[h1]Introduction[/h1]
Witch College is a short adult romance Visual Novel set in an art college in a small town, by indie developer, Kavorka play.
The games tells a story of a male student (you), who has grown up in the town together with his best (female) friend, Aki. A new arrival, Sam -- a hot blonde -- appears at the college one day in the week before the big Halloween dance, and your life takes a definite turn for the weird.
[h1]Story[/h1]
The game is very short. It took me less than 50 minutes to play through to the first ending of the base game, with no skipping or backtracking. I spent another half hour or so finding all of the alternate paths -- the game has about 10 decision points that determine how your relationships progress with each of the four main female characters. It was updated a few months after release with two free extra stories, though these are extremely short -- about 5-10 minutes each. But they're still a nice free addition to the base game.
The writing quality is pretty good, with few grammatical mishaps, though the sex scenes are a little painful to read -- then again, it's written from a young man's point of view, so maybe they're reasonably in character. Some of the dialogue and responses seem a little unbelievable, but the story is about witches, so suspension of disbelief is the order of the day.
A couple of times I had the same few lines repeated, as if there were a scripting bug. There were also a few dialogue lines attributed to the wrong person: usually "Me" when they were supposed to be one of the girls. This didn't really matter; it was just a bit distracting.
[h1]Art[/h1]
The art is done in a style that I rather enjoyed, but many may not. It looks more like western art than Japanese or Chinese anime, but it's consistent and clean, and mostly quite good. The included CG images -- including the uncensored H-scenes -- are done in the same style and look to me as though they're probably by the same artist as the paper-doll character sprites.
The sprites themselves are much more static than I'm used to, with no animations and, most glaring to me in the final scene, only one outfit per character. I mean, really, what girl would wear her normal day clothes to a big college dance!?
Backgrounds are fine, if nothing special, and as is pretty standard for the genre, background characters are simply not included at all in the visuals.
[h1]Other Considerations[/h1]
Unlike many modern VNs, Witch College doesn't include full voice acting. There are a few brief sound effects or exclamations from some of the female characters, but that's it. For the asking price that's not really surprising, but it's something to bear in mind if you like to listen to the characters speak. I can't recall whether it had any sound effects. Music was exactly what you'd expect: generic anime-style muzak.
The interface is also pretty limited. Though it includes a stupidly fast skip feature with multiple options, this doesn't appear to work: I've been unable to get it to skip only unread text, no matter which setting I select. There are lots of save slots, at least, so you can easily save before each decision point.
There's a CG gallery to peruse unlocked images at your leisure, but there are no Trading Cards or Achievements. The CG gallery is confusing, with a whole page left unused after finishing all of the possible story paths. Perhaps extra content was planned, but never eventuated.
[h1]Pros & Cons[/h1]
Pros:
+ Consistent art; Aki looks hot in her underwear
+ Lots of choices; multiple endings
+ Reasonably good writing
+ Uncensored
Cons:
- Broken skip
- Very short
- Limited voices
- Confusing CG gallery
[h1]Final Thoughts[/h1]
Witch College is a fun, light-hearted romance VN with uncensored sex scenes and a few characters to choose from. It's rather short, but it's also branching, which is always good. Unfortunately the interface doesn't make tracking down all of the branches and endings much fun. It doesn't do anything new, but it's a reasonably solid VN.
Aki is best girl.
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