This was my first VALKYRIA game I finished and its the only one officially translated (the other one available is just bad MTL that keeps having error messages pop up). I don't think it's a great idea to say that this company is bad when there's only one game to actually play with good translation. With that said, it's not perfect. I view this as a deconstruction of a magical girl genre not like Madoka Magica obviously. Just in the scenario where the villain is approached first and the protagonist has no training to actually fight her off when stuck as a healer.
Pros:
- Great artwork
- Good music
- Rinne is well-written
- Hijiri has negative character development
- Sliding scale of idealism and cynicism = cynical
- Mainly yuri centric
- Rinne’s character is influenced based on whether or not she goes for a more violent approach or a psychological approach.
- Narration on magic is great in the game
- Hijiri’s inability to save anyone despite being a healer serves as a reminder that a healer is limited in a realistic setting. She cannot hope to fight someone who is built for destruction. She has no one to rely on. She fails constantly and the only way for Hijiri to win is to throw her morals away and get corrupted.
Cons:
- There is no good ending. Hijiri is doomed not to be able to save Rinne. At best she can break Rinne and not let her kill anymore people. At worst, she simply gives up.
- The game doesn’t warn you of guro moments. It’s not tagged guro but dying from an orgasm is still a gruesome sight.
- First 20 minutes of the game are super slow in order to build up to the conflict.
- The narration paints Rinne in a very negative light but ends up making her sympathetic until a certain point is crossed in the game.
- Hijiri having negative character development is good but it hurts her in the end. She can only win in one of the four endings and it's not a real win because she ends up being corrupted.
- Hijiri’s crush on Rinne is odd. While Rinne’s inner monologue shows that she does hate Hijiri (but deep down probably did want to make friends with her), Hijiri doesn’t give a reason on why she likes Rinne in the first place in her inner monologue. It almost makes Rinne’s opinion about being looked down on correct seeing as how Hijiri when corrupted no longer cares about what Rinne thinks.
- Game’s too short and leave a lot of plot threads. The mascot character dies the moment he gives his magic up to Hijiri but it begs to question what happened to that universe.
Overall, the game being too short on top of the lack of options for the player to choose does hinder the story telling. The beginning of the game is well paced and then the moment the two become magical girls, it spirals rather quickly. This company does a variety of different types of magical girls so I would like to see if they try anything else with them.
