Preview: Witch & Lily is effective but not romantic
On paper, Witch & Lily sounds great! A dungeon crawling RPG with awesome monster designs and yuri? Sign me up! But despite its strong core concept, executing the early access build feels like having a really boring day.
Premise of Witch & Lily, as well as the basic gameplay loop, is very simple. You create your own unique party from a preset list of jobs, looks, and personalities. Then, with your party of five, you make your way through a monster-filled dungeon to uncover the secrets left behind by the witches. Its main story is pretty standard fare for a DRPG, but the real draw is its relationship system. Witch & Lily markets itself as a yuri DRPG, where nurturing relationships between girls is a major part of the game. Relationships mainly develop during post-dungeon events and quests, although there can also be breakups and jealousy.
Before we get into the negatives, let’s talk about the positives. The art style in the game is very subjective, but I quite like it Witch & Lily‘. The cute aesthetic of the human characters compared to the more grotesque appearance of the monsters comes to mind Puella Magi Madoka Magica. The music is also a lot better than I expected, especially the battle theme and main menu.
Avoiding witches on a map where you sometimes can’t see what’s around or in front of you can be difficult. I often lock myself in a corner, then have no choice but to die. However, it forced me to use the old method of mapping out the dungeons myself. As a DRPG, it plays very well. But it’s really too trivial without the romance system. However, as I’ll explain later, the romance system is quite flawed if you’re interested in yuri as something more than meets the eye.
Even a second in Witch & Lily has proven to have a lot of QOL quirks and annoyances. I play with a keyboard and feel like the game could be better with a controller. It took me a while to learn things like basic controls and menu navigation. Somehow I didn’t expect everything to work using the WASD control scheme. Party planning in particular is really unintuitive. If the game requires or the developers prefer players to use a controller then I wish they would indicate that. The game’s controls rarely appear on the screen. For example, it told me to open the menu to equip skills, but it never told me which button to press. It took me a long time to find my map and menu.
The game’s translation is also rough. It reads a bit awkwardly and has some random words in the sentence. Some words are too long for the window containing them, forcing them to move to the next line. Even though I played the preview in English, I still saw some leftover Japanese in certain menus. However, I’m inclined to believe that the developers will fix this for the final build. Ultimately, the lack of auto-combat can be frustrating, especially when weaklings push you deeper into the abyss.
Those minor issues aside, the core problem I have with the game remains: yuri. Witch & Lily is one of those games whose concept and premise sounds amazing. However, the execution is so clumsy that even the gist can’t really save it. A DRPG that revolves around maintaining relationships between your group and they are all women, you can romance each other, sound Great.
But remember that you are throwing your own party with predetermined personalities and looks. Because there are so many potential characters in the game, it’s understandable that there’s a limit to the game’s dialogue variation. Whether the girls reject each other, break up, or go on a date, each event only has about one or two lines of dialogue. The “conversation” they often have doesn’t make any sense either. My two girls went on a date that went well, but their conversation made it seem like one of them got rejected. It reminds me of those “support chats” in Fire Emblem dawns radiantly. So, other than the strategic benefit, yuri in the game is not very strong.
Honestly, I like yaoi more than yuri. So I can’t say I know what the average yuri fan should expect from a ship. In my games, I tend to pair my cheerful Warrior with my proud Bestia, because they are both frontline attackers who need to get rewards after battle together. The “genki girl” archetype combined with the “proud female warrior” is really cute. But even when they were dating and having fun, the content was so simple that I couldn’t really enjoy it. It’s nice to see that the sooner they come together, the sooner they can reap the benefits in battle. While this mechanic is still really fun, right now I’m not sure it’s strong enough to be what makes this DRPG stand out.
Despite its cute aesthetic, Witch & Lily is an unforgiving DRPG that takes some time to perfect its core romance mechanics. It also has a lot of small annoyances and issues that they need to address. As of press time, the game has received a mixed reception from Steam, with most other players having similar views. I hope the developers can find a way to use player feedback and incorporate some changes and optimizations into the final product.
Witch & Lily in early access and available on Windows PC.
