I really don't get the low standards people have. Sure, this game is big and ambitious, but ambition is a curse when you can't live up to it, and Love of Magic comes up tragically short. It has no
life to it- no vitality, no passion.
The visuals are difficult to judge; the idea of having photo backgrounds with character models imposed over them could work, if you don't have those models constantly gyrating on the spot. Seriously, they aren't even real animations; they're just flexing distortions of still renders, it looks fucking awful, and
you can't fucking turn them off. To say nothing of the MC, who (at the age of 22) looks like a 50 year old with over-dyed hair and a bad comb over.
The gameplay is somehow both trivial and unforgiving. It's a sandbox with a ton of locations but not much of anything to do in them; some spots are important for exactly one scene and then are never used again, but you keep the option to go back for... reasons? It's cluttered and irritating and almost entirely pointless, but I'm fine with that. What I'm
not fine with is how events can pop up in a specific location at a specific time on a specific day, and the game doesn't alert you to the fact- and if you miss them, they're gone for good, as are all the scenes that rely on them.
NO. THAT'S FUCKING STUPID. To get the scenes without tearing your hair out, you'll probably need a day-by-day walkthrough and to follow it religiously- and even then it's no sure bet.
The combat is, at least, an intriguing premise, though not for this game itself. You have a bingo grid of playing cards and you need to make poker hands with the cards dealt to you. Each hand corresponds to a gem you have socketed for it specifically, and the higher the hand, the more powerful the gems you can pair them to. Problem is the justification in-universe is trash (you're a fireball slinging superwizard, but you visualize your magic as poker because you're trying to make sense out of chaos) and just doesn't fit the rest of the game's tone. I don't feel like an Evoker- I feel like a middle-aged man in a mid-life crisis gambling match with weirdos in fursuits.
The sex scenes might as well not exist, honestly; they're just a couple of still images with a little bit of text vaguely describing the act, followed by a smash cut to the girl with jizz on her face. There's no sense of passion to any of it (excepting occasions with the main LI who seems like the only one the dev remotely cared about, and even then it's not
good), and the buildup of sexual tension and release is completely glossed over. None of the characters involved ever really speak like they're all that interested in it either; One second, the MC is dryly mentioning he's about to burst- the next scene, he's cum all over the girl's chest and mentions how that was pretty fun. It's like the author has some crippling fear of portraying sexual climax and afterglow.
The worst (and most devastating part) of the game's problems is the writing, which most reviewers here clearly have bad taste in. It's mostly well done from a technical and grammatic standpoint, which is commendable considering how so many authors are inept at even this. But the
tone of the writing is godawful. There's a whole lot of
telling you how you feel, or what other characters are doing, but because of the lazy visuals, that's all that you get-
telling, not
showing. One scene has the MC and a new friend drinking, but you can only understand that by the fact that they're constantly talking about how they're drinking. There's no descriptive text mentioning this- in fact, the visuals show they're still in the middle of the university's courtyard. Then there's the MC being ostensibly from rural Maryland, but speaking like a posh, pretentious Brit, with lots of "perhaps" and "indeed" and "quite" and "bugger" and all
kinds of phrases and speech patterns no rural Marylander would use (I know, I grew up not far from there myself). And the poor emotional weight of the writing is exemplified by a scene several weeks into the game where something happens to the MC;
READ BELOW FOR VERY MILD PARAPHRASED SPOILERS WITH NO SPECIFICS:
You might think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. That's the
EXACT tone of a scene that happens in the game; it's supposed to be shocking and dramatic, but it's so badly executed that it almost feels like a parody. So far that's the worst I've seen of the writing, but elements of it are sprinkled everywhere. The dialogue is entirely functional without one single ounce of emotion injected into it. People in pain never speak like they're in pain. We can only tell people are in love because they say it, over and over again. We know that people are furious because they calmly mention how very angry they are. We're frequently told how characters are feeling, but it's never
expressed in their voice or actions. Every line of dialogue, no matter how important or charged it's supposed to be, feels like a casual and slightly dull conversation with vague attempts at snark thrown in. Even unbelievably ancient beings of incredible knowledge and power speak like bored 20-somethings just trying to move things along.
I give the game 2 stars because it has a lot of technical competency going into it, and because elements of the worldbuilding have some intriguing merit to them- but everything else falls short of the finish line. People need some goddamn critical standards.
... This game offers all of those and much more. 
