The recent upsurge in popularity for more visual novel titles on Steam clearly shows that this niche genre is slowly getting more attention from curious fans. That’s always a good thing because we honestly feel that visual novels convey a lot of emotion, oftentimes in a very compassionate way, so that readers can feel more involved as the story progresses. The Witch’s Love Diary is the latest visual novel title from the folks at Qoobrand and Sekai Project, who’ve put together a story that really illustrates the beauty of young love and how over time emotions blossom and flourish into something special. Fleeting emotions, forgotten first love, these are just a sample of what you’ll get while playing with of course more in store down the road.

The Witch’s Love Diary is your quintessential story about the blossoming of love between partners and how this unrequited love can at times have its setbacks. Nevertheless, there’s a lot to discover throughout the game as it dives deep into the minds of Takumi and Alive, who provide us with a male and female perspective on how love is developed over the course of the story. Much like love itself, The Witch’s Love Diary is chock-full of multiple routes for each of the main characters, with sub-character routes being added as well. With so much to experience throughout the game, The Witch’s Love Diary is compelling in its delivery and gives you a pinch of nostalgia as it reminds you of your high school days when love was budding, and everyone was free-spirited.

The story focuses primarily on Alice Nanno, a straightforward, caring, and pretty air-headed student who attends the Hekihou Academy. In spite of her odd behavior at times, she’s well versed in photography, as she’s part of the photography club along with her friends Yakko and Keiko. While she tends to get along with pretty much everyone she runs into, Alice seems to suffer from loneliness and out of her piqued curiosity one evening, stumbles across a diary at the nearby Clock Tower which completely turns her life around. This diary, written clearly by a man, astonishes her even more and from that moment onward her feelings towards this book (and mysterious man) grow even stronger.

While the game does tend to use the same recycled backgrounds to save time, they’re still well designed that over time you don’t really mind as much. The character design overall is pretty standard for a visual novel, but we did like the nostalgic style that was used which sort of reminded us of Key Visual and their Clannad design. Characters aren’t fully animated as you’d find in other visual novels but you’re still able to descry what each character is currently feeling through their facial expressions and body language.

The music in The Witch’s Love Diary is nothing to celebrate too much about but it certainly does the job in setting the tone for emotional scenes between characters. The most celebrated aspect about the game really comes from the voice acting which we feel was stellar. Each character felt very distinct from the other, giving them a unique sense of depth and encouraged you to really listen in on what’s happening. This high quality of voicing is what really helps to bring the story together in a compelling way, and doesn’t leave you feeling bereft towards the end.

The Witch’s Love Diary is one to be taken at a slow pace because there are so many small details that you often miss when you speed through reading too quickly, and those very details make up a lot of the narrative. An example would be the scenes in which Alice lies and bed and reads each unraveled story through Takumi’s perspective, giving readers two different lenses to see through. It can be confusing at times to decipher what’s taking place which is why it’s important to really immerse yourself while reading. There were moments where we mistook Alice for Takumi and vice versa so we had to go back and read the log to make sure we didn’t get lost in the translation.

Since there are multiple routes to choose from it’s always good to pick your favorite character and sort of roll with that one until the end, before jumping onto the next one. We say this because there’s a lot to ingest while playing this game, and because each character has a great deal of depth with regards to their love relationships, it can be a bit hard to keep up with every single one. So in our playthrough, we focused on Hijiri Suou, the beautiful well-endowed priest who resides in the Church near the Clock Tower. We picked Hijiri Suou because of her contrasting persona when compared to Alice and other characters. While most other cast members would fluster once an ecchi word was uttered, Hijiri usually maintained her presence of mind and always made light of every situation. It’s almost as if she had experience prior and because of that, her maturity really helps to compliment the rest of the cast who are still evolving emotionally. One thing we’d like to point out as well is the map system in the game, which allows you to choose which story you’d like to dive deeper into. This helps to make choosing a path much easier at least from our point of view.

What’s really striking about The Witch’s Love Diary is that in spite of Takumi being somewhat of the main male lead in this adventure, we’re seeing all of it unfold through the eyes of a female. This really helps to instill both a male and female perspective which helps to better tell the story, since we get to experience emotions from both sexes. Initially, things didn’t really make much sense since everything felt really sporadic, but once you continue to invest more of your time you start to see how each story is well designed. You come to realize the connection between each character and why they’re a part of the Diary, along with other mysteries that we’ll allow you to discover as you read through. While Takumi may come off as a womanizer for most of the story, he actually helps to create a nice dichotomy between all of the female characters, giving a sense of how each girl truly is.

Eventually, you realize that there’s more to Takumi than what the story invites you to believe and that’s really where the bittersweet moments kick in. In the end, The Witch’s Love Diary drew us in with its captivating narrative and a wide variety of routes to explore, while its visuals helped to convey an emotional message in a simple yet compelling manner. If you love romantic love stories with a splash of comedy then this one is certainly for you!

We hope that you found our review of The Witch’s Love Diary to be a wholesome one and that the information provided was substantial enough to encourage you purchasing the game. There’s a lot to discover about each character and even more so with Alice, and with a well-designed map system allowing for seamless swapping of stories it’s a worthwhile ordeal. Be sure to follow us on social media via Twitter for more anime and game-related posts, and of course share this review with other visual novel fans to help grow this beloved community!

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