Book 1 : New Game+ Complete

I've often talked about how Persona 4/5 inspired Love of Magic, from it's basic structure (mixing sandbox and fixed events) to some of the character archetypes. For those curious, here's Laura Loveshanks, an early streamer, talking about Persona in Book 1.

One of the things I love about Persona is the idea of a New Game+. This is where, after completing the game, you can go back to the beginning, create a New Game+ playthrough and load your existing savegame.

So what's involved in that? Well, first of all I start you with higher stats, so you reduce grind. You start with 15/15/15 in stats, 10,000 cash and all your gems from the end of Book 3.

The game also notes a bunch of the decisions you made, and will occasionally adjust to them. Core dialog changes (as above, the first chat with Katie, where she describes gems to you). Look for early Emily dialog, a lot of the stuff regarding the Chosen, and occasionally other random events. 

I also went through and updated visuals in several different places; new introduction videos for various characters, updated character spines for some places, and tweaked visuals.

At one point I got maybe too ambitious, and started looking at redoing all the Homework and sex scenes you have in the Bedroom in Edinburgh

Obviously, re-doing all of the scenes there would be... work. Hundreds of images. But I figured it might be worth it, just to make sure everything is properly grounded.

What I hadn't accounted for (but should have) was the nostalgia factor. People had a lot of good memories from the old place, and I got requests from Discord players if they could at least keep the old one as an option. At which point I realized that I was doing something nobody but me wanted, and I'd rather spend the tens of hours it would take me to complete on something else :) Not every experiment is successful, but we still try.

Alongside the purely NG+ content (which involves a storyline hinted at when you fight Hel and her siblings in Book 3), there's also new "fan service" events added. Next to #Jenny4Chosen the next most popular request has been the Kult Of Kath, who desperately wanted some kind of sexy content with everyone's favorite Werelynx.

I decided to slip a questline called the Huntress of the Highlands into the game, spawning as always off a book you buy from Diana. Read it before Day 112 to unlock a new scene in the bathroom at night.

In addition I added a new questline for Jenny and one for Olivia (cover image).

On the technical side of things, the game uses the final Book 3 game engine (I basically ported Book 1's content to Book 3's engine). That means you get all the usual advantages, like rollback, animating backgrounds, more monsters to fight, etc.

I also added Gamepad support, improved Steamdeck support (finally bought myself one), and added a gallery for replaying sex scenes.

Overall it's a huge update, and one I'm very happy with. The next time I'm returning to Love of Magic will be to give Book 2 the same kind of overhaul.

For now I'm returning to Morningstar, and starting Act IV. Hopefully the first two days will be out today, or tomorrow.

You can enable NG+ mode on Steam by switching to Beta or Development branch; if there's no screams or burning computers I'll migrate it to the default branch in a week or two. As always, if you'd like a key just reply here, or DM me.  For those curious, you can now hide a game in Steam, if you were so inclined.

Here are the direct download links (I'll also update the pinned thread with these)

Win64:DOWNLOADGG - GOFILE - MEGA - PIXELDRAIN - UPLOADHAVEN

Win32: DOWNLOADGG - GOFILE - MEGA - PIXELDRAIN - UPLOADHAVEN

OSX:MEGA - GOFILE - PIXELDRAIN - UPLOADHAVEN

Linux: MEGA - GOFILE - PIXELDRAIN - UPLOADHAVEN

So. Thoughts on NG+? Let me know in the comments!

As always, thanks for the support. Love of Magic wouldn't have been possible without you guys.