How to Date A Magical Girl is a Visual Novel/Time Management hybrid that puts us in the shoes of a custom character. Starting off, we are given the option to pick either a male or female character, then can name them. Whichever you select doesn’t make a difference minus a few lines of dialogue, though the story is better suited towards the male as some moments and reactions make little sense as a female. After our protagonist is created, we find ourselves really hyped as we have the final manga of his/her favorite series in our hands. Despite being a custom character, he has a personality and ambitions of his own, to the point that he may actually be one of the most entertaining in the entire cast.
With his favorite long-running manga done and over with, he falls into a pseudo-depression in where he avoids human contact and lazes about aimlessly. Living by himself, it’s only his cheerful childhood friend Hikari that keeps him from becoming a complete hermit and guides him to do something with his life. In fact, she is the one that suddenly alerts him one day that he has to attend an all-girls school with her. The twist here aside of it being an all girl’s school and your character may be a guy, is that it is a training ground for women with magical powers.
In this world, there is has never been a case of a male containing magic of any sorts, so it comes as quite some surprise when Hikari tells him of an incident in where he stopped a falling glass in mid-air by freezing time. This sudden news of being allowed to join a school of magical girls, which he always admired, was enough to break him out of his trance-like depression. And so it was that he overslept the next day, then had to high tail it to his new school in hopes of making it on time. This silly and reliable nature of his quickly sees him make several new friends to spend time with and possibly date.
There are five main heroines, including your lifelong friend Hikari. All of them have distinct personalities, though none are all that unique, mostly falling into generic tropes like the tsundere or shy girl. Still, you can’t help but come to care about all of them as your group interacts with each other more and more. After a few days, you will be given free rein to spend your time as you please. You can work a part-time job to earn some cash, spend time with a girl to gain more affection, or kill time by searching for ingredients to use in your alchemy potions. It is a school after all so you will have to train up your four stats of Alchemy, Expertise, Perception, and Magic to get passing grades.
It is a whole lot to handle, and you can only perform two things in a day which are separated into mornings & evenings. Whether it is spending time with someone or reading a book, it will burn up half your day, making you need to choose wisely. The school is only open during the daytime and as long as it’s not a weekend, so get your training in while you can. All of the girls have their own lives as well. Some may only be available at certain times of the day or not at all. For as many things that you have to juggle, it is best not to make any plans as you never know what the day can bring. It may go by without having a chance to do anything due to the story. Heck, even entire weeks at a time can fly by as you despair that your midterm tests are getting ever closer.
You have nearly an entire year to get through and are ultimately given more than enough time for everything. To the point that you don’t really have anything to do by the late game, aside from trying to raise your affection levels with other girls if you are so inclined. With that said, the random time jumps will still drive you bonkers. There were countless instances where I brew up a potion whose effects lasted three days, only to suddenly have it wasted as story events forced time forward. It doesn’t even have to be story events either; at times, your character simply wants to spend his time watching TV or something. This will be a constant annoyance throughout the entire title, yet as previously stated, will give you more than enough time to accomplish everything.
The four stats you will be training up have absolutely no effect on either the narrative or your choices within them. They are only useful for secondary things like making more money at your job with Expertise or finding more ingredients by having a high Perception. Money is only used to buy gifts for the girls to increase their affection. Potions, on the other hand, have benefits such as gaining more money while under its effects, increasing the affection you receive as you spend time with someone, or helps you find even more ingredients. They are useful, but the higher tier ones that last multiple days will be the ones with a higher risk of being wasted as time may suddenly jump ahead.
In the Visual Novel front, I’d classify this title as a Slice of Life. It has a few actions scenes, though those are few and far between. They are also gone as fast as they arrive. One of its most significant flaws is how front-loaded it is. At first, you will be spending a ton of time with the girls, yet as time goes on, they get less and less screen time. Even if you are pursuing them romantically you don’t particularly feel attached to them, as their generic nature is entirely predictable and doing so only leads to a few more scenes. When they shine is when there are other personalities to play off of each other. The story itself is a really slow burn as well. It takes quite some time for anything to be done, and when things happen, they are brief.
With the combination of Time Management and Visual Novel, they leaned a bit too much into the former. It is too shallow to be much fun after the initial struggle of trying to tackle everything, and by the time you do everything you want, you are nowhere near the end yet. It would have been a good idea to give you a set of new goals after your midterms. After you get the A stat in each skill, which doesn’t take that long, you suddenly find yourself with too much time, and it is all downhill from there. With those stats, you can even ace the final tests, so you don’t have much of anything to accomplish or do. Having something else to shoot for would have done wonders to alleviate the sense of repetition deeper into the game.
If you have made it to this far into the review, it’s safe to assume you have some interest in this game. If so, you may have already seen the picture of someone crucified right in its store page. The title also warns you whenever you start it that it contains scenes that may disturb you. It is not much of a well-kept secret that it gets quite dark. The slow-burning nature of the title in general really helps grow a sense of unease as something horrifying may happen, then later on you once more find yourself falling into your regular routine as you try to move past it. Yet it is always nudging at you from the back of your mind. They happen so infrequently that just as soon as you start to get comfortable and forget this side of the title, something else occurs to one-up the last horrid event.
It is a fascinating twist of the usual genre conventions with plenty of surprises laying in store. I don’t want to spoil too much, which is why I hardly mentioned the actual story. However, I will say that it is too heavy handed with its approach, making things unnecessarily more apparent than it had to be. Still, it is the primary reason I decided to look at this title, and it did not disappoint. Overall, it lasted me a bit over 14 hours. The combination of knowing how it ends, the time management aspects, and low amount of gated content for after a girl has become your girlfriend makes replaying it a difficult thing to consider.
The visuals are all decent and varied well enough. Its CGs are very high quality, making the switch to the actual lower detailed in-game character sprites kind of jarring until you get used to it. There is no voice acting to be found here, and I’ve only spotted a few errors in the English translation. How To Date A Magical Girl offers a ton of content for its low price. It punches far above its league with all it has going for it ranging from the unique story, witty dialogue, and a wide variety of things to attend to during your character’s free time. In my opinion, it does stretch itself too thin, which does end up harming the experience, but this is nonetheless a title you’d do well to have in your library.
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