Witch on the Holy Night is getting a manga adaptation. Kodansha’s Weekly Shōnen Magazine announced it in its 49th issue, released November 4, and the first chapter runs in the next issue on November 11.
Keigo Maki is drawing it. Maki is the creator of Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, the romantic comedy that ran in the same magazine and got a television anime in 2022.
To promote the launch, Kodansha streamed a commercial for the manga that uses the film’s two leads: Haruka Tomatsu as Aoko Aozaki and Yūsuke Kobayashi as Soujyuro Sizuki. That casting detail matters more than it usually would, because the manga is arriving as a companion to the movie rather than as a standalone project.
The film opens in Japan on November 20. The smartphone version of the original visual novel launches the same day.
Where the story comes from
The source material goes back further than most people assume. Witch on the Holy Night, or Mahōtsukai no Yoru, began as a draft Kinoko Nasu and artist Takashi Takeuchi put together in the mid-1990s, before they founded Type-Moon. They showed it only to friends and never released it commercially. Type-Moon eventually turned it into a visual novel with art by Hirokazu Koyama, published in April 2012, with two sequels planned.
The story is set in the late 1980s. Aoko Aozaki is one of two sisters in line to inherit a long family tradition of modern magecraft. She has no interest in magic, gets named heir anyway, and reluctantly starts training under Alice Kuonji, a young witch living alone in a manor on a hill. Aoko also runs her school’s student council, meets a transfer student named Sōjūrō Shizuki who understands almost nothing about the modern world, and has to deal with her older sister Tōko, who believes the birthright was stolen from her.
It is one of the few concrete links in the Nasuverse. An older Aoko appears as an early mentor to Shiki Tohno in Tsukihime, and an older Tōko employs Shiki Ryōgi in The Garden of Sinners.
How the game has travelled
Aniplex released the PlayStation 4 and Switch versions in the West in December 2022, on the same day as Japan, and those versions have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide. Type-Moon put the game on Steam in December 2023. Tsukihime, the older Type-Moon title Aoko is tied to, got its remake in Japan in August 2021 and in English in June 2024.
Why it matters
The manga starts nine days before the film opens, which makes it the last piece of the promotional push and the first thing readers can actually keep. Maki’s Shikimori’s was a gentle comedy about a couple who are already together, and Aoko’s setup, a student council president who happens to be a reluctant mage, sits close enough to that register that the fit looks deliberate rather than random.
One caveat for anyone hoping for a straight retelling: the manga is timed to the film, and Kodansha’s advertising leans on the film’s cast rather than the original game. Readers who want the source text still have the visual novel, and the smartphone port arrives on the same day as the movie.
The film itself lands in Japanese theaters on November 20, nine days after the manga’s first chapter. For the staff, cast and theme song details already confirmed, see our breakdown of the final trailer. Readers curious about how manga adaptations of games tend to run can compare it with the recent Etsuran Genkin adaptation announcement.
Source: Anime News Network, citing Weekly Shōnen Magazine issue 49.
Featured image: Key visual for the Witch on the Holy Night anime film (© Kinoko Nasu / TYPE-MOON / Aniplex・Notes・ufotable), via Anime News Network.
