1060: Magical Diary

Still feeling shitty, but you don’t want to read entry after entry about how shitty I feel, so I’ll talk about a game I’ve been playing instead. I’ve had it in my Steam library for probably well over a year now — possibly more — but have only just got around to it. And wouldn’t you know it? It’s great.

The game in question is Magical Diary. This game initially attracted my attention with its promise of combining dating sim-like mechanics with dungeon crawling and puzzle solving. Any combination of “dating sim and…” will immediately get my attention and has done ever since I played Persona 3 for the first time, and here it’s particularly well-implemented.

Here’s the setup: you’re a 16 year old girl (yes you are!) who has recently been inducted into Iris Academy, a Hogwarts-like establishment in New Hampshire that trains witches and wizards in the ways of pentachromatic magic. During your time at the school, you’ll be juggling your time between studying the five colours of magic, each of which unlocks various different types of spells; managing your stress levels (which, naturally, increase with too much studying); and getting to know your fellow students, some of whom are rather more odd than others.

The gameplay is something like ancient eroge (and particular favorite of mine) True Love — at the start of each week, you set up your schedule, choosing which classes to attend (if any) and then letting the week unfold. Depending on your whereabouts at various points in the week along with past choices, numerous events will unfold and you’ll have the opportunity to do things like run for class president, shop for magical accessories (which, pleasingly, appear on your character avatar as well as affecting your various stats) and, of course, go on dates.

Every so often, the school will throw you an “exam”, which involves tossing you into a dungeon and demanding that you find your way out using the spells you’ve managed to learn. Generally there are several ways to solve a dungeon — for example, in one early case, you’re locked in an area with no apparent exits, so you can do several things: methodically search the walls for illusions, cast a spell to stir up the air and indicate where the way out might be, cast a spell to determine if any living creatures passed by recently and so on. As you level up your five colours of magic, you learn a variety of interesting-sounding spells — and this isn’t your usual “fireball, ice bolt” and that sort of thing — no, here you’re dealing with things like empathy spells, manipulating matter, fooling the senses and all sorts of other things. It’s really quite something.

I’m not that far into it yet, but I’m liking what I’ve seen so far. The graphics are good, the music is catchy, the writing is witty and full of character and the gameplay is interesting. It also looks like being a game that will be well worth replaying several times to tackle situations in different ways — I’ll be very interested to do so when the time comes.

Right. Time to dope myself up on drugs and try and get some sleep. Or possibly play some more Magical Diary. One or the other…