This game has it's moments of charm. It's incredibly earnest and clearly a real labor of love from its creator. I loved that about it. It also occasionally works well, in fits and starts. The transition to realizing that Yvin is basically a comic relief character, always falling out of trees, was genuinely kinda cleverly done. But as a whole, this game just doesn't work. That Yvin thing is a good example; once you come to understand it, it gets beaten to death and then some, and that's like a third of the game. Structural problems like that abound. This game also seems to misunderstand some of the strengths of the most common visual novel forms. The highly limited number of sprites, backgrounds, and musical pieces mean that all of them lose the ability to operate suggestively on how the reader imagines the scene, basically reducing it to just a regular text-based short story in function, but with all the non-dialogue stripped out. This leads to struggles with the actual sentence-by-sentence aspects of the writing, which awkwardly switches among points of views and levels of omniscience, so the game as a whole seems to be flailing to find its point of view, all while oscillating wildly between the second-person and the third-person. This lack of a wholistic, structural understanding of the way the game functions extends to every little detail. For example, musical motifs sorta operate as themes mostly tied to character, but then they get occasionally used in other ways, not as an intelligent subversion of established structure, but rather just because there aren't enough musical pieces to plan them out in an interesting way.

I'm also perpetually disappointed with the visual novel genre's essentially codified character idiocy informed by sexist tropes. That isn't genre or a formal convention. It's just rampant sloppy writing, in the same way that the worst romance novels sold in supermarkets are not careful formal expressions. The difference is that conventional literature has ample other works; visual novels have very few. Though it is certainly not unique to Magical Otoge Ciel, it's also certainly present in it.

But the earnestness of Magical Otoge Ciel almost saves it. I almost want to love it despite having so many problems with it. For some audiences, that is probably sufficient, but it's not enough for me.