You have been invited to attend a magical school. Here you can make new friends, learn dozens of spells, face exams in the school dungeons, run for class office, and try to find a date for the May Day Ball.
But be careful! You might end up in detention, be lured into a secret society, be forced to marry your professor, or even be expelled!
Every puzzle has multiple solutions, and the path you choose is up to you. Are you a good witch or a bad witch?
http://www.hanakogames.com/magical_diary.shtml(Check out their other games too, they have some awesome stuff. Long Live The Queen is great too, and currently in Steam Greenlight)
Magical Diary is part (western) visual novel, part RPG, part raising simulation, and a whole lot of fun.
I bought it just recently (it's on Steam), and have been playing it a whole lot since, so I figured I'd make a thread for it and try to get more people to play it.
The biggest appeal of Magical Diary is story and how it's presented. Lots and lots of choices, lots and lots of different sceness and storylines depending on your choices.
At the beginning of the game you get to customize your character (you always play as a female btw, a second chapter with a male protagonist is planned though).
You get to plan what you want to do each week, do you want to take classes in one of the five kinds of magic, do you study on your own, hit the gym, or just laze around, do you go shopping on saturday or do you study some more; and everything you do has consequences.
The most direct of these consequences are showing in your stats. If you study you can get smarter, in the gym you can get stronger, you get better at the different magics and learn new spells, you get more cute and weird based on what you do...
Over the course of the school year you'll have a couple of exams which all play in a dungeon where you'll have to put to use what you've learned. There are different solutions for each dungeon, but all in all these dungeon scenes are rather simple, and apart from some demerits and maybe a detention there's no real penalty for failing.
There are 5 main heroes/heroines you can either become lovers or best friends with, each making for very different experiences over the course of the schoolyear. And even outside of the related storylines, there are a ton of different things to do, making for a huge replay value.
There are lots of events you just hear about or observe as an outsider on your first playthrough (and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th... one) that make you wonder how differently it would have played out if you acted differently earlier. And even more events you discover on a later playthrough that you didn't even notice before. This is not because new things become unlocked after you finish once, but simply because of the sheer mass of options.
The art style is mostly on the cute side (including characters of both genders), and certainly is a matter of taste. There's no voice acting, but all characters have several different expressions, and the music is pretty nice.
All in all Magical Diary is not too serious, and has a big comedy value. It's pretty different from what I usally play, but one of the most entertaining and fun visual novels I know of (and remind you, it's from a western indie group!). And the main reason for that is the humour it has, and its huge replay value.
In a way it feels pretty old school, but at the same time also refreshingly different.
