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So it’s been a while since I played a non-otome visual novel but I heard good things about this one and I always wanted to play a Type-Moon game back in the day. The remake on Steam was on sale and I had gotten it sometime ago and finally got around to playing it. The story is basically about how back during the bubble era 80s, mountain boy Soujyuro who comes down from his mountain to go to school with all the other kids. One day he accidentally stumbles upon 2 witches doing some Witch Activity. The witches are Alice and Aoko and while Alice plans to kill him immediately because their secret cannot be known – Aoko somehow develops a soft spot for him and spares his life, going as far as to fight with her witch room mate. They instead drag him to their giant mansion to live with them so they can monitor him to make sure he doesn’t spill the beans. And so begins Soujyuro’s school life with his two witch room mates.
Oh and in case you didn’t notice, that’s “Soujyuro Sizuki” rather than “Soujuurou Shizuki”. For some reason there’s a handful of names that use that older style romanization rather than the typical Hepburn that all the rest of them use. I’m assuming this is probably some specific Type Moon style guide or something and not that the translators randomly jumped around between how to spell stuff.
So for the most part it’s just mundane hijinx between Aoko raging at how simple-minded and direct Soujyuro is and how Alice has had enough of not only Aoko’s shit but Soujyuro’s shit too. But then things are revealed that they are basically trying to fight Aoko’s older sister Touko for the throne of being the next Aozaki heir because gramps decided that Touko was too crazy and Aoko was a better fit…much to Aoko’s dismay. Aoko just wanted to be a simple high school student but welp now she’s roped into the family tradition. Alice is just the rich ojousama who owns the mansion so she was helping Aoko with her heir problems and Soujyuro kinda got roped into it by being at the wrong place at the wrong time. The biggest hurdle is of course the fact that Touko has made a contract with a holy beast who is basically immune to magic. Luckily this is where Soujyuro’s experience wrestling wolves and bears in the mountains comes in. 🤣
“Potato-kun gets forced to live in a mansion with some witches” sounds like it should be the premise of the shittiest harem anime of 2004 but fortunately the game is very much not that. Aoko is far too snarky and Alice is far too deadpan to cause the game to degenerate into that kind of cringe hijinks, and instead we get lots of fun banter interspersed with with some (pretty visually impressive) action scenes. Now that also said, the post-game vignettes were honestly kind of boring though since they focused too much on the side character randos rather than the big three.
So it’s a pretty chill VN with a pretty direct plot with no weird assumptions but I feel like that was also it’s downfall because I feel like the stuff they “focused on” was stuff I didn’t care about. For example, when you finish the game, there’s an extras section where you can see little extra scenes which give more lore detail about Alice’s magic spells and familiars or some lore about Tobimaru. I really just wanted to see more scenes of Aoko and Soujyuro. Much to my dismay there was actually no romance in this game. Although in my opinion, it’s hinted that Soujyuro kinda has a thing for Aoko and Aoko absolutely has a weak spot (and a muscle fetish) for Soujyuro. Still, since both Tsukihime and Fate/Stay Night had actual direct shipping routes, I was kinda disappointed that this game did not.
Sadly this was “Witch on the Holy Night” and not “Bitch on the Wedding Night” so all you mesubutas are gonna have to settle for an “otome game” that just insinuates rather than has explicit h*nd h*lding scenes. It’s still at least insinuating rather than having you weave your crack ship out of whole cloth, but ultimately this is about witches doing magical battles rather than witches doing mattress wrestling.
Luckily I found out that apparently this is actually a prequel to the visual novel Tsukihime! I had no idea when I initially bought it, but since Tsukihime so happened to be on sale as well, I bought it and plan to play it next! Overall it was a decently short visual novel (took me around 20 some hours to complete if you don’t include the extra stories.) While I am sad about the lack of blatantly obvious shipping options in the game, I think it was fine for what it was. The best part is it’s a kinetic novel so you don’t have to read some guide and pick the right choices. It’s just like reading a book, something you can just open, read and close.
Okay seriously though I had assumed that the fact that this is a Tsukihime prequel was specifically the reason (other than the Steam sale of course) behind buying the game. I was quite surprised when I mentioned “oh yeah Aoko is like the Jiraiya of Tsukihime” and was responded to with “wait what?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d handle reading another kinetic novel since back in the day I was really annoyed with Natsuzora no Monologue, but weirdly enough I somehow was totally fine. I think it’s because they handled action scenes and transitions between speakers much smoother in this game than Otomate did. Otomate just mostly had still scenes with 1 character on screen talking while the text completely blocked their sprite. Mahoyo actually put characters usually on the side and made the text gray out in transparency so you didn’t constantly have a wall of text blocking the images. So in that sense I applaud them for making the kinetic novel experience more enjoyable than I remembered it.
I have to say that I also quite liked the kinetic format from the accessibility angle. There’s been a lot of games recently that we’ve been playing where I was really squinting trying to read the text in the small text boxes on the bottom of the screen, so this setup made things not only very readable but also in a way that didn’t obscure the visuals either. And they did some seriously impressive visual effects here in the magical battles! It was a far cry from so many of these otome games where the extent of their special effects are “the sprite ‘jumps’ to show that the character is surprised.”
On that note, thanks to Kobayashi Yuusuke voicing Soujyuro, I now have a newfound appreciation for Seiya-kun.
Bread Master Lee 
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