Magical Diary, a dating sim/VN about magical anime new hampshire!

I don't know why I decided to play this. I think it was on the wikipedia article of LGBT characters in video games. Maybe it was a combination of that and Analogue, Katawa. I originally downloaded it illegally (I am in fact the worst) but they had an anti pirating measure that no one could crack so I bought it, and it might be a little costly, but whatever, it's still pretty rad and I know lots of people have gotten interested in the VN genre because of KS so I thought I could post a little blog post about one that might not get as much exposure.

This is a western made visual novel, and you can tell right away because there are black people in it, but it's about a girl (whom you can name and change skin color body type etc.) who gets accepted into a SCHOOL OF MAGIC called... hogwarts Iris academy, set in scotland New Hampshire. If your only frame of reference for the visual novel is Katawa Shoujo, this game might be a LITTLE TOO CEREBRAL FOR YOU.

You start every week deciding which classes you go to; there are 5 magic classes (red, blue, green, white, black [no artifact classes]) and you get new spells by raising those stats. you can also study to raise MP, or work out in the gym to raise HP, and you have to worry about stress so you have to skip a day due to sleep every now and again. The cool thing about this format is that it's fairly easy to miss stuff... I've played it 3 times and all of them have had quite a few things I hadn't seen before. Another thing is that you have exams, and they're actually like mini RPG's, or logic puzzles, and failing does not mean you lose the game... unless you fail all of them I think. There's multiple ways of solving most of them even.

There are 5 pursuable characters in the game... two women (as it turns out your roommates, which gets a little awkward), two men... also one teacher that looks around 40 years old, and I have to draw the line somewhere! Apparently it's not that bad but fuck it that's still creepy. He's also an asshole. This game doesn't have any sex though, at least drawn sex, so that's nice. and the biggest thing you get at the end is a kiss.

You can go down anyone's path, but my favorite part is that you can not romance them and still have a satisfactory ending. All of the characters are well written, it's quite funny, and there's lots of endings you can experience. Lots of them involve you getting expelled, funnily enough, such as the ending where you sleep the first two weeks. There's even... side quests? I guess you could call em that. Art's nice, music's nice, the only real problem I have with the game is the datable professor dude but I didn't have to go down his path so I never did. there's a demo hereso if you like what you see then I wholeheartedly recommend it.