Warning: Heavy spoilers for How To Date a Magical Girl and Doki Doki Literature Club! ahead!





Despite the amazing success of Doki Doki Literature Club! (including a commercial one, if you consider the 1300+ Steam reviews on the $10 Fan Pack DLC), there have been surprisingly few attempts to replicate its formula within the EVN scene, especially among the titles that could be considered of professional quality. While the plethora of mods kept the DDLC fanbase occupied, arguably no major Western VN even attempted to create a similar experience, or utilize some of the characteristic gimmicks used by Dan Salvato to a comparable effect. This, of course, can be seen as a positive development, as uninspired copycat games rarely make for compelling experiences, but elements such as drastic genre shifts, clever fourth wall breaking and weaving an interesting meta-narrative into the experience are far from being overdone in VNs, especially within the English-original niche.

Or at least, this was the case before the release of How To Date a Magical Girl by Cafe Shiba, a game that openly featured a very similar base structure to DDLC – a cute dating sim exterior hiding a brutal horror story, in which nothing is at it seems at first glance. Showing up on Steam in January 2019, it promised 5 romanceable heroines, nearly 40 CGs and over 10 hours of content – rather impressive statistics, especially for a game that originated from a humble, $4000 Kickstarter campaign, and ones that make it hard to dismiss it as a cynical cash-in trying to exploit DDLC's fanbase. In my opinion, however, it managed to fail quite spectacularly, only in small part due to its mimicry of Dan Salvato's game and much more because everything it added to the table was deeply underwhelming. But where exactly did it go wrong?

The mediocre quality of the game’s sprites and background art give the whole experience a rather cheap feel and contrast with the genuinely pretty CGs

How To Date a Magical Girl starts with our protagonist (you can choose both their name and gender, but the difference between playing as a male and a female is nearly non-existent), an painfully-average person with no idea what to do with their future, being enrolled by their best friend, Hikari, to an academy for magical girls. While having nearly powers (their latent magic only activated once in the past, in a somewhat random and uncontrollable outburst), our lead decides to accept the offer and starts their new life of studying magic, quickly meeting a bunch of highly-dateable and surprisingly willing girls. Sadly, the seemingly-idyllic scenario is quickly disturbed with a tragedy – a murder of a student. From there, things pretty much only go downhill, with every new tragedy affecting the protagonist in a more direct manner and turning the whole scenario into a living nightmare, the meaning of which stays hidden under multiple layers of mystery.

From the technical standpoint, the story is told through some rather robust dating sim mechanics, in which you grind four main stats (magic, alchemy, perception and expertise), engage in creating potions and earn money, all in order to effectively court the girls. As you spend time with them, give them gifts and raise affection, you unlock unique romance scenes, up to the slightly-fanservice’y culmination near the end of the story, while the main plotline progresses automatically at its own pace. The game gives you quite a lot of time to work with and various opportunities to optimize your playstyle (like skill training having a double effect on rainy days), so it’s not out of question to maximize affection of a few girls and max out your attributes on a single playthrough, making it reasonably easy to experience most of the content without replaying the game. Even though the plot-related events often come in the way of your stat-rising and dates, taking out time slots unexpectedly or skipping whole days, if you play competently you’ll never be under enough pressure for that to be a real problem. Dialogue choices, while present, are mostly meaningless, really starting to matter only at the very last moments of the game, where you can branch into three different endings (with slight variations to one of them, depending on which girl you romanced – if you finished the game without a girlfriend, it simply won't be available).

