Spirited Heart is a commercial original english language raising/dating sim developed by Jack Norton over on the LemmaSoft forums. It's an addictive little game that I've just started playing - and am loving so far. And so is the rest of my hall here at school.

Formal review coming later when I finish all the content. For now, just know that the marriage endings are far superior to the career-woman endings. I fear for feminism. D8

Edelweiss Thoughts

As many of you probably know - Mangagamer.com is a relatively new entrant into the field of commercially translated VNs. Despite being a fledgling company, they've developed partnerships with relatively large VN studios, most notably Overdrive and Circus.

I'm currently working through my first Mangagamer title - Edelweiss.

The summary on the Mangagamer website is completely inaccurate and displays the title as nothing but a pointless sex romp. Such myths have been debunked via BBS and forums, but the misrepresentation is a little upsetting. Still, I, being female, am not a fan of the sex romps, so I was actually happily surprised by the sheer narrative content that Edelweiss offers.

The translation is horrible. No holds barred. This was Mangagamer's first title and it shows. The game is riddled with grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sometimes even blatant translation errors.

Still, the game is playable to the point where you can still enjoy the story. It's very episodic - generally funny (sometimes naughtily so) episodes of the hero (Kazushi) and his three doofus friends make up the main content of this game. There are few choices, and I've heard that only one really makes any difference as to your ending. I've yet to test this, as I'm still working through my first playthrough.

I'll update when I'm done - give you my thoughts and whatnot.

It's Gotta Have a Purpose, Because Every Blog Has a Purpose

For anyone reading this christening post of Magical Girl Studios, welcome and thanks for visiting!

At this moment, this blog is ridiculously sparse. Default template, no profile image, no fancy header. It's kind of ridiculously bare bones. But considering Magical Girl Studios is very bare bones right now, I think it's appropriate.

What is Magical Studios? To put it bluntly: a one woman visual novel/Ren'Ai game development team.

A couple of years ago, I discovered Ren'Py, a visual novel engine created by PyTom and written in Python. Ren'Py is hardly a plug-n-chug engine - it requires basic knowledge of Python. Luckily, if you're code-tarded (like I am), there is plenty of assistance to be found via tutorials and the LemmaSoft forums.

I'm currently developing my Bishojo title in Ren'Py. Slowly but surely, the game is getting finished.

I do it all - art, writing, coding, the works. And pretty much strictly as a hobby. My goal in creating original English language freeware is to spread the influence of these games, get more people interested, and more games brought over the west and translated into English from Japan.

I'm a HUGE fan of these games. Visual novels, Eroge, Dating Sims - any Ren'Ai game is pretty much a hit in my book. So when I'm not making vague posts about progress/art/whatever, this blog will definitely be devoted to any VN I'm currently playing.

Hopefully the blog will also get a bit spiffier in the future.

Thanks so much for reading! Hope exciting things are in store for MGStudios!