Review of Mahoutsukai no Yoru
| Subject | Mahoutsukai no Yoru Witch on the Holy Night - Limited Edition |
| By | Helpfulness: 0 Vote: 9.4Ojojostar on 2023-06-03 |
| Review | I've read fate/stay night and hollow atarixia before this and I gotta say this is my favorite work from nasu by far. All of the characters are very enjoyable, even the side characters. I feel like I could listen to them babble on about random things forever. The way that the characters bounce off of each other with their lowkey humor is very nice. Battles are as also good as you'd expect from the funny mushroom man, which is to say very epic. I read some people complaining about how the puppet and Alice fight were too long, but I thought that both were very good. Also, gotta say that art and sound are on point here. Hirokazu Koyama is prolly my favorite artist now, and I have basically stared at every major CG in the game for 15-30 min (yes I need help), and its effect is amplified by the almost cinematic movement of the sprites. Like I actually can't stop looking at his art and I literally bought the limited edition for the magician's tune art book to look at more of his art. Everything is just so SMOOTH! Though the line art for some of the side characters seem like the man just made some scribbles and called it a day. Also the music is a bop as well. I am a particular fan of five and finality, but there are many other great tracks as well. There are a few that evoke a sense of peacefulness and calmness that I have not felt elsewhere. It's like I can just sit back, listen to the tune, and simply space out. Its a pretty unique feeling, to say the least. The world in which the characters inhabit seems extremely fleshed out as well. I'm waiting for the full translation of retsukihime to read it and I know that it is set in the same town which may explain everything being fleshed out so much, but even so, in the extra story which occurs a year after the main story, the hints to all of the events that happened in between the main story and it as well as Nasu saying that there was originally going to be three vns, it seems as if there several years of events for the characters that Nasu has planned out but just not written out and its driving me crazy! I need more Mahoyo! Additionally, the magic system which the game sets up for all subsequent entries into the nasuverse really bears its head here. Though the system is explained in great depth in the game as well as how magic differs from regular magecraft, the true limitations of the seemingly endless ways magecraft could be utilized crumbled before me. Yes, I am fully aware that Aoko is a proto-Rin and the reason much of the magecraft was reused in fate was because Mahoyo was never supposed to be released in the first place, but the focus on Irish mythology along with a certain few preliminary spells really shows how rocky the supposed base of all magecraft is. In contrast to the extremely fleshed out lives of the characters, the magecraft system seems like it is confined to a certain few ideas, and that's it. It doesn't feel like it is until Fate comes along that the different ways that magecraft can be used is shown to its fullest potential. Also though Magecraft is supposed to only be confined to what is possible through nonmagical means, it does seem like this very fundamental rule that separates magecraft and magic is broken down. Not so much in Mahoyo, but in subsequent entries, as though magecraft is supposedly confined by the aforementioned rules, the existence of ether as a fundamental element in the world throws a giant wrench into everything as things like ether clumps which are most certainly not grounded in reality in nature can be used for a plethora of seemingly magical things such as creating homonculi and whatnot while Aoko can literally just fire out the magical stuff like a gun??? Yet even though I feel like the magic doesn't shine as much as the other parts of Mahoyo, the ideas that it brings to the table that are remixed into new things in other type moon works makes me very happy. Like the borderline obsessive amount of research into fairy tales and whatnot needed for Alice's powers bears its head again within the character of nursery rhyme from the extraverse, Kizuki's base concept being molded into Kuzuki from Fate, and so on and so forth. Its very enjoyable seeing so many connections you'd never expect being made between all of the different nasuverse works. Also small gripe before the biggie but there are some places where there are typos which is kinda sad. Does seem quite odd when compared to how much polish is in the game as well as how advanced the english vocabulary is in this game, to the point that there were multiple points that I had to search up what certain words meant. The cockney rhymes by a certain extremely floofy bird was very appreciated. Do note that the following is all me talking about a side story in Mahoyo and can basically be skipped if you just want to know my thoughts on the main story. It has been fairly marked away of spoilers, so you can read ahead if you want. As someone who has spent an absurd amount of time on the extra chapter murder mystery of the game, I gotta say that I hold lots of mixed feelings on it. On one hand, everything up to the end was extremely good, and it got me laughing quite a lot while also keeping me on my toes wondering what would come next. However, due to the combination of extremely important decisions along with a extremely linear storyline, sometimes things don't meld together properly. I believe that the story follows Kumari through a single decision path no matter what choices are made. As such, even if you select certain choices that would narrow down things like say, the possible time of death of a character, if it is not the choice that the Kumari the story follows chooses, and such information can influence a choice later on in the story, using such information can lead to a bad end. Additionally, though the story is completely linear, seeing the results of multiple choices is required to pin down the culprit, making stuff make a bit less sense than it should. Also before I move onto the ending, there is one death that I have some gripes about, namely Beo's. The death is one of the less believable ones, as I firmly believe that there was no way that Beo could have seen Toukou lying on the floor in Aoko's room from outside, especially after seeing someone inside of the sun room point upwards (Aoko's room isn't even directly above the sun room either!). I believed that it would have made much more sense for Beo to be an accomplice of the killer, given their relationship and how Beo could have easily hid outside while Sizuki brought in the stuffed doll as a way to fake Beo's death. But that's just me rambling on what I thought when playing thru the story. Anyways, getting back on track, though the ending makes a certain amount of sense and clears up a certain hole in the story, the existence of "two" culprits throws a giant wrench into everything, and the whole "oopsies I got invited to the wrong day tee hee!" thingy raises up more questions than answers, as it makes me question what certain other characters who should have been affected by the mix up. The SINGLE line of text disproving Aoko as the culprit was also so vague that I only realized that it was the incriminating line after it had been reworded when things were revealed, even though I had read that scene several times already. And it took a few more reads even after I realized that it was it to realize that it was in fact actually incriminating! This isn't to say that the culprit reveal was based off so much guesswork that even Kumari herself had to point out how much of a stretch it was. Also I wasn't a big fan of how the final few deaths were carried out. Good art is good art, But good art isn't always funny art. Was a fan of the existence of aliens tho (not a spoiler if ya can't understand it lol). That was nice. Anyways, by how lopsided this review is, I hope yall can realize what part of the story I was most invested in. Perhaps it was me trying to drag out the final little bit of content that the visual novel had, but overall, despite the somewhat disappointing ending to the murder mystery, it was a very solid experience. I usually finish vns at basically the average play time, so I think it says a lot when Mahoyo was able to make me almost double its play time. This is most likely my second favorite VN right after Umineko, and I hope that it gets a sequel one day and that the movie is gonna be a bop as well. |
| 0 points |