately meaningless
- Shallow heroines and romance arcs
- Mediocre character and background art
- Unconvincing main intrigue


VNDB Page
Buy How To Date a Magical Girl on Steam

A Little Lily Princess Review (English Original Visual Novel)

This review was originally published on Fuwanovel Forums on April 20th 2018.

Those that follow this blog for a while might have noticed that I like to complain about the lack of identity that many Western-made VNs suffer from. As a medium utilized pretty much exclusively by the fans of original Japanese visual novels, EVNs far too often borrow extensively from those when it goes to setting and story elements, to the point of replicating various tiring anime clichés and kitsch tropes. They also frequently copy elements that really have no interest being in a game created by someone living in the USA or Europe, more often than not having only very superficial knowledge of Japanese culture and reality of life in Japan. 
            A Little Lily Princess, developed by Hanako Games and published on Steam in May 2016 (under the "Hanabira" label, signifying an outside scriptwriter), is a game that I like bringing up as an example of a Western VN that was able to differentiate itself from the crowd and create unique experience exactly because of the ability to not be completely defined its “weeb” roots, creating a setting and a story far detached from typical anime tropes. Paradoxically, the classic English novel A Little Princess, that this game adapted into the VN/dating sim format, is not a title unknown to anime fans, thanks to the highly-rated series from the 1980’s, Little Princess Sara (it even inspired a few less known projects, such as the slightly outlandish Strain: Strategic Armored Infantry). Hanako’s version tries to differentiate itself from those other adaptations mostly by giving a yuri spin to the story – still, as I will try to show in this review, calling it a yuri romance is rather misleading and says little about the true appeal of this game.

 The games arstyle and writing does a very good job of creating an appropriate climate of Victorian London, making it stand out from typical VN settings

 

A Little Lily Princess, just like its source material, follows the story of Sara Crewe, a young girl sent by her father, wealthy colonial official in India, to a boarding school in London in late XIX-century. Soon after arriving at the institution as the star student, she's struck with a tragedy that completely changes her life and the social status she was benefitting from. The game does a very good job of creating a believable representation of its setting and gives a lot of attention to the social divisions and injustices that were among the core issues touched on in Burnett's novel. The school's internal hierarchy, dependent mostly on social standing and wealth of the girls' families is a major theme not only in Sara's story but also in pretty much every other character arc. The unusual artstyle (with characters and CGs drawn by Inma Ruiz, whose considerable talent definitely deserves more uses like this, as distant as possible from Winged Cloud's Sakura games), language used by the characters and music all give the game a unique climate, making it pretty far detached from the typical EVN experience (even if mechanically it's a fairly standard visual novel with dating sim elements).
            This feeling of reading something fresh and different is further supported by very usual dynamic present in many of the game's routes – while some of them are more or less explicitly romantic and involves girls in age similar to Sara, other include (among other things) her becoming sort of a mother figure for a much younger child, or creating a close bond of friendship with her significantly older Maid. Yuri romance elements are definitely present in the game, but they are not really in any way the true focus of the story or its strongest element – also, when they're actually present, they're definitely on the cute and tame side of things, very much appropriate for how young Sara and her schoolmates are. This creates an interesting contrast with the game's dating sim mechanics and the way it advertised itself – it rarely conforms to your expectations, especially if you don't know much about the source material. 

Maybe the biggest virtue of this game as an adaptation is exploring the characters that had only minor roles in the original, giving them their own, complex personalities and motivations

 

The stylization itself and the interesting structure of the game aren't all though – its true strength lies in the characters, especially Sara and her personal story. Her dialogues, thoughts and overall behaviour make a very convincing impression of a somewhat spoiled, but ultimately very kind-hearted and sensitive girl that the player quickly learns to adore – this makes the hardships she goes through often painful to see, but keeps you emotionally involved all the way through the main story. This is ultimately the real focus of the game and definitely its biggest asset, as all the character routes and story arcs connected to them pretty much an addition to the tale of Sara's rises and falls from grace and the core plot, apart from some dedicated scenes of the ending sequence, always plays out the same way, no matter what relationship you chose to pursue. Of course, it's not like the rest of the cast, especially the “heroines”, don't have interesting characteristics and backstories of their own. Some of them are developed in very intriguing ways, that surpasses their characterization in the original novel – that goes especially to Lavinia, who in the source material was simply a bully and Sara's main antagonist among the girls, but here became more much more ambivalent and complex character. They all simply feel like secondary, maybe even optional additions to the main story-arc.
            If I had to say something negative about A Little Lily Princess, it would mostly be about the "dating sim" resource-management mechanic, which require you to decide how Sara will spend her time every day and provide you with resource points, which you later spent to progress the character routes. It’s rather tedious and doesn’t add any real challenge to the game, apart from that coming from frustrating RNG – the only good thing about it is that it’s very thematic, adding to the climate of the whole VN, especially after the first plot twist. Other than that though, this is simply an excellently made and unique game – not a masterpiece, but an all-around impressive experience and a must-read for every OELVN fan, even if they’re not into yuri. That part, while a bonus for those liking the theme, is probably one of the less important elements here.

