One of my major goals in planning out Ibuki Magica is to make sure that your actions have major effects throughout the game. The most obvious ones will be the wishes you’ll have Ibuki make, as these will affect the outcome of the story as well as Ibuki’s abilities and actions. I decided to break Madoka canon and allow a Puella Magi to make multiple wishes, as I didn’t want a single, major, game-changing event happening at the start of the game. Plus, for the RPG parts, allowing multiple wishes at different parts of the game is basically this game’s version of a class upgrade.
The choices you make, even small ones, can affect Ibuki’s personality. The more you have her be mindful of what she says, the more likely you’ll be able to make her do the same in another situation. Similarly, the less Ibuki is wild or cruel, the less often you’ll be given the options to act in those manners. I want your influences to make Ibuki’s choices to flow as if she had a distinct personality, rather than creating another bipolar video game character who will happily go from super-friendly to dastardly and back, with everything evening out in the end, somehow.
The allies Ibuki makes may not be under your direct control, but how you have Ibuki interact with them will affect their personalities too. The way you treat a character will change how they treat Ibuki, and possibly other characters too. You may find yourself walking a thin line, trying to find the right things to say that will please everyone, and sometimes that will not be possible. You’ll have to decide who and what you value more in different situations.
Remember the last post I made, where I mentioned traits that affect how characters make actions in battle? Those same traits are the ones that affect the personalities of the characters in the VN parts of the game. It’s less essential than the wishes you make, but even the tiny choices you make will impact everything in their own small way. (If you want to be an RPG munchkin, I suppose you could just try to promote specific personality traits in the girls you want. But that might screw you over in the long run, hehehe.)