When I heard Majikoi had obtained several sequels beyond the original, the next order of business was to play Majikoi S. Returning to Kawakami City and revisiting the Kazama family, Majikoi S serves more of an expansion to the original game rather than a continuation.

There are routes that take place after the ending of the five main routes and the Agave route for the original game. However, The main focus of S is on the brand-new characters that further add insight into the Kuki Corporation and introduce a new rival school known as Tenshin Academy. As well as characters from the original game that have not gotten a route have received one in S While the expansion sounds exciting and some of it is well executed, there is also quite a lot of content in S I less than enjoyed.

Majikoi S plays the same as the original game but with a few improvements. Since Majikoi S is fully voiced (just like the original game if you patched it), the addition of a voice timer to let you know when a character has finished speaking is greatly appreciated. Especially since there are times from the original when I have proceeded to the next line before the character is finished talking because I thought they were done talking (it can be a bit hard to tell at times since the voices are only in JP).

New to Majikoi S are short animated clips of action scenes that occur during fights in the game. Considering the nature of Majikoi and its focus on martial arts and combat, these short clips elevate the fights to be more engaging and entertaining to experience rather than just solely using text, voice, sound effects, and still images to depict these scenes.

Also, the route selection is much more straightforward this time, since you use a timeline to select which route to start, rather than spending X amount of time with a character after the prologue in the original game. From there, only the choices you can select can impact the game. While some choices will just alter the dialogue for the next few lines, others will impact what route you will proceed to. And Majikoi S rather has quite some endings that can be very difficult to get without using a guide.

At the end of the common route (which is 2nd-year 1st Semester + Future without a Relationship), the player character, Yamato Naeo, is presented with four “heroines” to pursue their routes. Tsubame Matsunaga, Margit Eberbach, Kokoro Fushikawa and Monshiro Kuki. Tatsuko Itagaki is also considered a “heroine” in S but her route must be accessed in the Agave After route. From what I have noticed, out of these options only Tsubame and Monshiro’s routes cover the bulk of the new S content while the rest of the routes are fairly self-contained to the heroine herself.

I was suggested to start with Tsubame’s route first since it was the route that further introduced the most amount of new characters. And for the most part that was true thanks to the tournament that takes place during her route as well as her need to advertise her natto brand (which means naturally encountering a bunch of characters). Maybe because I love it when girls are older than me or I just love the whole Onee-san trope but I ended up loving Tsubame’s route a lot and she ended up being my favorite character in the game, even if I can understand why some would dislike her at the end. Her route is split into two sub-routes. One route when Yamato “takes the lead” and another when Tsubame “takes the lead”.

The next route I have done is Monshiro’s route. While her route is considerably slower and less action-packed than the previous routes in Majikoi, Monshiro’s route gives the player plenty of insight into how the Kuki company is operated and the employees of the company. Not to mention as far as character writing and development, Monshiro is the strongest route for that in S. After all it’s just really hate to not like Monshiro, she is just really precious and I have claimed her as my “daughter”. Monshiro’s route can have various endings but the “Future with Monshiro” ending is the main ending for her and will unlock her “after” routes.

Margit was the next route I have completed and frankly, it’s rather disappointing. While this route made me enjoy Margit more as a character compared to the original game, I did not like it was so sex heavy with several explicit scenes. To the point, I think half of her route was just sex. It's just a bummer that this is how the game decided to treat Margit when she’s one of the more interesting characters in the games.

Kokoro was next, and while her route hardly focused on any of the new content, it was still a fairly enjoyable route as you get to learn more about Kokoro that was never revealed in the original game. I found her just very annoying and arrogant before, but her route made me see Kokoro in a new light. Now I just can’t help but laugh at her every time she fails at something and cries about it since it’s so comedic and amusing to me. There is a handful of sex scenes but not to the point I thought the sex was overwhelming (although I was quite disgusted with the end of one of them).

Then you have Tatsuko’s route, which began on the Agave After route as well as the after routes for the original’s game five heroines. These routes will assume you have played the original game since the after routes rather work as extended epilogues of the events that took place in the original game. There isn’t much to say since their main plotline is completed. You just go on romantic dates with the chosen girl and engage in plenty of sexual acts with them. Which for me, range from me enjoying them to absolutely loathing them.

