#otome game translations

[majunju]

I found so many new cool games from you:0 Can you do a list of what you play, please? It’s mostly otome, right?

oh of course! these are the otome games that i'm currently playing/have played recently:

virche evermore (switch)

birushana: rising flower of genpei (switch)

jack jeanne (switch)

even if tempest + even if tempest dawning connections (switch)

lovebrush chronicles (this one's a phone game but it's still classified as an otome game)

yumekuro (same as above)

[nejis-desk]

Jack Jeanne Complete Collection - Interview with Ishida Sui and Towada Shin Translation

This interview is from the Jack Jeanne Complete Collection art book, it’s available on CDJapan and Amazon jp. You can also purchase a digital only version on bookwalker jp. I encourage anyone reading to purchase the game (if you haven't already) or the art book itself to support Ishida and Towada directly. 💕

This is a VERY long interview so I apologise for any typos or errors I may have missed.

~ ~ ~

An interview with Ishida Sui and Towada Shin, who both worked on writing the story of Jack Jeanne. In this interview they reveal what went on behind the scenes during production, rejected story ideas and much more. This interview was conducted remotely on the 9th of February 2021.

Interviewer: Yui Kashima

How did Ishida Sui end up making an otome game?

—How did the production of Jack Jeanne begin?

Ishida: It was sometime around Autumn 2015 I think… On an old personal site that I used to run, I received an email from the company Broccoli to an email address that I no longer use. It was a commission request for character designs.

—In 2015 Tokyo Ghoul was still being serialised wasn’t it?

Ishida: Yes. Usually job offers like that go through Shueisha first, so I contacted my editor asking why this one was sent to my private email…  At the time, in addition to working on Tokyo Ghoul, I was also drawing illustrations for a tear-off calendar and very busy with various other things, so when my editorial department heard about the offer they seemed very shocked like "What!?".

—Why did you decide to accept the offer even though you were so busy?

Ishida: I would often receive offers asking for me to draw manga or illustrations, so I figured that this one was a similar case. However, some words in the email caught my eye. Like ‘Gender Swap’, ‘Takarazuka’ and ‘All Boys Opera'. When I saw these concept ideas, a dream began to swell in my chest and I felt like giving it a try.

I think if it had just been a normal character design job, I would have turned it down. However just from reading the short brief in the email my interest was piqued. While in discussions with the Young Jump editorial department, I also casually mentioned the kind of offer I’d received to Towada-san.

Towada: Yeah, Ishida-san asked me for some advice. I was also drawn to the ‘Gender Swap’ and ‘Opera’ concepts. I could easily visualise the setting of the story. Additionally, it seemed like it would be a story that included many different themes such as gender. When I thought about that, I figured that Ishida-san would be a good fit, since I knew he would be able to draw something that went beyond all genders.

Ishida: I’ve been drawing androgynous characters for a long time, so Towada-san and I talked and wondered if that's what they must be looking for. After that, I created my own proposal and submitted it to Broccoli.

—You created your own proposal, Ishida-san?

Ishida: When I looked at the original proposal that Broccoli had sent me, a lot of it differed from my personal tastes. It was a very upbeat and dazzling story. It would’ve been hard for me to match my art style to that, so in my proposal I noted things like ‘if it were me, I’d do something more like this’. I was interested in this unpolished gem of a story, so I thought it would be a waste to turn it down altogether. I wanted to at least try throwing my own ideas into the ring, so I spent a week creating the six main characters and sent them in.

—At that time, I heard that the game wasn’t titled ‘Jack Jeanne’ yet, but was instead called ‘Jiemarie’.

Ishida: At first, I wanted to try creating a word that doesn’t exist. So using French as a base, I came up with ‘Jiemarie’ as the game's provisional title. But then a month later when I was reconsidering the title, I looked at it again and thought, damn this looks lame. So I hurriedly called Towada-san on Skype and we entered a discussion that lasted about ten hours over what the title should be.

That’s when we decided on ‘Jack Jeanne’. The male roles take the name from the knight, or the ‘Jack’ in a deck of playing cards. And the female roles ‘Jeanne’ take from the word parisienne and Jeanne d’Arc. When these two terms are put together, I feel like you can comprehend what the game is about with a bit of nuance. Plus you can shorten it to ‘JJ’… That’s also the title of a magazine though (lol).

—Taking on another job whilst your manga was being serialised sounds like it would be tough on you both physically and mentally.

