Sorcerer is a standard choice based VN following the trials and tribulations of a newly minted sorcerer on his quest to survive in a world full of fantasy mischief, a good deal of which is out to kill him. It’s got a wide variety of pretty character models, a vast fantasy world filled with all sorts of magic and creatures, and a main character who certainly isn’t your bargain basement blank slate.
Alexander Ward solidly breaks the mold of the vast majority of sex game protagonists. He’s not some sort of isekai’d helpless chump yeeted naked into a world in which he has no hope of surviving. Instead, he’s a 38-year-old business professional with more competence in his pinky than most have in their whole body. He’s lived nearly a whole life before the game even started. In general, I find him to be a breath of fresh air.
Unfortunately, the information above is something you learn in dribbles over the course of the first half of the game. It makes being Alexander something of a chore in the early game, as everyone around knows him except for the readers and no one seems interested in introducing him. Tack that onto the fact that he ends up being uncomfortably broken, whether in wealth, sexual prowess, magical competence, charisma, and any other arena you can name, and you’ve got yourself an irritatingly flawless character.
I feel like a handful of training montages of some variety would have made him more likeable. The guy goes from learning magic exists to fighting the final boss in about a month. There’s no amount of broken pedigree that makes that reasonable, but watching him get kicked around by Aya and Miyuki would have at least made things more palatable.
Sorcerer’s story is pretty interesting overall, but almost the entire game suffers from a single flaw – a lack of depth. There are frankly just too many characters and too many factions for Talothral to do them all justice simultaneously. The end result is a game full of single scene snapshots trying to cover dozens of different characters and factions, all of which end up being thimble deep because there’s so many other scenes and characters that need attention.
This also applies to the girls and sex scenes. While I don’t think I’ll ever get much from the stop motion type animation Talothral uses, the sex scenes could actually be interesting if I had any sort of emotional connection to the girl featured. Instead, it feels like half the factions and races in the game were introduced just to add another girl for Alexander to fuck. None of them feel like they ended up with much personality outside of the main five, but there’s over a dozen other one shots. Heck, even the main five ended up feeling a little thin since they had to share screen time with so many other girls.
Overall, Sorcerer felt like a game that was close to being very good, but ended up over-ambitious. I really enjoyed parts of the early game, particularly when trying to ally with the gorgons, but as more and more factions were piled on, everything started to feel more and more disjointed and fractured. In the end, I can’t really recommend it.
