Reading the Magical Diary

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 8, 2011

Last weekend, my family and I went to visit my in-laws. I brought my laptop. And a copy of Hanako Games’ new game, Magical Diary: Horse Hall. I spent an entire afternoon playing the game.  I don’t know why this surprised me – I really happily surrendered some “man points” and loved the Cute Knight games.  Magical Diary: Horse Hall is part Cute Knight, part visual novel, and part Harry Potter fan fiction.

Admit it, you have someone in your life who will secretly go “squee” hearing that combination. It might even be you.

The game takes place at a school for magical youth in the United States. You play a girl (sorry, no gender choice with this one, though Hanako hasn’t ruled it out as a possibility for a future installment should this become a series… yes, please) beginning her freshman year, a “wild seed” who is the first of her family to bear these special talents. Consequently, she has no concept of how magical society works.

Sound familiar? Well, it only makes sense, as it allows the player to discover the ins and outs of life as a young witch with their character.  However, the game takes pains to create a unique world of magical entities that only resembles the world of J. K. Rowling in some superficial ways.  A big part of the fun is exploring this world as your character. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but the game won me over in a big way when I found an opportunity to try out a new magical spell at a dance. “What would happen if…?” The results were not good, but were incredibly satisfying to me, personally.  It was a great story point.

The school isn’t just for young wizards and witches. It appears to be home to fairy-folk, a possible vampire (I didn’t really meet her in my original play-through), a demonic character, and possibly other youth not entirely from the mortal world. While they start out fanciful and cute, there can be serious repercussions for taking them too lightly. Magical Diary isn’t afraid to get a little dark. The world isn’t safe. And those who seem cute, nice, encouraging, and trustworthy might not be. There are unhappy things afoot, and sometimes you may only be involved on the periphery of them (though I expect in future play-throughs I may find myself in the middle of hem).

Another thing that really worked for me is the commentary on decisions. So often in RPGs you only get the option to do something obviously correct or obviously stupid or evil. In Magical Diary, most of the decisions were far more interesting than that, and a running commentary justified the decision very much the way I did in my own mind. Maybe I’m just on the same mental wavelength as the designer, but this addition really helped the game come alive for me. In fact, the main character appealed to me a lot for this very reason — she doesn’t jump to conclusions (or actions) that I disagreed with. The game leaves that up to the player. She overhears things, notes things, and files them away for future reference for the player to deal with.  This way, none of the actions seem forced.

Besides making decisions at various events (which can lead to completely different events down the road, from what I can see), much of the gameplay is about building your character through your choices of activities. Unlike other schools, going to class is completely optional and you take the classes at your own pace. Each week you make out a schedule of what you will do – attend a magical class in one of the several types of magic (hopefully raising your skill in those types of magic, and allowing you to learn new spells), attend gym (increasing your “Strong” score), study (increasing your “Smart” score), or just resting. Resting is important – all other activities raise your stress level, and your performance degrades as stress increases. Certain activities, decisions, and equipment (which you can buy in a special shop in the mall) can modify your other attributes – including the “Cute” and “Weird” scores. While “Cute” and “Weird” have no advantage to you in the tests, they seem to be used to determine which events happen to your character – and what relationships become available.

And speaking of tests – these occur about once a month in game-time. This is about right – much more frequent, and they might get tedious, but as it was I was looking forward to them. You are tested by being locked in a dungeon, and need to use your spells and skills to overcome the challenges to escape. At any point you can give up and fail the test – a single failure won’t hurt you much. The fun part is that there is no single way to pass the challenges. You need to take advantage of what spells you know to find a solution. You must be careful as well, as you have only limited spell points to power your efforts.

As far as replayability, I hope Georgina doesn’t mind if I share what she emailed me about the subject: “The dungeon puzzles themselves will stay the same on subsequent playthroughs, although if you build different skillsets you will need to look for different solutions to them. Most of the variation in multiple playthroughs comes from character interaction – who you choose to romance/befriend, how well you do at it, whether or not you win the class election, whether or not you get involved in the secret society, and so on.”

The only thing I really found missing in this game is a limitation in the visual novel approach: It is very demanding content-wise on the developer, and it does limit the degree in which I could explore the game. You can’t introduce yourself to characters until your story presents the opportunity to do so.  You don’t get enough opportunities to experiment with your spells until it’s time to take the tests.

I’m planning on putting the game up in the Rampant Games store over the weekend, but if you can’t wait to check it out for yourself (or have a friend try it out), here’s a link to the demo:

Magical Diary (Windows Version)

Magical Diary (Mac Version)

Magical Diary (Linux Version)

And here’s the trailer video if you haven’t seen it already:

Filed Under: Game Announcements, Impressions - Comments: 9 Comments to Read



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