The Weekly Stuff #465 - Witch on the Holy Night (Mahoutsukai no Yoru) Visual Novel Review

The second season of our anime podcast, Japanimation Station, is coming to a close tomorrow night with a jam-packed season finale, and we’re bringing you a big chunk of that episode today with our deep dive discussion of Witch on the Holy Night (aka Mahoutsukai no Yoru), the visual novel based on Kinoko Nasu’s first unpublished novel, originally released in Japan in 2012 and released worldwide in a 2022 remake. The remake landed right as we started recording this season of Japanimation Station, and we talked about it at some length in our Top 10 Video Games of 2022 episode in January. So we definitely wanted to do a bigger episode about it at some point, and this is that episode! Witch on the Holy Night is something of a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for the Nasu-verse, featuring all of Kinoko Nasu’s character types and major themes in a single, smaller-scale story, and it’s simple one of the best and richest visual novels ever made.Support the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuffSubscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our sister series about the wide, wacky world of anime: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation  Explore our archives and subscribe to The Weekly Stuff Podcast on all podcasting platforms:https://weeklystuffpodcast.comFollow The Weekly Stuff Wordcast newsletter for regular updates and extra content! https://weeklystuff.substack.comEnding music by Thomas Lack https://www.thomaslack.com/  Read Jonathan Lack’s movie reviews and stay up to date with all our podcast projects at https://www.jonathanlack.comSubscribe to JAPANIMATION STATION, our podcast about the wide and wonderful world of anime: https://www.japanimation-station.com Read Jonathan’s book 200 Reviews in Paperback or on Kindle – https://a.co/d/bLx53vKSubscribe to our YouTube channels! Japanimation Station: https://www.youtube.com/c/japanimationstation  Purely Academic: https://www.youtube.com/@purelyacademicpodcastSupport the show at Ko-fi ☕️ https://ko-fi.com/weeklystuffOriginal Music by Thomas Lack https://www.thomaslack.com/©2012 - Present Jonathan R. Lack & Sean Chapman