Zero Hour

Here we are at last. The most important thing to note is to watch out where you save. If you haven’t been paying attention, this game has a very obnoxious engine in comparison to the previous ones, and in particular, it doesn’t handle lines that take two text boxes very well. If you save on one of them, it’s possible that you won’t be able to load it again. Another thing you might notice is that the name plates in the backlog aren’t translated. This is because it breaks the game in unpredictable ways, and I didn’t feel like troubleshooting every single line of code.

Also, as you will probably have already noticed, I did the RPGX scenes for the game. I know I said I wouldn’t do any, but it only amounted to about 600-ish lines, so I figured what the hell. I think I’m missing a couple of audio files somewhere, but you can solve that by dumping in the audio from your own viewer.

However, I know that some people have problems getting the viewer to work, and I don’t feel like doing tech support for something I don’t understand. So I’ve also made a “mod” version for TA0, which squeezes Sakura and Oboro’s side stories into one slot each, and uses their second slots for the bonus scenes. Choose whichever you want to use, and if it doesn’t work, you can get rid of it and try the other one.

I have a lot to say about this game, but some of it’s technically spoiler-related, so I’ll hide it behind a Read More button.

As everyone knows, this game underwent considerable development hell. It took three years to arrive, missing the series anniversary that it was made to commemorate, and got downgraded from Anime Lilith to mere Black Lilith along the way.

As a result, the structure of the game is weird. Usually, in a typical Black Lilith game, you would have your opening remodelling scene somewhere around scene 6-8. In TA0, it’s scene 17. And scene 17, interestingly, is listed in-game as the introduction of Chapter Four, which doesn’t formally start until Asagi and Sakura meet up at the Arena. What this says to me is that there must have been some considerable rearrangement going on. Some kind of plans got changed, and whether that just entailed making Sakura’s scenes into side stories, or some major change to the content, is anyone’s guess. The timeframe for the game is all over the place, as well. At first, Sakura was kidnapped almost a week ago, and then it suddenly becomes multiple weeks. There’s even an instance where the script notes say a scene takes place somewhere in the two-week period between scenes 1 and 2, and the following line explicitly contradicts that.

The game shares an interesting relationship with the two gacha games. The original plan for Big Gogo was to reuse an ogre CG from TABA, but presumably they changed that once his part got expanded. It’s possible that at one point in development, he was only meant to be in his opening battle scene. Development of the game finalized while Taimanin RPGX was in production, and this leads to an interesting little twist: The gacha games notoriously reuse things like background assets from the main titles. However, TA0’s files contain a lot of images that are exclusive to RPGX, such as Young Sakura’s room in Fuuma’s house. The hotel bathroom in Oboro’s side story is actually Fuuma’s bathroom, which makes this (to my knowledge) the first main VN to steal assets from the gacha games.

There are also signs of changes everywhere. I don’t think I’ve worked on a Lilith game with more signs of adjustment. For example, you may notice that when Snake Lady brings up a certain snake that lives in hell, it’s conveyed through the prose, rather than a dialogue section. The original line was meant to be voiced, and refer to a South American snake instead, but for whatever reason, they decided to replace it very awkwardly. There are a few of these kinds of things around, and the game contains (especially early on) far more signs of changes and lines commented out than I’m used to seeing. Byg was supposed to have his arm cut off in the final scene. A couple of lines in Sakura’s scene with Big Gogo were cut out because they simply didn’t get recorded somehow. Her first side story was initially meant to take place in the pigpen, with other women present. Asagi was also meant to have a side story; it’s unknown whether that was canned, turned into a gacha scene, or reallocated to some other part of the game.

There are also a higher-than-average number of typos, including in the name fields somehow. In some cases (especially prevalent in the blowjob training scene), they intended to comment a line out, but neglected to do it for every line of the paragraph, leading to half of a redacted sentence still popping up in-game.

And, as if to prove that they were really phoning it in by the end, the two versions of the final fight scene share about a couple of hundred lines in common. Usually, when there are cases of shared text between routes, they go to some effort to have little differences between them. I’ve never seen Lilith just copy and paste like that before.

Bad Ending 2

However, not all of these things are Lilith’s fault. Some are the fault of the ethics officials. We’ll finish this dissection of the game with a look at the second bad ending.

I’ve complained for years about Lilith not doing a proper amputee scene, despite frequently teasing the concept. But we now know, of course, that the main reason for this is that it’s simply not allowed by the officials. The above image is from the original version, wherein Byg comes along and cuts Asagi’s arms off before stabbing her in the chest. The details of the stabbing were also slightly more gruesome. According to Sasayama when he posted this picture, they intended for it not to look terribly gory or explicit, but it was nonetheless still rejected. Apparently, you can have Sakura graphically disembowelling policemen, and Clockup can show women being brutally tortured, but you’d better not go whacking off any limbs in a cartoonish manner.

Here are a few (non-consecutive) lines that survive in the final script:

Asagi: 「………………Heh?」
One of Asagi’s arms flew away.
Asagi’s other arm had also flown in the complete opposite direction.
Byg: 「Geheheh. How does it feel to lose both arms, Asagi?」
Asagi’s arms had been sliced off by Byg’s knife, and fallen onto the platform with a clanking sound.
Sprays of blood rose up, and gushed out from the edges of the cuts.
The surrounding area had transformed into a sea of blood in an instant.
Having lost both arms, Asagi was left behind on that spot, alone.
But Asagi, who had lost both arms, didn’t move.
The sharp blade easily pierced her breast, broke her ribs, and made a hole in her lung.
Byg made a twisting motion with the knife he had thrust into Asagi’s chest, in order to gouge into her internal organs.
Asagi had had her arms lopped off, and a knife thrust into her chest, but in truth, even though she had reached this point, she was basking in sexual pleasure.

Byg thrust the knife in even deeper, in order to gouge into Asagi’s organs.