Ishida: I think I must’ve been a bit unwell (lol). My body was fine, but being able to work on something other than a serialised manga was a lot easier on me mentally. I may have seen it as a way to escape, so I didn’t feel that working on two projects at the same time was difficult. When it comes to game development, I can only create what I’m capable of, and there was no set release date yet. Of course, I would work on and submit things whenever I could though.

—What kind of things would you submit?

Ishida: I would sketch character designs, discuss and create story elements with Towada-san and try to put Univeils history into chronological order. Then I would share the progress with Broccoli and have meetings and such with them. In the beginning, rather than having to draw anything yet, it was mostly just brainstorming and planning. That’s why I think I was able to do it all concurrently with the serialisation of my manga. 

~ ~ ~

How Ishida Sui and Towada Shin know each other

—Do you chat with Towada-san often?

Ishida: Well yeah, she is my older sister after all.

Towada: We talk a lot. When we both have the time we chat over Skype.

Ishida: Once we start the conversation can last up to five or six hours. We mostly talk about things that happened throughout our day. When I’m talking to someone I often bring up something that’s happened to me and ask their opinion on it. She became someone that I could chat with whilst working on my manga. Ever since my student days we’d talk until early morning, I usually told her about storyboards I’d drawn.

—At the Ishida Sui exhibition it was revealed that Towada-san had even given you advice on some of your earliest works.

Ishida: Yeah that’s right. It was a work I’d prepared for a 'bring your own work along' induction course in Tokyo that I attended back in my student days. It was a manga about two characters who eventually became the prototypes for Tsukiyama and Hori Chie in Tokyo Ghoul. It was only about 30 pages long, however when I showed it to Towada-san the day before the presentation, she told me that she thought my linework was too thin.

Towada: Yeah, the overall linework of the manga was thinly drawn. Once I told Ishida-san this thought, he began tracing over his linework and making it thicker. And then when he looked at it again, he said “Yep, I need to redraw the whole thing”.

The linework being too thin was only my personal opinion and the presentation was in Tokyo the next day, so in horror, I began hastily telling him, “You won’t make it in time, stop, stop!”

Ishida: All I could think about was that the lines really were too thin, so I wanted to redraw it. All of the screentones had already been affixed to the panels, but I didn’t want to bring something along with me whilst knowing it wasn’t the best that it could be.

Towada: Ishida-san handled the linework and I helped with redoing the screentones. We worked throughout the night and finished redrawing the whole manuscript. Once it was done, it wasn’t even comparable to the previous version, the lines were powerful and the characters' expressions conveyed a lot. I was seriously worried though (lol), I didn’t know if we’d complete it in time.

Ishida: I couldn’t think about anything other than the lines being too thin, so I wasn’t even worried about whether I had enough time or not.

Towada: I fell asleep halfway through, but you continued and boarded that Tokyo bound flight without having slept a wink, didn’t you?

Ishida: Yeah. I let Towada-san sleep and continued applying the screentones myself right up until the very last minute. I was still applying them whilst on the plane and also after my arrival in Tokyo. I used screentone number 10 a lot, so I remember the scenery around me gradually began to look grainy like the screentone. It felt as though I was hallucinating.

—Sounds like it was a tough manuscript to complete. Towada-san was also the author for the Tokyo Ghoul novels, has your relationship always been one akin to work partners?

Ishida: When it was decided that Tokyo Ghoul would be getting a novelisation, I was given other authors' works to look at. However, none of their styles really clicked with me, and they didn’t seem right for the series. I knew that Towada-san wrote, so I tried reaching out to her.

Although back in the days of Tokyo Ghoul’s serialisation, Towada-san and I didn’t talk as much as we do now. If I had any concerns I would just try and sort them out by myself. We’d always gotten along as brother and sister, however we didn’t really start to have a ‘work partners’ kind of relationship until we started working on Jack Jeanne together.

Towada: That’s true. Back then, we only occasionally conversed regarding the novelisation of Tokyo Ghoul. Before :re we only spoke once every few months over Skype. As Ishida-san said, it wasn’t until I started working on Jack Jeanne that we really started properly talking to one another.

—How often would you contact each other?

Towada: Depending on what stage we were at, we would bounce ideas off each other once every three or so days. Ishida-san would make a request like “I’d be happy if this part of the script was done within the next two weeks.” And then I’d present what I’d written and we’d discuss it and then I’d return to writing again. This process was repeated until Jack Jeanne reached its completion.

—Was Ishida-san the one that reached out to Towada-san to write the script of Jack Janne?

Towada: He didn’t ask me specifically to write the script, early in development he’d ask me to help with some research like “I’d like you to look up some information on this, could you help me?”. I’ve always liked ikusei games and within that genre I also enjoy romance and otome games. So I think that’s why it was easy for Ishida-san to consult me about it. We’ve had a common interest in games ever since we were kids.

