Spitting Image by Bricks

 

Fan cover made by Clavietika

While it's true that a big part of the TF community is focused on the sexual parts of the transformations alone, there are also people who like the social parts that come from it.

Like v3 and v4's Antics route, v4's Monitor, or v5's Magic Sayaka, Spitting Image focuses on interactions around the school including John's classmates and friends as part of the magic casting rather than merely on having two main leads subject of a TF event. The writing has a very similar tone to one of these routes, just a couple of students playing around with magic, for better or worse.

The story centers on an alternative path to Antics where John decides to tells his friends about the book, John decides to use the morph spell to prove them magic is real, and out of pure mischievousness, the friends pick up Sayaka, later in Kiyoshi's house they take a photo with John (looking as Sayaka) being around with Kiyoshi and they spread it around the school.

Unfortunately, it seems Maria sees John's transformation the day before and records a video that uses to blackmail John, fearing for his life due to witch hunters if the video gets released, John accepts and morphs into Yui so Maria can take compromising photos of her to blackmail Claus and allow her to publish any kind of news articles she wants.

John arrives to Kiyoshi's house and tells his friends, who propose him to morph into Maria to get fingerprint access to her phone and delete any copies that might exist of those pictures.

The story promised a strong and interesting conflict with relatively high stakes (that go up to the roof in a parody "upcoming trailer" at the end of the scenario where John tells Kiyoshi that wants to destroy Tina Koya) in a slice of life kind of setting, but it seems the scenario has been abandoned and touched since.

Aside from capturing pretty relatively well the style and mood of certain ST routes, this scenario also counts with interesting features, like John not being able to use the mind control spell since it is a spell from another "school of magic" and requiring practice from John before he can use them. This is an interesting limitation that can avoid escalation issues that are sometimes presented in the main game where characters have the opportunity to use mind control but they don't think about doing so or simply don't do it "by principle".

The story presents several choices to pick from but these do not trigger any special flairs or routes and show different events going back to the main, linear story of the scenario. While some people might not like having choices that do not affect the plot people who like to have able to see different character's actions will find this a nice detail. Some people might complain about the linear story stelling as well instead of the usual ramification in visual novels but the truth is that the scenario was left up too early to get any more branches or endings.

Even when left alone in a premature state and clocking only at 36 minutes of reading Spitting Image is a fun little ride that fans of these routes can enjoy and get inspired from, personally, I think I enjoy it a bit more than Antics.