I have finished
Witch on the Holy Night
I remember the VN community talking about this a decade ago, when all we knew that it looked good and sounded good. The music was by Hideyuki Fukasawa. There was a partial English fan translation patch, but a lot of us were waiting for the full thing to get translated. Now it has finally come to Steam and has been fully translated into English, so I decided to check it out.
The VN is very highly produced. Ofcourse, there are other highly produced VNs like Muv-Luv or Utawarerumono, but this one has better visual directing/storyboarding than those and is able to wring even more mileage out of its plethora or CGs. Rather than introducing you to the whole CG or background, this VN instead has a tendency to start off by showing you slices of the background art, and then eventually shows the whole thing. Dialogue scenes also have a lot of movement and changing of camera positions to make it more visually engaging rather than just having a static camera and a static background with only the character sprites changing. It's hard to showcase all of these movements in a static forum post. I don't think making gifs would sell it very well.
There are lots of small touches that add up, such as when a character enters a dark room and flips on the light and not only does it fade between the darkened and lit room background art, but you also have that spark visual effect reflected in glass. Or when Aoko and Alice are fighting over the hot pot with their sticks. Etc.
It is unfortunate that the writing is not as good as its production values. First, there is far too much prose, which very bad for a book/VN. The most interesting part of a story is the dialogue as that is where most of the plot happens. People will skip prose and go to dialogue because they want to know how a character feels and what they will say. They express reasoning, feelings, and react to events. Dialogue exposes who a character is. Lots of prose in a book is already bad, but it's even worse in a VN when we have the audio-visuals showing us what is happening. I don't need the story to repeatedly stop and dump paragraphs about how Aoko is mad. That was already clear from the visuals. There is also too much technobabble about stuff being pulled out of thin air. There is no puzzle to predict what the solution will be here.
It had a slow start but I wound up getting more invested into the VN as it went on. I think this is the least action heavy of the Type-Moon stuff; there are only three battles and the VN is mostly slice of life shenagains. It is unfortunate that this was to be the first part of a trilogy, but Type-Moon never got around to making the two sequels and likely never will. Would have liked more.
I noticed that the cover advertised the two pig familiars in human forms, and what appears to be Tobimaru's father? But they never appeared, I guess they were intended for the sequels. Probably would have also seen Father Eiri and Sister Yuriko whip out their special weapons too, and maybe a situation so desperate that Alice invokes the third and fourth forms of Thames, and whip out her third artifact.
Stills:
