Receiving your invitation to come study sorcery at a magical academy is the dream for many a millennial. I think some pop culture media license may have contributed to that, or something. However, that is a dream for complete pussies. Virgin losers obsessed with their dumb little wizard books. Where is the harem? Where are the monster girls? The rampant sexual misadventures? Move over Hogwarts Legacy; Magical Waifus Academy is here to show you a REAL fantasy.

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Your character becomes the first and only male student at a prestigious academy for witchcraft. Not only do you get to discover a world of magic and fantastical creatures, you also have exclusive access to the nether regions of anyone (or anything) you find there. Whether that means romancing fellow students, seducing the staff, or going on RPG adventures to “defeat” wild monsters. It’s all up to you.

Okay, let me be real from here on out. This game is fucking rubbish. From its story to its gameplay. Even the sex scenes are bad. I just wanted to have a go at Harry Potter alright.

Let’s start with the basics. You are free to explore the academy, which will take you approximately a minute or so. There are about 8 screens in total, of which only about 4 are actually relevant. You can meet students and teachers and have conversations with them, but the writing is incredibly dry. It’s wordy, it’s keen on dumping uninteresting lore on you; I didn’t like it. And despite so much lore being written for each and every character, their relevancy in the story can be over in about 2 minutes. Ask all the lore questions, effortlessly unlock your sex scene, and never speak to that character again.

The actual objective of the game is to grow stronger. You can do mini-games to grind stat points and take exams, but these are very frustrating. You have to spend like 3 minutes on a mini-game that you have to do near-perfectly, just to get the tiniest incremental boost. It’s far more lucrative to go into the semi-random dungeons and fight monsters for “arcana” points. That’s not very fun either, but at least you’ll never waste a bunch of time just to walk away with 0 gains.

Fighting of course involves casting spells. As exciting as that sounds, you’ll quickly find that it’s repetitive busywork.

When you run into a monster, you have to wait for a bar to fill up before you can select 1 of 4 equipped spells. You then hammer out a quick-time event that dictates how powerful the resulting spells is. That sounds functional, but God does this system have problems. First up, only having 4 spells at any time makes combat very restrictive. 3 of those slots will likely go towards an attack spell, the shield spell, and the healing spell, leaving little room to experiment with your loadout.

I was stuck with the exact same spells for 80% of the game. An issue that was made worse by the fact that the QTE’s are the same every time you use a spell. Hours of my gametime was just me hammering out the exact same chain of inputs over and over and over again. Not just because I didn’t dare to experiment, but also because I didn’t get anything to experiment with. You only get new spells when they spawn as collectible items in the randomized dungeons. I didn’t get anything worthwhile until the tail end of the game, when the grinding had long since soured my opinion of it.

To be clear, you’re expected to do this for hours upon hours. You need TONS of experience to level up your stats to a point where you can comfortably take on the later exams and dungeons. Monsters aren’t hard to fight necessarily, but they do have an absurd amount of health. Each combat encounter drags on and on, especially when you have multiple foes to deal with at once. It makes you want to skip fights whenever you can, but then you’re underpowered for the later floors. You get wiped out by a boss or overpowered enemy, lose a bunch of arcana, and back on the treadmill you go.

Having done hours of grinding just to make the tiniest bit of story progress, I can confidently recommend not even bothering with it all. Look up the cheats, give yourself an unholy amount of experience, and skip the grind. You don’t lose out on ANYTHING and instead get to actually move on with the game at an encouraging pace

While I criticized the plot for being dry, I do have to admit that the game has some fun secrets to uncover. It gives you hints on how to unlock the raunchier scenes, which usually take several steps of easter egg hunting. You need to go to places at specific times or while wearing certain costumes, find out information and perform little side-quests. It’s not amazing, but I had fun figuring it out. It’s at least more effort than the instances where you get sex scenes just from checking off enough dialogue options.

There are some technical shortcomings, however. The keyboard controls aren’t exactly logical and the interface on the right side of the screen is tedious to use. Menus sometimes pop up and then you press a button to get rid off it, but that does something unexpectedly as well. I kept pressing enter to try and interact with people, except pressing enter opens the cheat menu instead. I felt like a fumbling moron just trying to do some very basic actions.

“Why didn’t you reconfigure the key bindings then?”

Because doing that caused the game to lock up on me twice, costing me unsaved progress.

I also ran into other problems. The game sometimes failed to load scenes, didn’t unlock art even when I met the criteria, dialogue choices can glitch out or overlap, and buttons can occasionally not be pressed despite the game prompting you to do so. Conversations that advance the story can also strangely loop and imply they give you the necessary items multiple times. I don’t know why they didn’t just remove those options after you got what you need or changed the text to reflect that you can progress. None of these are big, game-breaking deals, but it reflects an untidy approach to design. It makes the game feel sloppy

Speaking of obtuseness; I have not seen any other hentai game on Steam where the hentai content is this annoying to access. Unlike other eroge-styled games, there is no written dialogue to accompany the sex scenes. It’s voice-acting only. You are just awkwardly listening to dialogue while staring at a static illustration. These illustrations are nothing to write home about and, since you can’t skip spoken dialogue, you just need to wait and hope the other illustrations are nicer. Or that there are other illustrations at all. After a while, I took up the habit of alt-tabbing out of the game and coming back 3 minutes or so later, to see if the art had changed. This doesn’t work, however, because some scenes loop infinitely or only show changes in the illustration very briefly.

Just forget about it all. Unlock the sex scene, immediately exit, and then look it up in the gallery instead, You can switch between illustration with the arrow keys, even if you didn’t stick around for long enough to actually see them.

It also has to be said that the game is plain ugly. The blocky pixelart aesthetic mixes poorly with the monster girl anime look. All the characters look kind of underwhelming and the improvised look of the menus make the game feel a bit cheap. It reminded me more of old flash games than a premium product that you’d buy on Steam.

You can also mate with the monsters in the dungeons, but this is too much of a bother to pull off reliably. It’s reliant on a bunch of factors; I believe they need to do damage to you while their pink meter is filled up and you have no defenses up. Even when I deliberately try to let the monsters hurt me though, it doesn’t usually do anything. Even when I use the seduction magic, it sometimes randomly doesn’t work. A shame too, because the animations are quite nice. You can rewatch these scenes if you unlocked them in the gallery, though I again recommend a cheat in place of actually trying to collect them manually.

This does put one before a difficult decision. You can put up with the grind and have a horrible time. Even risk physical injury as you rapidly hammer out the same button combinations for hours on end. You do all that and your reward are some of the most rubbish hentai scenes you can have the displeasure of paying for. Alternatively, you can use cheats to power yourself up or unlock all of the content outright. Except you then don’t have much of a game to play. Even if you decide to take on the dungeons, that amounts to about 45 minutes of content. Maybe an hour and a half if you decide to do some stuff in the school as well.

Faced with a situation where you can only pick between two poisons, I recommend buying a different hentai game instead.