What an amazing story. I won’t go too deeply into it because of spoilers, but I love how personal and focused the story is. It balances drama, comedy, and action really well. It left me wanting more, which is good. All the side story stuff is good too—a lot of comedy, insight, and character moments.
The three main characters, Soujyuro, Aoko, and Alice, are all fantastic and form a strong trio. A lot of the humour and drama comes from their interactions. Soujyuro might be one of the funniest Type-Moon protagonists and maybe even one of the funniest VN protagonists of all time. A lot of the VN’s humour comes from him, and it’s usually just him being himself. Aoko is all around really cool and very, very, attractive. She probably has the best expressions in this. Alice is a very fun and entertaining version of the cold, emotionless type. All of the extended cast is good too, but I do wish some had more screen time.
This is 100% the most high-budget visual novel I’ve read. Koyama's character designs are all striking and detailed, with tons of expressions. It’s also nice how many different outfits everyone has; I feel like you're lucky if a VN gives you two. All the background art is fantastic with amazing detail, all of it does a great job at creating a mood, especially all the stuff at night. Of course, there are tons of high-quality CGs. They do a lot of cool dynamic stuff in the more high tension situations—lots of motion, effects, and just a lot of stuff I would sum up as dynamic. Even outside of these moments, there is a lot of thought put into how characters are positioned in a scene.
I do want to talk about the translation in this game for a bit. This game has way too many grammar mistakes in it; it really needs a patch. There is double spacing, no spacing, words are missing, words are repeated, and there are even spelling mistakes. It does suck but it didn’t ruin it for me. I assume that VN’s translation was rushed to be ready at the same time as the Japanese release, so there wasn’t enough time for proper proofreading.
Another odd thing is how they chose to translate the names. In practically every single Japanese thing I’ve engaged with in my life, "し" is translated to "shi," but here they translate it to "si," so you get names like "Sizuki" and "Yamasiro" instead of "Shizuki" and "Yamashiro." Imagine if one day Fate/Stay Night gets an official translation and Shirou becomes Sirou; that would feel wrong, right? I don’t even know how Fumizuka becomes Fumidsuka. To make all of this even odder, in the digital artbook that comes with the special edition, both the Nasu and Koyama comments wrote Yamasiro’s name as Yamashiro. There is even a short story in it where a character’s name is written as Yoshitsune.
The name thing is odd but not the end of the world, but the game really needs a patch to fix all the mistakes, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up between now and the English physical release, which would make this entire section completely useless to people reading this in the future.
Overall, Witch on the Holy Night is a really strong start as the first official Type-Moon visual novel in English, and I hope this leads to more like the Tsukihime remake coming over too.
Please play this.
The three main characters, Soujyuro, Aoko, and Alice, are all fantastic and form a strong trio. A lot of the humour and drama comes from their interactions. Soujyuro might be one of the funniest Type-Moon protagonists and maybe even one of the funniest VN protagonists of all time. A lot of the VN’s humour comes from him, and it’s usually just him being himself. Aoko is all around really cool and very, very, attractive. She probably has the best expressions in this. Alice is a very fun and entertaining version of the cold, emotionless type. All of the extended cast is good too, but I do wish some had more screen time.
This is 100% the most high-budget visual novel I’ve read. Koyama's character designs are all striking and detailed, with tons of expressions. It’s also nice how many different outfits everyone has; I feel like you're lucky if a VN gives you two. All the background art is fantastic with amazing detail, all of it does a great job at creating a mood, especially all the stuff at night. Of course, there are tons of high-quality CGs. They do a lot of cool dynamic stuff in the more high tension situations—lots of motion, effects, and just a lot of stuff I would sum up as dynamic. Even outside of these moments, there is a lot of thought put into how characters are positioned in a scene.
I do want to talk about the translation in this game for a bit. This game has way too many grammar mistakes in it; it really needs a patch. There is double spacing, no spacing, words are missing, words are repeated, and there are even spelling mistakes. It does suck but it didn’t ruin it for me. I assume that VN’s translation was rushed to be ready at the same time as the Japanese release, so there wasn’t enough time for proper proofreading.
Another odd thing is how they chose to translate the names. In practically every single Japanese thing I’ve engaged with in my life, "し" is translated to "shi," but here they translate it to "si," so you get names like "Sizuki" and "Yamasiro" instead of "Shizuki" and "Yamashiro." Imagine if one day Fate/Stay Night gets an official translation and Shirou becomes Sirou; that would feel wrong, right? I don’t even know how Fumizuka becomes Fumidsuka. To make all of this even odder, in the digital artbook that comes with the special edition, both the Nasu and Koyama comments wrote Yamasiro’s name as Yamashiro. There is even a short story in it where a character’s name is written as Yoshitsune.
The name thing is odd but not the end of the world, but the game really needs a patch to fix all the mistakes, and I wouldn't be surprised if it showed up between now and the English physical release, which would make this entire section completely useless to people reading this in the future.
Overall, Witch on the Holy Night is a really strong start as the first official Type-Moon visual novel in English, and I hope this leads to more like the Tsukihime remake coming over too.
Please play this.