This release marks the first time that I have chosen a project purely on the basis of requests, rather than personal interest, and it didn’t take long to realize this was a mistake.
I’ve written a long, rambling post about a few of the problems I encountered (some of which were my fault), which you can read below if you’re dull enough to be interested in that sort of thing.
First of all, I found the game extremely boring. I had managed to convince myself that it would make for a nice change of pace to do something more realistic, which is how we ended up with a game about a genius shota with a massive penis who corrupts mature women using his mob connections. In practice, however, realism just meant that there was less chance for interesting stuff to happen.
A huge part of what made this game a chore was the fact that it was repetitive. Scene after scene involving the same “imperceptibly small hole that a phallus can fit through” gimmick becomes grating after a while. And I frankly could have killed Haruki’s friends, who say almost, but not quite the same dialogue over and over in the script, depending on when you meet them.
This is also the first time I’ve worked with the fabled KiriKiriZ, which is much like KiriKiri2, only a pain in the ass. The problems started immediately, because I knew that my old word-wrapping script wouldn’t work, so I would have to do all the wrapping by hand. This meant measuring the line width in “—” characters, working out what font the game used, and then keeping a text file with the right number of em dashes above the script as I worked.
This resulted in two problems:
- I didn’t know how much wiggle-room I had regarding the ends of the margins. In Lilith’s KiriKiri2 games, the margins stretch to the entire length of the text area, behind the buttons, which means they have to be changed. This game wraps pretty cleanly at the end of the text area, and I couldn’t even find the margin settings, let alone change them. This ultimately meant that I ended up going over the width limit by just a character or two on hundreds of lines.
- I got the font completely wrong. Apparently, the game was set to use the “Regular” version of the font, whereas I was using “Normal”. (Or maybe it was the other way around.) This meant that every line was too wide, and I had to cheat by just changing it to use the version of the font I had been working with. Otherwise, all the other lines would have exceeded the limit as well.
As a result, your average in-game line looked like this:
Another problem with KiriKiriZ is the way the engine files are set up.
Whereas the various functions of the game (menus, dialogue boxes, etc.) would be grouped together in KiriKiri2, they are in completely random places in the KiriKiriZ files. In addition, there are lots of leftover files from KiriKiri2 which cover exactly the same functions. Most of these don’t work, but add confusion as to which version of the files I’m meant to work on. Sometimes, you have to work on multiple versions for no apparent reason. And some bits are in completely different locations. Some strings about saving and loading were in a saving/loading-related file, meaning that the two or three or four other instances of saving/loading messages were redundant, even though they had been grouped together with lots of strings that were used. This basically meant that whenever I wanted to edit anything, I had to open every single system file and run a search for the applicable string. There are three strings I never even found, including the title of the game.
Now we come to the issue of developer screw-ups. (Light spoilers follow.)
First of all, there’s a brief segment during one of the Sayoko scenes in which Takashi nearly walks in. Due to bad coding, this was completely missing from the Animation version. I’ve fixed it by moving a bit of code down to where it should have been.
Then we have the problems with the endings. I noticed that there are a number of voice file mix-ups in some of the ending scenes. This is because, from all appearances, Lilith did a rush job on them.
A typical Lilith scene will involve two CGs that can be alternated to (badly) simulate thrusting. Some of the ending scenes only involve one CG, followed by an ejaculation CG. (This will not be apparent in the Animation version, but you can see what I mean in any CG rip.) Indeed, there are references in the script to thrusting CGs being used, and the CG numbering indicates that some images are missing, such as in this sequence: ev045a, ev045b, ev045d, ev045e, ev045f, ev045h, ev045j.
In the true ending, the player is presented with a choice of outfits for the heroines to wear. However, this change is completely superficial, and only affects one range of CGs. The game gives you this pointless choice, but still makes you choose the outfit it wants you to. In addition, there are unused, fully functional script files involving other outfit choices for which there are no CGs. I assume that they intended to actually give you a choice as to what the women should wear during the scene, similar to the Tentacles and Witches scene in IZM 04.
Finally, and most annoyingly, we reach the big one: An entire third of Ryouko’s only scene was cut out. There was a middle part to the scene that is conspicuously absent from the script, and this can be seen quite easily in the original version of the game, in which the lines are numbered. I personally consider Ryouko’s scene to be the best one in the game, so this pisses me off to no end.
Anyway, after far too many months, it’s finally time to move on. I have some work to do for somebody else, but I’ll try to split my time between that and another game that I don’t particularly care about, because I am not the sort of person who learns from his mistakes.
