After way too long, I’m finally done with this game. I’d like to start out by apologizing for the wait: There are half a dozen excuses I could bring up, but I don’t think any of them are good enough. I do, though, want to give a shout out (in the sense of “fuck you”) to the Superior Court of Justice. They summoned me to jury duty, wasted my time on their stupid website, kept me on hold on the phone for ages when their stupid website didn’t work, made me completely reorganize my life, screwed up my sleep schedule, and then, at the last minute, told me, “Hey, your jury duty’s cancelled. We’ll do it some other time this year.” It’s things like this that lead to violent crime in the first place.

Anyway, we’ll start with engine stuff. This being a KiriKiriZ game, it is technically possible to change the font through the options in the menu bar. But don’t. I don’t know any good way of doing automatic word wrapping in this engine, so if you mess with that setting, you’ll probably make the game look awful. Also, a lot of minor messages and dialog boxes remain untranslated, because I simply couldn’t find the text strings for them. If you happened to have played any partial patches, you might want to start a new game from scratch. This engine doesn’t like it when you load a save from a different version of a script. You might get an error which screws up your placement, or sends you back to the main menu. Starting afresh is the best way to avoid this.

Like with TA0, there are a few signs of changes made to this game. The most obvious is the chapter headings (which I had to remove in this patch, to make all of the scene titles fit properly). 78% of this game is Chapter One—and that’s not even counting the prologue. Chapter Two is so short, by comparison, that there’s no doubt in my mind that it was rushed to completion. There are other signs of this, too: Notice how much longer the early training scenes are than most of the bad endings. The further into the game you go, the shorter individual scenes become. That suggests to me that either the game was going to be longer, or that they spent way too long on early scenes, and had to rush some of the later ones.

There are also some inconsistencies. Some of these are continuity errors, such as the Taimanin being part of Section Three, and Nomad controlling Yomihara. Both of those are things which happened in later games, and don’t make sense for a prequel. Also, Yomihara is apparently a place you can just drive to now. Remember the entire premise of Yukikaze 1? Because this game doesn’t. Arguably the weirdest inconsistency I noticed was Tendou’s nightclub, which changes location from Tokyo Kingdom to Yomihara, and nobody either noticed or fixed this contradiction. It’s not clear if this is merely the kind of oversight you might expect from gacha-era Lilith, or a sign of significant rewrites.

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Speaking of rewrites, check out these mostly-unused faces. The only one that does get used is Ayame’s, but she still switches back to having green eyes immediately, with no explanation. Kurenai is also supposed to have one, but I can't find any sign of it. The only clue about them is that they are internally labelled the “spell sigil brainwashing” expressions. I can only imagine that they’re a remnant of an earlier version of the story, and Ayame’s was kept in by mistake.

Lastly, a minor note on character designs. There isn’t much here to uncover, but you can see on the Kurenai website that Ayame was at one stage intended to have pinkish-purple hair. In the game, there is also a line which refers to Felicia as having golden hair—again, probably an overlooked detail from an earlier version.

With this being said, there are other inconsistencies that just come across as laziness, or a lack of attention to detail. I think everybody's used to the event CGs not always matching up with the script in every way. But of all the games I’ve done, this one seems to have the highest amount of differences between the prose and the visuals. I would blame ZOL for these, except that they also seem to extend to the colourists: There’s a scene where the game tells you explicitly what colours a group of pill bugs are, while simultaneously showing you a different combination of colours. Why not just alter the script? They even patched the game, and didn’t fix these little details.

There isn’t really any bonus content I can produce this time. From what I can tell, there’s only one gacha scene set during this game, and it was already translated in the TABA English localization. I’ve done my own version here, with (and I want to emphasize this) heavy modifications. The premise is similar to the TY2 promotional scenes: Fuuma is watching a recording that Tendou made and distributed many years earlier. Unlike the TY2 promo scenes, which relied heavily on the premise of Tatsurou witnessing everything through a screen, it made more sense to insert this one by simply removing every reference to Fuuma. This means that a lot of lines have been removed, or altered, to fit more organically into the storyline.

However, there is one further issue, which is placement. The premise of the scene is that Tendou is filming further catalogue footage with Kurenai, after the game’s original catalogue scene. However, Kurenai is considerably more reluctant (and less broken) than she should be at that point in the story. As such, I have made this scene an alternate path, completely replacing the original catalogue shoot. Naturally, that required even more rewrites, including a brand-new intro to incorporate the original set-up dialogue. I’ve tried to write and restructure this to seem as natural as possible.

The long and short of this is that the scene has been modified too much for me to distribute it with the base patch. It’s a mod as much as it is a translation, and if you’re interested, you can download it below. The game will automatically branch off in the new scene’s direction if Kurenai’s corruption flag is set to a low number. It should come up naturally while you’re trying to get all the endings.

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