 
Final score: 4/5
 
Pros:
+ Unique, well-developed setting
+ Emotionally engaging, touching story
+ Interesting art and overall good production values
 
Cons:
- Romance sometimes feels forced and underdeveloped
- Shallow, RNG-dependent dating sim mechanics
- Can be extremely sad and painful to read

VNDB page
Buy A Little Lily Princess on Steam

Sunrider Academy Review (dating sim)

The Sunrider series is one of the most successful OELVN franchises – one which not only spawned two highly-appreciated VN/strategy game hybrid titles, but even made a rare attempt at expanding to the Japanese market (at least successful enough that the games’ developer, Love in Space, apparently works on making their upcoming title, JP-idol themed Shining Song Starnova, into another export product, with Japanese voice acting and other elements rarely seen in western-produced VNs). Both the freeware Sunrider: Mask of Arcadius and it’s commercial sequel, Liberation Day, got much recognition for their space-opera storytelling, solid game mechanics and good production values.

            One thing the mainline Sunrider games definitely lacked, however, was satisfying romance – while the cast followed typical harem tropes, with male protagonist and vast, female-only crew more or less visibly in love with him, the character development for most of the girls was extremely basic and, at least in the first game, player was left with no ability to pursue any of them. To remedy this sorry state of affairs, Sunrider Academy was created – an alternative universe dating sim spin-off, placing the protagonist and the main four heroines of Mask of Arcadius in a typical high-school setting (although without abandoning the sci-fi elements or the Sunrider universe itself). So does this game, published by Sekai Project on April 2015, really remedy mainline Sunrider games’ omissions?

The slightly smaller cast serves the game well, as every character can receive more meaningful screen-time and development

 

The alternate storyline follows our usual protagonist, Kayto Shields, as a second-year high school student in the prestigious Sunrider Academy. Many elements of the setting match the already established lore – Kayto's close relationship with his younger sister Maray, his role as student council vice-president and the presence of Ava as both his childhood friend the overly strict council president are all known from the flashbacks in Mark of Arcadius. The game, however, places three more Sunrider heroines, Asaga, Chigara and Sola, as fellow students within the Academy, while other characters from the main games, like Admiral Gray or Veniczar Fontana, make cameos in setting-appropriate roles. While you could expect some of these appearances to be just excuses to reuse visual assets (that is admittedly done a lot with sprites and backgrounds), it's not really the case – Fontana for example only shows up in two unique CGs and many other references to mainline Sunrider games are fairly clever and elaborate, definitely not done in a lazy way you could expect from this kind of spin-off.

            The plot itself involves Kayto being ordered by Ava to act as a manager for the three "trouble” student clubs (swimming, science and kendo), each led by one of the heroines. During the school year, his tasks are to save the clubs from being closed, lead them into progressively harder competitions while keeping up with his own studies and (hopefully) finding a girlfriend. All this is achieved through pretty involved and extensive resource management gameplay. Apart from managing three club's morale, readiness and member count, you have to work on your personal stats, earn money and fight for the affection of the girls through events and random encounters (during which you choose from a list of topics, that might or might not be appreciated by the heroine). From the technical standpoint, the game is definitely a dating sim before anything else, as the dialogue choices are pretty much just an extra factor influencing the affection meters, while everything else is determined by the stats and the schedule you set up for yourself every day.

Fanservice and h-content are important parts of the game, but never overwhelm the actual story Winged Cloud-style

 

The heroine routes take some of the defining themes of the girls’ original stories (like time travel for Sola or forced marriage for Asaga) and give them a spin that makes them compatible with the new setting. After the introductory common route, that makes you familiar with both the characters and the game mechanics, you can choose to enter the romance arc with any girl with whom you have high enough affection level (the arcs are, of course, mutually exclusive). All stories are similarly enjoyable, doing a decent job when it goes to character development and making the heroines likeable – Academy is, admittedly, much better in this department than the main Sunrider games. The arcs themselves are however not without some heavy flaws when it goes to writing and pacing – the drama, especially in Chigara’s and Asaga’s route, feel forced and the resolutions to it rather anticlimactic. Dialogues also suffer a bit from Love in Space’s persistent mannerisms, which not always fit the characters and situations involved (including the ever-present “Mou...” and “Fufufufu”, which I have yet to find in similar quantities in any other VNs).

