My Bewitching Perfume

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

My Bewitching Perfume is a Visual Novel released on mobile devices in 2017 and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game casts you in the role of a woman working in a cosmetics company who is inexplicably reassigned to work on the company’s big new collaborative project to create a new perfume… which incidentally also sees you working with a group of attractive men. Yeah, so this is one of those “reverse harem” sorta’ things.

The presentation here has one bright spot, and that’s the artwork for the characters and backgrounds, which is nice, albeit somewhat forgettable. However, the music is repetitive and annoying, and overall there’s not much here to really draw the player in and entice their interest. Given this game’s themes of working with perfumes, you would think the visuals and sound would need to work overtime to compensate for the inability of the game to convey the sense of smell, but no attempt is made to do so at all.

As for the story, I’m sorry to say that it’s a terrible mess. The localization is a bit stilted and awkward, the characters are poorly-crafted stereotypes that aren’t introduced in any sort of compelling way, and the overall story is a mess that’s poorly set-up and yet also dabbles in numerous cliches. Even the player’s character fails to work very well here – she’s not given much of a strong personality of her own, not introduced to the player in any way that gives a strong impression of who she is, and players are not given much in the way of options to shape her personality themselves.

When it comes to the gameplay, well, as I mentioned, there’s very little in the way of choice that seems to matter all that much. At the very least I can say this game makes good use of touchscreen controls, though it works perfectly fine with normal gamepad controls too, save for one issue – the way menu options are highlighted by darkening them is unnecessarily confusing.

In the end… okay, look. I’m not necessarily opposed to the “harem” subgenre of anime-themed media, but give me something to work with here. My Bewitching Perfume doesn’t provide players with an interesting story, compelling characters, memorable artwork, or a nice presentation. This is a Visual Novel that lacks both style and substance, and even those looking for a guilty pleasure read to indulge in some romance will find this game to be a terrible disappointment.

tl;dr – My Bewitching Perfume is a Visual Novel that has players in the role of a woman working alongside numerous attractive men in an anime-style “reverse harem” situation. Unfortunately, the artwork is forgettable, the presentation is sub-par, the story is poorly-written, and the characters aren’t at all compelling. Don’t buy this perfume, it stinks.

Grade: D

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