There are fun aspects to the game’s magical girl theme, but all of it falls apart due to the setting and everything you do in it acting essentially as a distraction

The giant problem of this whole setup is that the dating sim mechanics and the setting the game builds are basically one giant red herring and are turned mostly meaningless by the final reveal of the story. Not only all the girls, including the one you romanced get killed off (in an admittedly disturbing final sequence, where the protagonist’s sanity simply breaks from the overexposure to violence and losing everyone he cared about), but the world itself is revealed to be a simulation, created to assist with waking the protagonist from an accident-induced coma. Also, the protagonist’s homeroom teacher, Satomi, is revealed to be the perpetrator behind everyone’s misfortunes – an AI, that was meant to help him recover and still claim to be doing that, but actually went rogue and started working on her own, somewhat unclear goals (one of the endings suggests that her ambition was claiming the protagonist's body for herself, but her actions are hardly consistent between the alternative scenarios). This premise does a pretty poor job of explaining everything that happened earlier, but most importantly undermines everything the player worked for up to that point. DDLC’s game mechanics worked well specifically because they were brief and unusual, never making you feel like you were wasting your time and producing interesting feedback, even if the romance plots of the first act were obviously all dead ends. Here, the gameplay far overstays its welcome and while the final horror twist uses the dating sim mechanics as a build-up, it’s hardly good enough to justify all the effort on player’s part. Seeing the whole cast of the story you’ve spent many hours reading as mutilated corpses is surely unsettling , but the shock value here was mostly a goal in itself, rather than leading to some interesting plot developments.

You could argue that even with a twist ending, experiencing the heroine arcs themselves could be a reward in itself, even if they were labelled fake and nullified later on. However, this is another aspect of How To Date a Magical Girl that turns out seriously disappointing. While the setting itself and the way the game uses the magical girl tropes is rather fun, with girls' transformations and powers playing a real role in the story, their personalities and backstories are basic at best. Also, while the unlockable “dates” give some slight spins to each of them, they are simply too short to add something really important and especially the heroines that play lesser parts in the main plot (the deredere childhood friend Hikari, shy Yui and school celebrity Miyu are clearly the most important characters here) feel heavily underdeveloped. This also means the game never really manages to create an emotional connection that would make the later development of killing off the whole cast that meaningful. The SoL content is never very compelling by itself, with writing being consistently very average and humour rather uninspired – Hoshi, Hikari’s magical dog familiar she dumps on the protagonist, is a prime example of that, as a comic relief character that barely does anything genuinely funny or interesting throughout the whole game.

The game’s excessive violence does not completely lose its shock value, especially when it extends to the main heroines, but still feels heavily overdone

Presentation is also something I have a major problem with, although it’s not on a particularly low level – it just underperforms in areas that I rarely see quasi-professional VNs having problems with. While the CG art is for the most part quite good, even if generic, character sprites look flat and unappealing. Same goes for background art, which lacks personality and detail. It’s pretty much a full reversal of the situation typical of EVNs, where good basic assets are often coupled with very few, or underwhelming CGs and honestly, as you spend most of your time with How to Date… on stat grinding and short dialogue sequences, better character and background art could do wonders for the overall enjoyment factor of the game. In the later parts of the story, the game introduces visual and sound gimmicks representing the protagonist’s waning sanity and glitches within the VR setting, quite reminiscent of some tricks used by DDLC. However, most of them consist of rather basic colour filters and changing the ways of displaying text and while writing accompanying them can be decently disturbing, these are the moments when the VN really does feel like a poor imitation. Also, some stylistic choices, like the “real form” of Satomi, are rather laughable and undermines the game’s climate even more.

How To Date a Magical Girl is a strange game, as it doesn’t look terrible when you look at its production quality or various parts of the story, but somehow it manages to consistently undermine itself and turn out as less than the sum of its parts. Decent stat management mechanics are wasted by being made irrelevant through the twist ending. The heroines are proclaimed figments of the protagonist’s imagination and then unceremoniously killed off after hours of investment from the player. It wastes its setting and emotional buildup through a set of underwhelming endings. Playing through it is not without its share of fun, but in the end, it mostly just leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth. For all these reasons, I can’t really recommend buying this VN, but I hope the developers can learn from these mistakes and create something more memorable in the future – considering the technical competence shown in How To Date a Magical Girl, they're clearly capable of doing so.

Final Score: 2/5

Pros:

+ Good CG art

+ Fun use of magical girl tropes

+ Well-crafted and reasonably fun dating sim mechanics

Cons:

- Dating sim elements are ultimately meaningless

- Shallow heroines and romance arcs

- Mediocre character and background art