Ishida: Back then I played games like ‘Pinnochia no Miru Yume’ and ‘Angelique’. I wanted to try and conquer Marcel in Angelique but it was one difficult game, so it was a tough task. Before I could even raise any flags with him, the training aspect of the game was so hard that no matter how many times I played I never got any good at it.

Towada: I’m the type that loves playing games, so after talking with Ishida-san, I went on to play every popular otome game that had been released around 2015, as well as every Broccoli published otoge. I completed every single character route in those games. I began analysing otome game trends and Broccoli’s brand identity and relayed my findings to Ishida-san. After that, I went along with the Jack Jeanne production team and Makasano Chuuji-san from Shueisha, who was the scriptwriter of the Tokyo Ghoul anime. We all visited the city of Takarazuka for research.

Ishida: I was also supposed to be there for the Takarazuka trip but since I had my manga to worry about, I had Towada-san go and take in the atmosphere in my place.

Towada: I did have to gather material but I think I visited Takarazuka a total of five or six times. From morning I would watch the Takarazuka theatre from afar and simply watch the guests move about, soaking in the atmosphere of the city.

Along with the Takarazuka plays, I also watched student plays, in total I probably went and watched one hundred shows. Theatre shows that are performed by professionals are fully realised and flawless. So getting to see the contrast to student plays, where they progress and improve until the show is complete was a very helpful reference.

I’ve always enjoyed watching plays, so everything I had to research overlapped with my own hobbies. I still shared my own input with Ishida-san though.

Ishida: I’d never formally been asked to write a script before… I felt like a fraud (lol). I think it’s because I’m not very good at being considerate of other people. I don’t think I’d be able to work with anyone other than Towada-san on something.

—Why is that?

Ishida: Well, for one I don’t want to talk to anyone for long periods of time (lol). Because Towada-san understands what aspects of a story are important to me, she’s also able to comprehend what I mean when I talk in abstract concepts. We could save time by not needing to have any pointless discussions.

Towada: Back then Ishida-san was still very busy publishing his manga, so bringing in all sorts of new people to work on the project probably would’ve put quite the burden on him. That’s why I wanted to help him out in some way.

After researching all sorts of things, I ended up participating in a production meeting for Jack Jeanne, but I was not expecting that I myself would end up being in charge of writing the script. Rather, I was more just looking forward to getting to play a game made by Ishida-san. As things progressed though, I was asked to try plotting things out, or to write part of the script to be used temporarily. Eventually I came to think, why don’t I just write the scenario myself?

I’d never written the script for a game before though, so that’s what had been holding me back. Unlike novels, it’s commonplace to not have to write descriptively. Novels are made up of dialogue and descriptions, like describing the setting and characters' expressions or emotions. So I had to spend a lot of time working out how to write to properly convey a story through dialogue alone.

When I first started getting the hang of it, I tried writing a script that still included descriptions but I quickly stopped. Jack Jeanne is about theatre, so I figured that it would be easier to convey the presence and narrative of the story through conversation. I usually write novels, so I was uncertain, but since Jack Jeanne has sprites of the characters on screen, I thought that I could do it. I suppose it’s closer to writing for a manga rather than a novel.

~ ~ ~

The rejected character routes

—Before Tokyo Ghoul was completed, what kind of things did you work on?

Ishida: The first two years were mostly spent creating the game’s world and mechanics. Like deciding how many performances there would be, how the plays would be presented. Would it be a dialogue drama? Would there be mini games? Things like that. We also had to decide whether summer break would be included or not, how raising affection would work and how the choices would be presented. Those are the sort of things that were talked about first.

—You got to watch over the entire game’s development then.

Ishida: At first, I got carried away and envisioned a stage play game full of skill mechanics that I personally enjoyed. A busy game full of specs you can raise and improve in mini games, however when I explained these details to a friend of mine, they were like “You’re just imagining a game that you would like, right?”.

They asked me if that’s what the eventual players of Jack Jeanne would be looking for. That same friend said that since it’s a story that deals with the theme of theatre, it would be better if the player could witness the performances themselves. So I took that advice and the prototype of the current Jack Jeanne was created. I told all of this to Towada-san and had her handle the script.

Towada: You can’t write a script without knowing how the game’s system works after all.

Ishida: Now that I think about it, before Tokyo Ghoul was finished, rather than build the game's foundation, all I was really doing was scattering the sand to prepare for said foundation.

