Ratings and Reviews by EJ

Astralily is a first IF effort by an enthusiastic young author. It's clearly a labor of love, and gives me a pleasant nostalgia for the unfinished fantasy epics I wrote when I was younger - big jumbles of all the tropes I loved and ideas I thought were neat. There's nothing like really luxuriating in some wish-fulfillment-y genre fiction. I'm also happy to see more magical girl IF, and that it has a lesbian romance and a multiverse plot is even better. There are a number of cute moments here (I enjoyed the bit with the cat), and some well-used multimedia elements. (I liked the newspaper in episode 1 and mostly liked the backgrounds; there are one or two places where the font colors chosen for character names don't contrast well, but I've seen much worse in that regard.)

As is to be expected from an inexperienced author, there are also a number of places where the work could use a little more polish. I would like to see how this looks after a good proofread, especially to fix all the missing periods at the ends of sentences. The cast size also grows very fast, and I think it would be nice if existing characters got some strong establishing moments before more characters were added, as by the end of the currently available story I was having trouble keeping track. And not all the multimedia felt well-integrated; images of characters and locations often felt more like a gesture of giving up on trying to describe things in an evocative way than an integral part of the piece (though I might feel somewhat differently if they were incorporated into the piece rather than linked on external sites). The occasional use of emoji also felt like a substitute for describing how people looked or sounded. In the script format that this piece is written in, you don't even need to be that subtle; an "(excitedly)" or "(with a huge smile)" at the beginning of a line could be a solid replacement for "😄😄😄" or the like.

Regardless, it's a fun idea executed with a lot of verve, and I hope the writer keeps at it!