Magical Dears (マジカル☆ディアーズ) Review

I’m a person with some integrity.

Mostly this shows up as my OCD. If I say I’ll do something, I’ll finish it, and if I don’t finish it I feel guilty, worried someone will call me out and roast me over it.

Taken a step further: if I’ve opened the full release of a VN, I won’t drop it. One day I’ll finish it, no matter what.

Note I said “full release.” Translation: if it’s just a trial version, yeah, I can absolutely bail.

Magical☆Dears is one of those games I left sitting forever… one of many…

It should’ve been a January release this year. I played it back then, then February’s new releases dropped and I tossed it aside. So it’d get picked up occasionally — mostly once I’d finished the current month’s stuff and had a day or two left before the next batch came out.

So I chipped away at it on and off, grinded through more than half, and then…

I had basically no memory of this game!

Yeah. I finally picked it back up recently and got through it, and I still don’t remember much…

The story’s roughly about magical battles. Super formulaic. Formulaic in every way — not just the overall plot beats, but even the everyday dialogue…

You want to know what a VN with formulaic slice-of-life dialogue looks like? About as boring as it sounds, in every scene.

I actually thought it was decent at first. Why did it end up like this? I thought about it, went to check the official site, and found that navel’s sub-brand navel-honeybell’s site was already dead — the kind of dead where the domain doesn’t even resolve. No idea if the company folded.

So after some deliberation, I figure they just didn’t put any care into making this one…

It’s not like the writer’s incompetent — he did Tsuki no Kanata de Aishite and stuff like that. So why write this? I looked at the planning credits and there’s no name, just the company name. Maybe the whole project was slapdash from the start, the script was slapdash, everyone half-assed it, and the result is a half-assed game — though the artist clearly put in some effort.

I’m not really sure what navel-honeybell’s positioning as a navel sub-brand was supposed to be. Going by the name, probably cute-style moege, but it always falls short. Do they have some misunderstanding where they think cute-style moege just means good art and cute girls, and people will buy it, so their planning went down the wrong road…

Maybe they decided from the planning stage that this game would live purely on selling art, and the story would just toss in a magic school and a level-up-by-magical-battle system. Then the standard route requires a foreign-blooded ojou-sama, a brocon little sister, a childhood friend with a promise, an idol-type girl who loves singing, ideally a loli, and most importantly, a rival who’s both enemy and friend…

So all those tropes make up the story. The whole thing feels careless, and you don’t need to actually engage with it. Everyone’s stiff, even though the voice actors clearly tried… okay, maybe they didn’t try. Fujisaki Usa might have, since she finally got something like a main heroine slot instead of a bit part — shame it’s in a mediocre game.

How do I put this… the game already got shit on in ErogameScape… oh right, barely anyone even bothered shitting on it. My one-word take: unfortunate.

Unfortunate where? The artist, Yū Narumi. I think this is the best game he drew all year… as for his later work… Hatsukoi Third Time, that lovey-dovey daily life one… those character designs are just awkward to look at. Only this game’s girls came out cute, and honestly I think a lot of that is the coloring…

I tried to find something good in this game and came up empty. It’s also pretty long, though at least there’s no route lock — just clear any heroine and you’re done. The story itself is so careless they probably couldn’t be bothered with a route lock… I don’t get it. If you’re this careless, why ship the game at all? Would it kill you to take your time and make something decent?

Reminds me of the company’s previous game, Sora Tobu Hitsuji to Manatsu no Hana. Good setting, good VAs, good art, but the story stops halfway and goes nowhere. No, it’s not even half — it’s a half-finished product. It starts, then stops. Like ordering dessert, getting a cake, and they bring you half of it… you wouldn’t just feel unsatisfied, you’d be pissed. That shorted-on-the-portion kind of pissed.

Oh right, there are some bright spots. The OP and ED are good, and the OP is pretty flashy — probably outsourced. The OP lyrics were written by Aoi Nishimata.

Yeah, a rare Nishimata lyric credit. Give it a few listens. Though to me the lyrics read like a cheerleading squad chant…

Ah! How did I forget — there’s one more bright spot. The protagonist can use magic and fight too, and when he does, he turns into a girl!

Technically it’s fusing with a summoned loli to become female — the kind of gender-swap where his consciousness is controlled by the loli… I guess you could call it an industry innovation? Ha… (bitter laugh)