Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai (紙の上の魔法使い) Review

There is magic in this world, and there are magic books. A magic book is a thing with actual power inside it. The story it holds might be sad, or happy, or left hanging, or wrapped up clean. Nothing special on the surface, maybe. But call something a magic book, and it’s bound to have a “magic” part.

“Open a magic book, and the story inside plays out around you for real. The magic only fades once the story reaches its ending.”

Amazing, sure. But magic books don’t always bring happiness. More often they’re a pain in the ass for reality. So Yūkōji Anko’s job is to collect them and keep them safe in the magic library.

Anko married into the Yūkōji family. For various reasons, the family pushed her out. The Yūkōjis have ties to magic books, but there’s one thing they’re afraid of too: a witch called the Paper Magician. White hair, red eyes, that’s her.

During those push-everyone-away days, Yūkōji Anko and her husband had a daughter. The moment she was born, everything changed.

Yūkōji Yoruko is the biological daughter of Yūkōji Anko and her husband. Unlike anyone else, she came out with white hair and red eyes. That violated a Yūkōji taboo. Nobody would have anything to do with this monster wearing the face of the witch from legend. They bullied her, looked down on her, even the servants would grab her hair and hit her when no one was looking. Eventually the Yūkōji family made their move on the mother and daughter: they exiled Anko and Yoruko to a library on some far-off little island, saying they’d bring them back one day. In truth, Anko knew that day would never come.

So Yoruko spent every day in that library, growing up with nothing but books. She didn’t want to go outside. She read, every day. That shut-in life worried her mother, Yūkōji Anko, sick. She wanted Yoruko happy, and for her daughter’s happiness she’d do anything. That’s when she remembered what a magic book could do.

“Lonely Yoruko can’t go on like this. She needs someone to look after her.”

Yūkōji Anko picked up a magic book. A blank one. In it she wrote down the story of a girl. A made-up girl named Fushimi Rio. Anko set the girl’s height, personality, skills, hobbies. Above all, she set her to live only for Yoruko’s happiness. When Yoruko was down, Rio would cheer her up. When Yoruko hurt, Rio would ease it. Yoruko’s happiness could never be obstructed. Done writing, she opened the book. A girl exactly as described stepped out of the light of its pages…

Soon Rio became the other person in the library with Yoruko, looking after her daily needs, talking with her all the time. Yoruko never once considered that Rio might not be human, that her mother had created Rio with a magic book.

Until one day, another Yūkōji showed up at the library: Yoruko’s half-brother on her father’s side, Yūkōji Tōru. He’d been sent to keep an eye on her. Before long, the boy was getting along with Yoruko too.

Then one day Yūkōji Tōru brought a pair of siblings in to the library: Shijō Ruri and Tsukito Hi.

“Oh… so you’re that legendary shut-in Yoruko.”

“Wh-who are you calling a shut-in! I hate people like you!”

Shijō Ruri wandered the library and stumbled into Yoruko’s study. Their first meeting wasn’t exactly friendly, but the sudden stranger still left an impression on her. As Ruri kept coming back, Yoruko’s feelings toward him got complicated. Stronger and stronger, until maybe—they’d turned into love.

Yūkōji Anko watched all of it. Abandoned by a man once herself, she firmly believed men couldn’t be trusted. Yoruko was going to get played by this Shijō Ruri, sure as anything.

“Yoruko’s happiness doesn’t need that man. Yoruko is my treasure.”

With that, Yūkōji Anko opened a magic book again. She wrote a new story—about Yoruko, about Shijō Ruri, about Tsukito Hi…

In that story, she shifted the budding love between Shijō Ruri and Yoruko over onto Shijō Ruri and his own little sister Tsukito Hi… and left Ruri and Hi as Yoruko’s good friends.

The magic book took effect. Yoruko lost her feelings for Shijō Ruri, and Ruri became a man with complicated feelings for his sister. Soon the Shijō siblings left the island. When they came back two years later, they were both siblings and lovers.

The two returned to the library and started school life on the island. A whole lot happened; they even confessed and started dating properly. But one day, Tsukito Hi opened a magic book by accident in the library—the one marked with quartz. A sad story: a couple gets together, then the heroine is forgotten by the man and falls for someone else.

Hi finished the quartz book and knew exactly what ending the magic was about to bring her. Soon enough, her brother Shijō Ruri’s feelings for her began to grow, and soon after, Yoruko’s brother Yūkōji Tōru fell in love with her.

“If I follow that book, after I confess to my brother I’ll forget all of it and end up with Yūkōji Tōru. That’s unforgivable.”