Majikoi S is undeniably very sex-heavy in general and because of that, it is important to note that all of the involved characters are 18 and over. In fact, I have discovered the word “nukige”. A term I found out because of this game that means it explicitly focuses on the graphic sex scenes, and by that I mean it’s porn. I rather not get into details since I want to keep this review as clean as possible. But I thought they have overdone it with the porn. The original game had 20 and they are all removed if you play the Steam version while S had nearly 50 porn scenes.

Not to mention they are all very long and unrealistically dragged out. I was uncomfortable seeing a handful of sex acts (for reasons I rather avoid mentioning to not make things problematic) but for the most part, I just ultimately got bored of nearly all of them (I will admit I enjoyed two of them though) since they’re all written the same way and quite frankly, I get very impatient with sex scenes. So in the end I ended up turbo-skipping over all of the dialogue.

However, my biggest complaint is you have to endure much of the porn just to unlock the childhood route. To unlock it, you must complete all 5 routes of the newly added heroines for S as well as all of the after routes of the heroines from the original game. I think that only completing Tsubame and Monshiro’s route should be the requirement to unlock the childhood route considering they are directly tied into the new S content while the rest was fairly irrelevant to the new content. So enduring 8 sex-heavy routes just to unlock what I consider to be the best route in the game is heinous and what I consider the biggest fault of the game.

Once you do unlock the childhood route, which will lead into the Koyuki’s route since Koyuki Sakakibara is considered to be the “secret” 6th heroine for S. The childhood route is easily the most epic, action-packed, and exciting route in the game since it’s such a love letter to classic battle shounen series such as Dragon Ball and Bleach and even take influences from Star Wars. As someone who grew up on those series, it was just nonstop joy from beginning to end thanks to the tight pacing despite how huge the Koyuki route is in scale.

However, I thought any romance for Koyuki was forceful and shoehorned due to the lack of time you spend with her. If the Koyuki route was named something else (I think it should be called the Bushido Plan route instead), then I would have no major issues with it. However, considering that the route is named after Koyuki and considering there’s a huge lack of focus for her. The naming convention is rather confusing and jarring.

Majikoi S in the end is a severable sequel with new improvements to make enjoying the visual novel easier and the new characters are overall great and help expand the world of Majikoi. The porn is frankly overwhelming, does overstay its welcome though and I dislike a handful of them. And due to a lack of an option to skip or censor those games, it makes Majikoi S very difficult to recommend even if someone loved the original game. However, if you can overlook the high amounts of porn, then Majikoi S is a treat for anyone that wants more adventures with the Kazama family and the people that surround Yamato Naoe.

It was more fanservice-y than the original but I just love the characters and the atmosphere and the slice of everything and everything that I can't help but still give Majikoi S a very very high score.

Route opinions:

Koyuki's was great but not in the way I was expecting

Agave After should have been longer but still makes it one of my favs

Common routes (2nd Year 1st Semester + Future without Relationship) were also really good though shorter than I was expecting

Original 5 Heroine routes were fine. Favorites were Yukie friendship and Miyako because Miyako

Tsubame and Monshiro routes were good

Kokoro's was fun if a bit short

Iyo/Hermit Crab/Yumiko/Kosugi were short fun distractions

Margit's was.. weird

Takae's existed

Most Dead Ends were good, especially Miyako ones

Generally a good sequel but also disappointing in several ways. While the narration of the action scenes still isn't up to snuff, S is far less reliant on fights in general and the ones that are there have a lot more visual flare to make them more exciting. S adds a lot of new characters and while they're all pretty fun in their own ways, only the select few who got their own routes got much time to shine. I enjoyed the new routes, particularly Kokoro's, but the routes in S typically spend too much time on H-scenes and not enough on building up an impactful story so I ended up preferring the first game. I also just generally prefer spending time with the Kazama family and they really took a backseat in this one. I appreciate them adding a route for Koyuki but making it a retcon of the past feels like a real cop-out. I realize it's a lot of complaining but the eccentric fun of Majikoi is still certainly present throughout the game so it was still a real fun time.