            Obviously, the stories themselves are not meant to be taken too seriously, as much of them is more or less excuses for h-scenes and fanservice. This does not go into the over-the-top territories some ecchi VNs take it to (like for example Sakura games with boobs and panty shots attacking you at every corner), but every route offers three lengthy hentai scenes and some additional “sexy” moments. As I’m not a fan of h-content in general, I’m not a good person to judge the quality of it here, but I was generally positively surprised with how the scenes were done – they were mostly very vanilla and nicely drawn. Story-wise, some of them definitely came out of nowhere and not necessarily fit the characters, but not to the point of completely taking me out of the story. What I also didn't really expect, the sex scenes definitely worked the best in Asaga’s route, as they simply went completely in-line with her characterization and were also a pretty important part of the narrative.

            One thing that proved to be definitely a negative surprise was the relative lack of interesting events and meaningful interactions with heroines other than your current love interest after the common route (which goes on for the first 1/3 of the playthrough) – even the achievements such as winning the galactic-wide competitions with your clubs or acing the final exams don’t reward you with proper celebratory dialogue, making the effort put into the gameplay mechanics quite hollow. This, along with the lack of variety when it goes to endings, definitely reduces the replay value of the game – after one or two playthroughs there’s literally nothing new to uncover apart from the strictly route-specific content, which isn’t expansive enough to nullify the boredom of replaying, for the most part, the same linear story.

Dating-sim mechanics are extensive and fairly fun during the first approach, but become unbearable with repeated playthroughs

 

While the game offers around 12-15 hours of story content between all routes, most of your time with it will be spent on resource management, choosing your activities at 6 different points of every day over the pretty overwhelming, 450 days-long school year of Cera. The gameplay elements, while rather well-balanced and initially as addictive as in other well-crafted dating sims, are sadly unskippable and become a real chore after the first playthrough. This is connected to both how time-consuming they are and how the game’s goals are set up – as you can’t fail in any aspect of the "simulation" without receiving an instant game-over, there’s really not much space for different goals or unique play styles apart from some very arbitrary/pointless Steam achievements. Even though there is a “waifu mode” difficulty, which renders most stats irrelevant and makes the game pretty much impossible to lose, it still leaves you with hours of mindless clicking, maybe even more frustrating than it would normally be, considering its utter pointlessness. This led me, after the first playthrough, to giving up on the game itself and looking up let’s plays of the other three routes on YouTube – and it was, sadly, a much better experience than trying to replay the whole thing even from the end of the common route. 

            The game’s visuals are kept exactly the same level as in the rest of the Sunrider series – with average artstyle and level of details, but the very consistent quality that makes the end effect reasonably appealing. The CGs (not very numerous, when we consider the overall size of the game), backgrounds and UI are just as solid as the character designs and sprites already know from Mark of Arcadius, while they also never go above the expectations. Music consists of typical dating sim background tunes, with enough variety to signify shifts in the climate within the story and not drive you insane with repetitiveness, but once again keeping it at a perfectly average and generic level. 

            In the end, is Sunrider Academy worth playing? For fans of the series, it should be an enjoyable experience, especially on the first playthrough – if does a decent effort at remedying the lack of romance that plagued the Sunrider at least until the Liberation Day’s [RE]turn DLC. Beyond that, it’s still a fairly fun and well put-together dating sim that might be enjoyable on its own and can be found on Steam nearly for free, with frequent -80%, -90% sales. Beyond finishing it once, however, there’s just not enough depth in its gameplay mechanics or variety within the story content to make it interesting – if you really want to explore all the routes, or you’re not interested in the resource management mechanics in the first place, watching a let’s play, at least after experiencing the game for yourself once, might actually be the better option.

 
Final Score: 2,5/5

Pros:
+ Decently enjoyable heroines
+ Well-done references to main Sunrider games
+ Well-balanced gameplay mechanics
+ Good-quality h-content
 
Cons:
- Unskippable busywork makes replaying the game a chore
- Poor story/gameplay ratio beyond the common route
- Inconsistent quality of the writing


VNDB page
Buy Sunrider Academy on Steam