Maho x Roba -Witches Spiritual Home-
Entry posted by Clephas
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Maho Roba is the latest release from Akabei Soft 3, the subsidiary made by conglomerating staff and resources from a number of Akabei Soft 2's other subsidiaries. Now, this game is in a different vein from the games previously released... in the sense that this company has done pretty much everything but a fantasy charage since it was formed.
... I'll be straight with you. My first thought upon finishing this game was that it is exactly like another half-dozen 'average quality' fantasy charage I've played in the past. The protagonist, despite being an adult member of society with an interesting job, somehow ends up working as a volunteer at a girls' magic school. He is a natural magician... who can only use one spell effectively. Moreover, for some reason the role archetype chosen for him in relation to the girls at the dorm is 'lucky sukebe who is the target of constant abuse from the heroines'. I don't think you can get any more cliche than that. Considering how the way the story is set up makes his job and previous experience and maturity irrelevant and constantly reduces him to just another 'sort of perverted protagonist making excuses', I found a lot of reason for irritation throughout this game.
The heroines aren't much better... Shizuru is a standard straight-laced tsundere with an inferiority complex toward her more capable older sister (seen this over seventy times), Konatsu is the 'deredere heroine reunited with the protagonist' archetype, Kuon is the childish but brilliant loli who is afraid of strangers (yet another 'classic' archetype), and Teru is your standard 'Love? Can you eat that?' innocent genki heroine...
The two heroines unlocked by completing one of those four are a bit more interesting (the ancient principal and the lonely genius magician), but their paths don't really show anything more interesting than those of the previous four heroines. By the time I finished this game, I was so immensely bored with the dull cast of characters and pathetic attempts at humor that I was falling asleep in the middle of my day. About the only thing that was consistently funny was the borderline yandere moments Konatsu showed sometimes (always momentary)... and I felt the protagonist only grew less interesting with time, as he regresses to a hormone-driven teenager during the paths.
In short, while this might be a decent choice for someone looking for a really average fantasy charage, it contains every flaw the charage genre tends to inflict on itself in spades, except excessive ichaicha (that was actually decently balanced in most of the paths) and a lack of decent epilogues (though why they went through the trouble to give a solid epilogue to each of these heroines, I have no idea).
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