After confessing to her brother in the church, Tsukito Hi chose to kill herself right there, dying in the street.

There’s another way a magic book’s effect ends: the affected character dies.

Tsukito Hi was dead. Shijō Ruri, heartbroken, couldn’t take it and hanged himself. Yūkōji Yoruko saw him hanging there and broke.

Yoruko’s mother never expected the happy future she’d written to go off the rails like this. Tsukito Hi, fine, whatever—but Shijō Ruri could not die. So she pulled out a new magic book, one that rewrote the whole curve of the story: Shijō Ruri didn’t die, Tsukito Hi went missing. Another book wrote out the settings for Shijō Ruri and Tsukito Hi separately, following the story’s development, and created the two of them with magic…

A magic book is the kind of thing that, once you open it, never stops.

Creating two fictional people with magic books to patch the holes in that happy future—just how far had Yoruko’s mother gone for her?

Soon Yoruko’s mother had to travel far away, leaving Yoruko, Rio, Shijō Ruri, Tsukito Hi and the rest in the library. A silver-haired, red-eyed witch started moving around the library. The real Paper Magician. The one the Yūkōji family had always feared. She pitied Yoruko and decided to help her, her own way.

Unfortunately her way of helping left something to be desired. She tricked people into opening one magic book after another, trying to make every single person who affected Yoruko’s happiness unhappy. That way, Yoruko would be happy. With the witch stirring the pot, Yoruko started paying more and more attention to Shijō Ruri… and soon, fell for him.

But Shijō Ruri, dragged into magic book incidents over and over, saw something was off and broke the witch’s schemes one by one. And with them, the happy future Yoruko’s mother had written crumbled too.

Fushimi Rio was a creation written on paper, and the current Shijō Ruri and Tsukito Hi were paper creations too. The original siblings had already died.

That’s when Yoruko realized the Shijō Ruri she liked was already dating someone else.

The girl was Hinata Haruka. A pain in the ass who’d been clinging to Shijō Ruri since he started school, never letting up, confessing, throwing affection at him, and even after getting rejected over and over, never giving up.

Shijō Ruri suddenly said his memories were back. Without all the writing Yoruko’s mother had done, Shijō Ruri should have ended up with Hinata Haruka from the start. He’d accepted her confession, and they’d become a couple.

Yoruko, dumped before she’d even dated him, couldn’t accept it. Then the Paper Magician appeared and told her something even more shocking:

“The magic book your mother wrote for you—if it doesn’t match your own wishes… it can’t come true. Put plainly, deep down you also wished for things like Tsukito Hi dying, or Hinata Haruka’s confession failing, didn’t you… So the magic book answered your request and added a few strokes to that happy future script…”

“All those tragedies might have something to do with you. In the story your mother originally wrote, nobody died.”

“You’re not the victim. You’re the perpetrator. In the story your mother wrote for you, you hurt people.”

Yoruko started going back over her past… and remembered that she’d seen Hinata Haruka back in the very first year she met Shijō Ruri…

At the time she and Shijō Ruri didn’t get along. One day she saw Hinata Haruka outside the library, confessing to Shijō Ruri. Yoruko felt a jealousy she couldn’t explain… She hated that confessing girl. With that feeling, Yoruko opened a magic book called the sapphire. She hadn’t meant anything by it, but the book responded to her emotions and cast its magic on Hinata Haruka.

The Sapphire’s Proof of Existence told a story of hardship for a couple: the heroine confesses to the hero over and over, and every time the confession succeeds, the hero forgets her completely, so she has to chase him again and again.

That story played out on Hinata Haruka in full.

“So you’re the source of their tragedy!” the witch whispered in Yoruko’s ear. “But it’s fine… come on, pick up the magic book and pen. You can write the happy future you want. If you want, write the story you want—Shijō Ruri can come back to your side, Hinata Haruka can drop dead right now. This is a magic book. You want it, you got it.”

Yūkōji Yoruko picked up the pen… and didn’t write the story the witch wanted.

Yoruko’s story was that she’d be forgotten by Shijō Ruri and everyone else, and grow old alone in the library with Rio… She never wanted to leave the library again. She’d never trusted people to begin with, and now she meant to run from the whole world.

“How can you do this? Aren’t you going to get revenge?” The witch was furious.

“Nice weather today… what should I read…” Yoruko’s face was blank, her eyes empty, as she mechanically turned pages.

“You—!” The witch really lost it. “If you won’t write it, I’ll write it for you!”

