The last two months were a real roller coaster of emotions for me. After a good few years of looking through my backlog of VNs without actually reading any of them I stumbled upon an old, interestingly sounding game titled “Majikoi! Love Me Seriously!”. Despite a lot of high praise I found about it online, I jumped into the story without expectations and boy oh boy was it worth it.

This discovery ended up with me going through a good chunk of the series (from the original game, through sequel and A disks) as well as Wagahime (the latest major release of the studio). I’ve read more VN content in the last month or two than I did in the last few years - not only that, I still want more. All thanks to Majikoi.

I can’t say I’m a VN expert. I’ve read maybe a dozen titles before this, so I can’t say how good the series is compared to other titans of the genre. I can however say that the original game is my favorite VN and something I ended up loving way more than I thought possible. It’s such a wonderful story about friendship, self-improvement and working towards your goals it makes me warm and fuzzy inside just remembering it. Sure, it has its issues (some stemming from when it was created, some from the fact it’s an eroge) but all of those flaws end up melting away after finishing each route. It’s a rare case where a game clicked with me enough I’m unable to hold onto my grumblings about the bad stuff.

I don’t know what I’m going to read next. On one hand the world of VNs is so vast and filled with quality there’s no end to interesting stories. On another, I don’t know many titles that feel like Majikoi and that’s kind of what I’m still craving for. Guess I’ll just have to search and hope for the best.

Sorry for rambling. I’ve been cleaning my hard-drive today and decided to watch the credits movie from the first game before archiving it - even that made all of the feelings flood back to the point I needed to get this of my chest. I love this stupid game, it makes me happy.

  • neo (he/him)MA
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    4 months ago

    That’s one of the big problems with finding a novel you really like early on;

    How in the world is anything else supposed to compare?

    • Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.worldOP
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      4 months ago

      I hope I didn’t make it sound too dramatic - I did play VNs I liked before so I know I’ll be able to find stories to enjoy. Majikoi is just one that stuck with me in a very specific way (it’s the main reason I mostly focused Minato Soft’s titles since then).

      I kind of gave up searching for novels that would give me similar feelings for now and just slowly go through other “normal” games and VNs, jumping to an unfinished route of one of the Majikoi games whenever craving for those characters comes back. That’s the best I can do at the moment.

      On one hand you’re right, how in the world is anything else supposed to compare? On the other, I’m just glad I played it - those games made me genuinely happy and that’s not something I can say about many games I’ve gone through (VNs or otherwise).