Mahoutsukai no Yoru (2012)

Back around May I decided that I wanted a visual novel on my Switch that I could play around bedtime if I struggled to fall asleep. Ideally, I wanted it to have strong visuals and I wasn't really looking for a romance story, which limited my options quite a bit. Witch on the Holy Night came up in a few discussions I parsed through so eventually I bit the bullet and bought it. I'm not sure I could have chosen much better than this for my purposes, honestly. The fanbase seems to call it Mahoyo for short, so I'm going to do that from here on out.

Mahoyo is a treat for the eyes and ears. Every scene has unique art for environments and a variety of angles to keep from lingering on one for too long. Character portraits are reused, but they have a wide enough variety of poses and expressions that they never felt out of place. It's fully voice acted in Japanese, and just about all of the voice work felt pretty strong to me. The music is great and builds a strong atmosphere. I never got tired of it. There are even some really cool animations and particle effects used during key action moments. Everything comes together to create the most visually impressive visual novel I've ever played. I'm gonna just put some screenshots below to give a taste of the game's art.

Said gorgeous artwork always takes up the full screen, with text overlayed upon it rather than making use of text boxes. It's an unusual approach but I admired its simplicity. At any time you can hide the text to just look at the art. There's a text log as well that lets you replay voice lines. The game also features a metric TON of save slots even though it's a kinetic visual novel, meaning it has no choices for the player to make. So save to your heart's content, I suppose. I only ended up using two, as I recall.

A big part of why Mahoyo was such a perfect match for playing before bed is that it places a heavy emphasis on "slice of life" narrative. A large chunk of the story is more about the three main characters going about their daily lives at school, work, and home. You could tell that the author had a vested interest in developing the main cast and seeing how their personalities bounced off of each other and their peers. As a result much of the novel is pretty low-key and makes for excellent bedtime reading.

Pardon the quality of some of these screenshots. A few had to be taken with my phone due to a blanket system ban on screenshots/videos past the 10 hour mark in this particular game. A baffling choice in my opinion, so I had to work around it.

I do think there were times when I began to grow a bit exasperated with the lack of a driving force behind the plot. I would have liked it to maybe be a bit tighter-wound in that regard. But I also feel that its loose story is part of what makes Mahoyo so unique. It's not often I've seen stories with main characters capable of magic where they spend most of their time just... living a normal life. There's not really that much actual magic here outside of the few fight scenes. Like I said, this makes the story ultra slow-paced, but it occupies such a unique space as a result that I find it difficult to hold this against it.

The main cast is comprised of two witches living together-- Aoko and Alice-- and a boy who goes to the same school as the former, Soujyuro. All three come across as believable even if Soujyuro's good-natured thickheadedness feels a bit much at times. I had a lot of fun watching them interact. In my playthrough I felt like I got just enough to want to know more about each of their respective backstories. Unfortunately I'm not sure if there's more to dig into beyond this game. I'll have to explore and see what's out there.

Finally, I do feel like I should touch on the writing itself. While the translation is pretty solid, there are clearly some points where it gets a bit muddy and I think something is lost in those moments. Still, I'm impressed that the author's voice feels intact. He has a very meticulous way of writing that I'm sure would get on some folks' nerves. I think a bit less time could have been spent expounding on each character's emotions in response to everything said to them, but there's an authenticity here that I really appreciate.

Hm. Well, I went into this review thinking this would be a four star game, but after writing all this out, maybe it has almost nudged its way to a fifth. Mahoyo has a unique vibe with some rough edges and a plot that moves along at a truly glacial pace, but its excellent presentation and how well it nails what it tries to do earn it some merit beyond the sum of its parts in my mind. I could see myself going back and forth with the rating in the future.

As a fan of type moon stories and Nasu's stories in general I found this very interesting.

It a kinetic novel, so basically you just click… next.

The characters are nice, but the pacing is a little bit off sometimes. For a moment it looked like it would transform into Fate/Stay Night, with the days going by and nothing happening narrative-wise – but suddenly the plot thickens and everything starts to happen very fast.

By the ending you get a little bit infodump’d, but… if you are familiar with Nasu’s writing, that isn-t something you will be scared of.

I think it is a nice start point for those who want who either want to read a Visual Novel, want to get into the Nasu-verse, or liked any of his other works (Garden Of Sinners, Fate/Stay Night, Tsukihime).