The witch picked up the magic book. Just as she was writing, Shijō Ruri burst into the library. He already knew the truth. He remembered Yoruko again. He hadn’t forgotten her. He wanted to save her.

The witch’s carefully written illusion fell apart too, and Shijō Ruri finally saw Yoruko…

“None of this is your fault. It’s all of our faults.” Shijō Ruri told her not to blame herself so much.

“I’m so selfish. I stole your happiness, I cursed Hinata Haruka, I got your sister killed. I don’t deserve to be saved.” Yoruko was still blaming herself.

Then Tsukito Hi appeared in Yoruko’s mind… She’d torn a page out of her magic book and stuffed it into another book.

“Love is selfish by nature. Seeing the person you like get taken by someone else, wanting to curse her to death is a little normal, isn’t it?” Tsukito Hi said calmly. “Having some selfish thoughts is fine. What’s scary is not facing them, just running away.”

Yoruko remembered a lot of things other people had said, and finally got it… She needed to be stronger. She decided to face her own feelings honestly.

The first honest thing: confess to Shijō Ruri… Even knowing she’d be rejected, this was Yoruko’s first step forward.

The witch went mad. She couldn’t stand this Yoruko. But Yoruko pulled out the magic book that contained the witch,

“Thank you, Paper Magician. You made me stronger.”

Yoruko closed that book again, and the witch vanished in frustration.

Everything was over. Shijō Ruri and Hinata Haruka became a couple, and Yoruko stayed in her library, reading those endless books one after another.

But unlike before, she didn’t curl up inside the library anymore. She’d go out for a walk now and then.

“Today… is good weather for reading…” Miss Yoruko picked up a book, stepped outside, and smiled up at the sunlight.

Maybe she’d lost the lover she wanted, but this wasn’t so bad. In that moment, Miss Yoruko felt happier and lighter than she ever had.

Maybe leaving this relationship behind meant a new world was waiting for her!

Maybe out there in the wider world, there’s someone better suited to her!

Fickleness is what I despise most. Contradicting myself on a dime is something I hold in contempt too. But all I can say is, with this game, I’m happy.

Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai is replacing Grisaia no Kajitsu as my number one masterpiece.

If I said Eustia’s flaw was the plot going off the rails late, and Grisaia’s flaw was leaning too hard on flashback drama and loose worldbuilding, then Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai’s flaw is that it has no OP and no ED.

Give this game even a slightly mellow OP and ED and it’d basically be perfect. Maybe the studio really had no money and couldn’t find a singer. Maybe it was intentional.

Story-wise, I’d say this isn’t a galgame—it’s a proper novel. It doesn’t have that galgame shadow of boring daily-life grinding. The everyday scenes are tight and well-paced. It doesn’t have the typical gal rhythm of messing around until the crucial moment and then rushing the drama. The whole thing flows in one go, the foreshadowing lands, the emotional writing is clear, the characters are sharply drawn. Hinata Haruka, Yoruko, even the side character Honjō Misaki—they all feel alive.

I’ve heard plenty of magic stories, but Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai is a story with a fairy-tale air, and a seriously gripping one. The protagonist is Shijō Ruri on paper, but I’d rather call Yūkōji Yoruko the protagonist. Everything starts with her and ends with her. Look at the whole story: the one who grows the most is Yoruko. The core of the events is Yoruko. The emotional shifts are Yoruko. The other characters are mostly puppets moved around by the magic books, and they don’t carry the spine.

If this weren’t a galgame but a novel, Yoruko would probably be the protagonist. Adding the 18+ content and making Shijō Ruri the male lead was probably unavoidable.

The game involves three characters’ deaths. A lot of people will find it brutal, and some glass-hearted types will say they can’t take it. I’ve always thought that’s melodramatic. If a character’s death makes them fuller, I don’t see the problem. What I hate is the kind of writer who kills people off willy-nilly.

The music in Kami no Ue no Mahoutsukai is fairy-tale style too, and fits the game’s theme perfectly. The artist is Kiriiha, who says this was their first time doing galgame原画. All I can say is “explosive.” This quality already blows away several major studios. The only place a newcomer shows is the school uniform design, which borrows a bit—Mashiroiro Symphony, Sora no Mukō de Saku Hana no Sono—that kind of thing.

Honestly, when I hit a game I really love, I kind of don’t know what to say. Because no matter what, I’d rather just say “go play it.” Anyway, this game is now number one in my heart. I’m sitting here waiting to buy the OST and other merch. The fan translation group has started on it too. I hereby seriously recommend this game to galgame players who love a good story. It really is the cream of the crop.