YMMV / How To Date A Magical Girl!

• Esoteric Happy Ending: The happy ending of this game is apparently staying with your girlfriend, but doing so means staying in the simulation and letting your physical body waste away. By contrast, choosing to stay with 54T0M1 aka Satomi (the mystery ending) actually brings out the best possible ending: she's touched by your love for her and decides to keep you sleeping in order to devote herself to you as well. While your time with her gets cut short when the medical team removes her AI chip from your brain, you make a full recovery and Satomi doesn't hijack your body.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Midway through Hikari's dates, her mother's torture escalates into a knife fight, and at the end of the game, Hikari dies with knives stabbed onto her back. If you've encountered one of the events, encountering the other would be more dreadful.
  • Miyu joking of breaking your legs if you reject her offer stops being funny when you discover her corpse with all its broken joints.
  • Likewise, Kaori threatening to noose an annoying otaku for not stopping is not as funny when her corpse is discovered hung by her closet.
• Padding: One criticism about the Visual Novel is that the dating sim aspects are drawn out, even by Visual Novel standards, to the point that it's easy to forget that fact that the game contains murder of all things. There's a noticeable gap in thresholds for raising both stats and affection, and it will take a long while to raise them unless you get very efficient with your time management.^note For instance, almost any activity that raises a girl's affection would only raise it by 1% unaided, and you have very limited ways to raise them by any greater number.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game likes to trigger events that forcibly advance time. If you're under the effects of a potion when it happens, you've essentially wasted what's left of that potion by the time you regain full control.
• Shock Fatigue: The way the game uses its disturbing moments for shock value tends to leave most players desensitized by the time the ending rolls around. While seeing the named girls dead is not pleasant, the game slowly kills them one by one and surrounds each death with similar events, turning these moments dull and predictable.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Despite the game allowing you to choose the protagonist's gender, most of the dialogue is written around a male protagonist. That said, the concept of a magical boy is entertained at the start of the plot but never fully explored.
  • Your stats include magical aptitude, alchemy, and perception. There's an implication that having them at the appropriate levels at the right times can influence the plot, but all they're used for is for the game's own Dating Sim mechanics.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The first few in-game days present dialogue choices that can influence the girls' affection for you. However, the Dialogue Tree concept vanishes for the rest of the game and your only source of affection switches to hanging out and giving gifts. The remaining impactful dialogue choices are those during your exams and the Last-Second Ending Choice.

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