View RSS Feed

Karifean's Blog of Visual Novels

Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! Review

Rate this Entry
Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! (lit. Do Love Me Seriously!), or just Majikoi for short, is a visual novel developed by Minato Soft. It's very long and expansive yet consists almost entirely of lighthearted slice of life.



Overview

The initial setup of Majikoi is surprisingly reminiscent of Little Busters!. The main cast of characters is a group of friends that has been together for a long time, and the subject of how long they'll really stay together comes up very early on. They're led by a charismatic male leader who returns from a journey very early in the story and constantly comes up with random fun ideas. Other members include a guy who flexes his muscles all the time because they're just that amazing, a red-haired girl constantly likened to an animal even having a sprite with said animal's ears and a black-haired older sister type girl who's ridiculously fast and good at fighting. In the early parts of the story the group consists of more guys than girls, but that turns around with the addition of some extra female members. There is a duel system in place that allows battles between students in the school they attend.



Totally not Masato Jr. on the left and Rin and Haruka's lovechild on the right.

But the similarities only go that far and Majikoi turns out to be, in fact, very different from Little Busters! both in tone and story. For one, Majikoi is fun and games for about 95% of its plot, and the while the other 5% are more serious, it's nowhere near the level of drama of a Key game.

In a nutshell, it's lighthearted highschool everyday life with tons of anime humor and crazy colorful characters for about 50 hours.



Structure

Majikoi has a wonderful structure. After a prologue that takes enough hours to even put Fate/Stay Night to shame you get to see the opening movie and following that Majikoi unveils its actual structure. You can get a tutorial on how it works in the main menu, but it basically boils down to "click character -> view scene involving them -> continue clicking them until the orbs below them are all gone -> enter their character route". The available characters vary with every day and you can always stay at home instead of viewing a new scene. There may be a few complications due to special happenings, but as long as you stick with a single character at a time and just start over from scratch for the next you WILL end up in whichever route you're going for every time.



The five main girls all have romantic routes with up to six extra side routes being unlocked as you complete these main routes. There are also epilogues for four of the five main girls that unlock automatically when you complete their respective routes. If you complete all five main routes, you unlock the final route, the Agave route. It's not the "canon story" by any means, as Majikoi has no such thing, but it's a fitting end as it centers more around the group as a whole rather than any individual member.

Your actual choices during the story don't affect much barring a couple scenes. There are some "instant bad end" choices and in both the prologue and Momoyo's route you can end up with a bad end over the long term due to bad choices, but other than that you can go wild without any particular repercussions. Unless you don't like towels.



Finally, as a neat easteregg, there are small scenes consisting of only a few lines of dialogue waiting for you every time you turn off the game. A nice touch, in my opinion.



Story

As I've already said, Majikoi has a very lighthearted story, but that ties directly into its underlying theme of friendship. The Kazama Family is very tightly knit and they all play off each other and make up for each other's shortcomings so well. Pretty much all of the story paths have a few nice moments showcasing just how much they all really mean to each other. I loved that.

Another big thing in Majikoi is the fighting. All the girls in the group, as well as a huge amount of supporting characters, are fighters. The fight scenes are all as unserious and silly as the rest of Majikoi though, with very few exceptions.



Every route does have a major conflict though, and it's mostly by everyone helping together that it's overcome. If you've ever had that feeling in a visual novel like all of the characters except for the MC and the focal heroine take a major backseat and are all but forgotten about in the character routes, Majikoi doesn't do that at all. Every single character is still there and contributing at any point in time.

The conflicts range from bullying based on heritage to a love drama to a city-wide battle tournament to a serious threat to the very existence of the Kazama Family. I can honestly say that I found none of the conflicts to be particularly engaging, but the humor more than made up for that. Majikoi just isn't a serious story and I doubt it ever will be.



The one primary problem I had with Majikoi was in its 18+ content. Not gonna lie, none of the H scenes are even remotely meaningful or story-critical in any way. It's porn, nothing more. And there's a lot of it. It's not as bad as Kara no Shoujo, but still. Geez.



But overall, I appreciate the light tone of the game. This is most certainly no nakige, and it was never meant to be. Majikoi is just having a good time. And that's just fine with me.



