WITCH ON THE HOLY NIGHT

Witch on the Holy Night is a great story that I wish had branching paths like their previous visual novels. If I would've known that it was a kinetic novel I wouldn't have bought it.

Visual novels such as this is why I wish Steam had a "meh" option. This story ended up being one of those that started out really strong only to then totally lose steam past the halfway mark and started to fall back on the usual sins I have come to expect out of Nasu' work. Honestly, the story before the amusement park and the story after felt like they were written by different authors. The early parts set up the characters nicely, exposition is kept brief and to the point as well as relevant to the current situation, both the action and the downtime felt like they advanced both the plot and characters, and there are hints at more under the surface waiting to be revealed. There were some hiccups here and there but otherwise really solid. However, after the events at the amusement park it just felt like the whole thing just ground to a halt. Here it really started to feel like it started to fall back on series sins. Characters began to feel more like caricatures of what was previously established, often for cheap jokes. Soujuurou especially felt really bad as he was just a bland punching bag with the intelligence of a rock that the girls constantly abuse. Felt painful to read rather than funny as the author clearly intended. Exposition also started to not only become lengthy and clearly there only to be dumped onto the reader, but also started to engage in a lot of that nonsensical logic that so plagues the series, and both the plot and characters felt like they was just wasting time as it had completely stalled. In some parts it even feels like it is starting to recycle ideas and character beats from Stay Night. And you can really tell that there are moments where you can tell that the story is really trying to do something with the characters, but things just feel really disjointed and underdeveloped with them. Even the climactic battle [spoiler]started to pull out some of the BS stuff that I felt it had been somewhat good at avoiding until then. Soujuurou somehow decking Beo with nothing really being explained plus several narrative oddities and reveals really start to rip one out of the story. A lot of stuff is being hinted at, but nothing is really answered. And it was also here where all the series dubious magic really started to cause my eyes to glaze over and my brain just check out[/spoiler]. One positive though are the fantastic production values with highly detailed art and flashy effects, making it stand out among other visual novels. The soundtrack is also fairly decent with some strong tracks sprinkled in here and there. Honestly though, the VN ended up really disappointing in my eyes mostly cause of how strong the opening hours were and how much it dropped the ball later on.

Great art, poor story. The magic is overexplained to a painful extent despite amounting to little more than random ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Character motivations are weak and there are no stakes, empty threats are thrown around constantly yet nothing significant ever happens to any of the characters. The writing is, for lack of a better term, pseudo-literary, overusing metaphors and such just for the sake of sounding sophisticated when really it just comes off as annoying. Finally, the translation sucks, a fair few grammatical and spelling errors, and inconsistent phrasing, the text says both "could care less" and "couldn't care less", I mean if you're gonna say it wrong at least be consistently wrong. There are much better VNs you could be spending your time and money on.