Chiyoko Kirishima is a middle school girl living in the city of Kakehashi. Her classmates don’t like her because she hurt one of her bullies not so long ago. Her only friend, Haruka, has a boyfriend and a reputation to uphold. Perhaps in other circumstances they would grow apart. But this time, Chiyoko and Haruka are visited by a strange cat-like creature called Phi. To protect the world from evil, they must join forces and become magical girls. The life of a magical girl isn’t as glamorous as you might think, though. In order to become strong, Chiyoko must inject an extremely painful serum into her spine. Also, while Phi looks like a talking cat, in reality he’s an alien from another planet. Chiyoko and Haruka’s only chance to survive the coming interdimensional monster invasion, he says, is to find an army to fight alongside them. But for a girl like Chiyoko who doesn’t make friends easily, that is easier said than done. RELATED: How Maebashi Witches Updates Magical Girls for a New Generation That’s the story of Mahou Shoujo (Magical Girl), a strategy RPG developed in the Simulation RPG Maker 95 engine by TS and released in 2012. It was later remade as Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo in 2018, this time in the SRPG Studio engine. The game was translated into Spanish by fans in 2024 by Proyecto Shinmahousho, and then into English in 2025 by the same team with the help of Tico Translations . (TS’ Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo+ , a commercial release with an extra storyline, was not translated as part of this effort.) The full English translation of Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is the most excited I have been for a game release this year. This may surprise you considering the quality of releases in 2025. Just the first half of this year included the critically beloved meta puzzle game Blue Prince , the beautiful French role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , and even Too Kyo Games’ video game turducken Hundred Line . Who has time for smaller scale projects in the face of that bounty? The thing is, cool games are being released outside of the limelight all the time. So many that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. That includes translations and re-releases of older games that never had their due abroad. For instance, Sakura Wars 2 was translated into English for the first time this year , and I’d say that’s at least as important to me (if not more so) than Blue Prince . Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is no different. For a long time, folks in the visual novel fandom have talked it up as being one of the best Japanese independent strategy games ever made. Kastel praised it for Hardcore Gaming 101. Quof, the translator of the light novel series Adolescence of a Bookworm , called it one of his 10 favorite games back in 2019, ranking it above Planescape Torment . So the game’s complete English translation was a cause for celebration. But that made me nervous. After all this time, could Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo live up to the hype? RELATED: From Mascots to Heroes: How You and Idol Precure Made the Fairy Formula Into the Coolest Cures Ever As a strategy game, Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is quite basic. You control Chiyoko and her friends in battles against monsters. Just like in Fire Emblem , you maneuver your units across grids to bait and punish enemy attacks. Most battle objectives come down to defeating all the enemies or surviving for a set number of turns. You then have a chance to purchase items from a shop in between chapters, powering up your characters and unlocking new abilities. In this respect, Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo also owes a debt to the Super Robot Wars series. The focus on battles shifts the genre of Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo from a magical girl story into a military fiction story. Battles happen without warning; our protagonists are nearly always outnumbered. They win through aggression rather than friendship or the power of love. Sometimes people die. Over the course of the game Chiyoko transforms from an ordinary girl into a soldier willing to sacrifice people she cares about (or herself) to protect everybody else. It’s a world away from magical girl shows for kids like Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura . The closest comparison for me is early 2000s tokusatsu (live-action with heavy special effects) like Kamen Rider Kuuga . Harsh violence is interspersed with uncomplicated heroism. Chiyoko is a classic heroine in the mold of Yusuke Godai; there’s a darkness to her, but she’ll always put herself on the line to protect others where it counts. Slowly but surely she wins over her allies, who change from fellow soldiers into close friends. It’s heartwarming to watch them build a support system to keep each other safe that stretches across the city and multiple school systems. Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is also the rare magical girl story with a handful of magical boys. They fight alongside Chiyoko without much fuss being made over their gender. The game doesn’t have much else to say about this other than half-baked assertions that these magical boys are “more feminine” than ordinary boys. But by leaving space for them, TS depicts a wider universe than you sometimes see in stories like this. A world where girls and boys coexist, but girls are still without a doubt the main characters. RELATED: Writer and Podcaster Victoria L. Johnson on the Influence of Magical Girls Something I love about strategy RPGs is how each unit’s stats and special abilities open up new opportunities for characterization. You get a good sense of each character’s personality from how they play. For instance, the tennis player Kozue is a reliable fighter whose attacks are both strong and cheap to use. Haruka’s friend Akari isn’t as happy about fighting, but if you invest in her she becomes a very powerful caster character. Hiyori the delinquent girl is underpowered compared to her friends, but has a special ability that lets her reposition units within her range. And so on. Other characters are distinguished by their animations. For instance, Nanami is a caster character with the power to buff your party members, at least on the surface. But she’s also a big tokusatsu fan, so she fights monsters one on one with a Rider Kick. She and every other player character in the game has their own unique combat animations, all drawn by the game’s creator TS. It’s a huge flex for a solo project that gives the cast so much more life than they’d have if TS relied on existing graphics. Chiyoko and Haruka are particularly interesting as characters in combat. At first Haruka is much more appealing to use than Chiyoko, with both healing and close range combat abilities. Chiyoko by comparison has experimental Dark powers, which at first manifest as regeneration and the ability to provoke other enemies in range. Later, though, unique enemies are introduced that only Chiyoko has the power to defeat reliably, with a special attack that does nearly as much damage to her as it does to her opponents. The shifting relationship between these two units mirrors the complex love between the characters themselves. The monsters they face are divided into types, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The greatest danger they pose to our heroines though is numbers. After the first dozen or so chapters, monsters outnumber magical girls by two or three times in each engagement. The fact that you deploy nearly every character in your army in most battles, rather than picking from a list, only makes up for so much. You’ll still feel like you’re fighting your way out of a nest of hungry rats every single fight. RELATED: How Roller Skating, Magical Girls and Sports Anime Inspired WHEELS & ROSES Creator Pearl Low Worse, Chiyoko and her friends rely on MP for their special abilities. Some enemies can only be defeated by these attacks. Use up too much MP, or let too many characters die, and battles change from feasible to unwinnable very quickly. In this way Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo models in its systems the encroaching horror facing Chiyoko and friends. You, the player, are made to feel the same sense of desperation in the face of dwindling resources. Your only consolation is that there is no permadeath in this game; units who die in battle return for the next without any trouble. Battles in the second half of the game (on normal difficulty) can last a good hour or two even if you don’t make any mistakes. You can save whenever you want, but that just adds to the risk that you might accidentally put yourself in an unwinnable situation. The grind of fighting makes it easy to burn out on this game. That said, I can’t help but come back again and again to find out what might happen next to Chiyoko and her friends. If I have a reservation about the game besides the slow pace of its battles, it would be the magical girl costumes. Chiyoko’s “magical girl uniform” is a skintight outfit that’s more like a tokusatsu suit. As she and her friends are attacked in battle, their suits tear under the strain. I don’t necessarily have a problem with sexy magical girls; it’s been a part of the formula since Cutie Honey in 1973. But did they really have to be middle schoolers? It’s those bits that remind you that Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo was not originally a commercial release. Instead it’s a passion project, a full 51 episode military fiction magical girl series. The game is first and foremost driven by TS’ own tastes rather than what sells. That’s not to say it’s particularly experimental. Just that the game, for better or worse, refuses to compromise. RELATED: Meet PrismHeart, a Fantastically Diverse Magical Girl Idol Group Independent strategy RPGs are just starting to pick up in the United States. This year saw the release of Dark Deity 2 as well as Gales of Nayeli , two titles inspired by the Fire Emblem series. TS, though, has been pumping out games like this in Japan for at least two decades. Their first strategy title, Erumani , was published in 2003. Their most recent game, Kuon no Kanata , came out just last year. While visual novel fans are aware of TS’ work, I haven’t seen any indication that strategy RPG developers outside Japan are familiar with it. That’s too bad, because they could learn from this game’s monstrous ambition. Shinsetsu Mahou Shoujo is big, difficult, and rather distasteful from an aesthetic perspective depending on your tolerances. But it’s living proof that the sky's the limit when it comes to independent projects. Chiyoko will save the world whether or not you believe she can do it. That’s what it means to be a magical girl.