Characters

Naturally, this game is very character-focused. What with the game being almost entirely just slice-of-life, the characters are what carry this novel from beginning to end. And they sure do a good job at it.

First up, the main character is Yamato Naoe. He has no dramatic origin story of being saved by the Kazama Family or anything like that but he's just as enthusiastic about the group as everyone else. He's the "tactitian" of the group, having earned a reputation as an extremely good and economic thinker. He's not charismatic the way some other characters are, but he sure has his strengths.

I'll go through the main girls one by one.



Momoyo Kawakami is the older-sister-type girl in the group, is a little addicted to fighting, and she takes the cake as the most hilariously overpowered martial artist in anything I've ever seen. She literally calls Yamato "younger brother" and very much treats him that way. But even being as strong as she is, she doesn't put herself over the others even slightly, and still accepts Capt as the leader of the group wholeheartedly.



Kazuki Kawakami, dubbed "Wanko" by everyone in the group, is Momoyo's adopted younger sister. She's incredibly diligent and hardworking and constantly trains herself as her goal is to be her sister's rival in fighting. Whether or not she has a legitimate shot at that is up in the air, but her unbreakable spirit is quite captivating to some onlookers.



Miyako Shiina is the archer in the group. She joined the group as a result of them rescuing her from isolation and bullying and since Yamato was the one pushing for it she is seriously in love with him. Like, really, she spends most of her time in Yamato's presence attempting to woo him or trick him into saying something that could be misconstrued as him loving her back. She's pretty aggressive in her advances to say the least and while Yamato is conscious of her, he feels he shouldn't reciprocate or casually accept it until he's sure of his own feelings towards her.

She's a pretty good sport when Yamato gets romantically involved with any of the other girls though. It's not that she gives up on him, but she doesn't want to get in the way of his happiness.



Yukie Mayuzumi spends most of the prologue with vain attempts at socializing, something she's extremely bad at. Besides getting flustered very quickly when trying to talk to people, she also carries around a stuffed horse called Matsukaze, whom she voices herself every now and then, speaking in a far more sarcastic tone than usual. But once she manages to join the group, it turns out that she's actually a pretty sweet girl and gets along with everyone quite well.



Finally, we have Christiane Friedrich, the transfer student from Germany. She has a tendency to be very much "holier than thou" in her convictions regarding justice and honor, which clashes a lot with Yamato's far more ruthlessly economical mindset. But she also really likes cute things like stuffed animals. And then there's her father, a German army general who straight up announces that the army will exterminate any guy who dares to make a move against her. I was quite surprised she doesn't say a single line of horrendous Japanese German though.



Besides these we also have Capt, Moro and Gakuto to round out the main group. Moro is a nerd who doesn't stand out much, Gakuto is a literal musclehead, and Capt? Capt is smurfing great. He's incredibly random and constantly keeps everyone in good spirits, a charismatic, awesome leader figure for the group.



Now these are just the members of the Kazama Family; Majikoi's cast of supporting characters is HUGE. You have a good number of classmates, students in a rival class, the teachers, the instructors at Kawakami Temple, random fighters from all over the world, random delinquents, the prime minister (because why not), and more, and more, and more.



While some of the side characters can get a little annoying sometimes, others really spice up the cast. You're bound to find some you enjoy. I believe this is the first visual novel I've read with such a massive cast of supporting characters that aren't particularly relevant to most of the story, but just there to be fun. It was nice.



Soundtrack

Haven't got much to say here. The opening is catchy as hell, and the title screen theme is just an instrumental version of it. Just about all of the tracks on the OST just add to Majikoi's bright atmosphere. Not many standout tracks besides the opening though.



Summary

Majikoi is a rollercoaster of fun. Nothing more, nothing less. If that's your thing, and you're not turned off by the adult content, I'd say give it a shot. The characters are colorful and cover pretty much all the anime bases, and the story complements the atmosphere with juuust enough feel-good stuff to keep you reading.

I really had a good time reading through this visual novel, and I'm satisfied with that. Thus I give Majikoi a rating of

8.5 / 10

Just don't expect any real engaging drama or serious undertones.


Comments

  1. Pumpkin's Avatar
    Oh this one looks really good :o