Ihanashi no Majo - イハナシの魔女

This doujin VN has been moving some sort of waves since it was released last year at summer comiket, it’s been pretty popular around Japanese circle and it’s already officially translated to Chinese and Korean and I kinda expect an English TL soon too, wouldn’t be suprised. When Kemco announced their console port I got curious since they don’t really do ports of other games. I Grabbed it without knowing what to expect but to my surprise it was totally my kind of shit since it’s some ボーイミーツガール セカイ系ish with a lot of supernatural 伝奇 SF stuff.

The plot follows Hikaru as the protagonist that until now his live has been some kind of hell with his parents dying when he was 5, been bullied in school and by his aunt too until one day she ditches him sending him to a small island in Okinawa with his grandfather who has been missing for god knows when. He finds himself homeless in the island and meets with a cold enigmatic girl called Lilun in similar circumstances, He tries to get closer to her to survive and soon enough he discovers she is a real witch that comes from a different world that can use magic. From there they start living together trying to discover the secrets of this magic and its link with the past of this island.

The game divides his efforts a lot between character writing and the actual plot/mystery. There is a lot of push to the thematic value of the difficulty of living in your own and making it in the world, I’d say the writer does a good job at bringing the plot where he wants to explore this topic, although I feel the writer is vastly superior at writing the scenes about the mystery of the island and all the 伝奇 stuff in it, he’s great at writing unsettling and spooky scenes, he mixes it perfectly with the island/田舎 making a really good atmosphere when he focuses in this mysterious stuff. Also the entire plot of the game has a crazy good story with a really elabored setting, nothing but praise in that aspect.

So where’s the problem then? Well that I wish more of the game would focus in more of the plot stuff that’s where the writer’s style shines. However more of the time the writing is focused in the characters and their daily life, and while it’s not like bad or anything it isn’t anything too remarkable either. It definetly suffers a lot from what we call the “doujin” where there are a few bad flashbacks, the pacing slow downs in boring parts where the plot is getting stuck, and has a lot of parts where doesn’t seem to have any clear direction.

The game is linear consisting of four chapters: The prologue, two chapters for two of other girls and finally Lilum’s chapter. I’m not sure what to think of those two mid chapters, if there’s anything the game is very good is at being a linear story and using all their characters, and those chapters do chain with the main plot in cool ways, but they only really do so by the end, so while you are reading them it’s definetly feels hard to care and get into at times. The problem that comes from this is that it takes a while to get into the actual plot of the game and see the link of this characters with the story. Although the usage of the cast by the last chapter is pretty good so it’s kinda forgivable, there’s is also a lot of short scenes from their POV which gives a lot of hindsight into the island. At the last chapter the POV usage is also used in a similar way to Iriya which was pretty cool.

Another point where the doujiness shows up is with the art, specifically with the CG usage, there’s like 9 cgs in total in the entire game and the usage is… kind of questionable to say the least, kind of wish they used them in more serious scenes, but at least we got the good CG for that final scene so gotta give props to that one. Even besides the CG the scope of the story feels too big for the budget they had since a lot of side characters don’t have tachie and have no voice neither, especially in the last chapter that’s where it suffers the most. But well it’s a doujin game so can’t really complain too much about that. What is cool about it is the background art; it uses some kind of disorted photographies that actually look cool and work phenomenally with the atmosphere of the game, in both ways to show spooky and the Okinawa inaka stuff, also there’s a lot of motion within the tachie and changing backgrounds constantly it feels vibrant. The voice acting and BGM is pretty good too.

After the end of the game I also do recommend to do all the extras since by the end it actually explains the rest of the details leftover in the main story, it’s kinda weird it didn’t do in the main story, and it isn’t anything crazy either but may aswell go for it at that point. The console version that’s what I grabbed also brings the extra after story for each chapter, they’re pretty short and addreses some points you also may had questions left but nothing really too big. If you get the PC version it’s also sold at the booth page of the circle if you are intersted but I wouldn’t go out of my way to grab it unless you really liked the game since it doesn’t add much and they are pretty short. The main drawback of grabbing the console version is that cancer anti spoiler stuff they do you can’t take screenshots anymore after the second chapter, but at least you don’t have to deal with tyranoscript engine so it’s a win imo.

But yeah it was a cool game although not very polished sadly, kinda wish it would have had more intense spooky stuff since those were really good, also I can see why Kemco offered to port it, it feels somewhat similar in atmosphere to their VNs, not really similar in a deep way or anything but it has a Feel to the stuff they try to do.