When Tokyo Ghoul entered its endgame especially, I really had to concentrate on it, so I took a six month break from Jack Jeanne. Ending a story requires a lot of energy and attention, so I left the practical work of Jack Jeanne to Towada-san and only supervised the music production and attended any important meetings.

—So during serialisation you were making preparations to jump right into it afterwards?

Ishida: Yes exactly. I wasn’t able to do much practical work, so I had Towada-san prepare the script in advance for me. And for the time being, create one character route.

—Which character was it?

Towada: It was Shirota. I wrote about the equivalent length of a short book and it was more or less complete. In the end, we scrapped the entire thing though… Because the atmosphere in the beginning was quite dark.

Ishida: It was dark because I was too used to Tokyo Ghoul. It included issues like a troubled household and severe bullying. Reading something like that wouldn’t put the player in a happy mood.

Despite it being a story about the theatre, my attention drifted to other topics which didn’t fit. And it was me who had asked Towada-san to write something like that… A couple months after the Shirota route had been completed, I read over what Towada-san had written for me once again and realised that it was a bit too gloomy. I’d forgotten what prompt I’d even given to her in the first place (lol).

The first character portraits and CGs that I created were for Shirota too. The reason being that Shirota is the only second year student and he was already a complete individual, so he was easy to create for. As for the third year students, there’s three of them, Fumi, Kai and Neji. Along with Kisa, Suzu and Yonoga are also first years, so continuity and character relationships need to be taken into account in order to create them, so they were a little more complex.

—How did the other characters come to be?

Ishida: At the proposal stage, the first character that I created was Kai. It’s a game where characters will be falling in love and confessing to one another, so first off I wanted a character that was handsome. Then I made Fumi who would be Kai’s partner. After that, I think Shirota was next.

Towada: At first you created the characters by basing them on plays didn’t you?

Ishida: I’m a fan of Yamamoto Shugoro’s work ‘Kikuchiyosho’ so Shirota was created using that as a base. In Shirota's case the genders are swapped, but Kikuchiyosho is a story about a girl who is born into a samurai family and raised as a boy. It has an element of androgyny and portrays the confusion and anger concerning gender quite well.

—How did you select the plays to base the characters on?

Ishida: I chose plays that lots of people are familiar with and would be easy to assign characters to. Kai is ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, Fumi is ‘Salome’, Neji is ‘Faust’ and Yonoga is ‘Shintokumaru’. Kisa and her classmate Ootori are ‘Don Quixote’. Ootori ended up becoming a side character though.

—So Ootori was originally meant to be a main character?

Ishida: Yeah. If I were to compare it to Tokyo Ghoul, Ootori is in the same position as Tsukiyama. I wanted a pompous character like that in Quartz. However I may have made him a little too unique (lol).

I received feedback from Broccoli that they want the main six characters to be an elite group, so a more easy to approach character would be better. So I moved the bright and cheerful character that I had originally made as Onyx’s Jack Ace over. That character was Suzu.

Making the characters personifications of plays started to become difficult to stick with though, so I abandoned the idea entirely halfway through.

—Despite appearing glamorous, the characters are all dealing with their own issues, like certain complexes and family troubles. I think that they’re all conflicts that are easy to sympathise with, how did you decide what the backbone of each character's conflict would be?

Ishida: First I created the character's appearance and then decided what personality would match them. Like with Fumi, when I began to think about making his story about the unique struggles that come with being born into a respected family, if becoming a successor was going to come into question, then he needed to have a brother.

In this way, I worked backwards from the vibe of his appearance and created his home life. I did the same with the other characters too, thinking things like ‘to have a personality like this they must not have parents, or they must struggle with expressing themselves’.

I think that if you let your characters do human-like things, then aspects of them that are easy to sympathise with will be born.

Jealousy, setbacks due to failure, inferiority complexes… Each and every character naturally ended up having some form of theme attached to them.

—I feel as though Kisa had a different sort of personality than that of a typical heroine.

Ishida: To put it simply, I want my protagonists to be fighting something. If they’re not giving it their all, then it’s no good. If they’re just standing around, then you can’t empathise with them.

—There’s times where she draws others towards her or supports those around her. She also has some masculine aspects to her.

Ishida: I think that I’m moved by characters who make me think “This kid’s really admirable”. That’s why I made Kisa a girl who works hard no matter the difficult situation that she’s in. I like Kisa and I’m sure Towada-san feels the same way.

Towada: She’s the result of both of our preferences. While due to the game’s setting, she of course has struggles related to being a girl, but I was careful to write the main thread of her story in a way that transcended gender and instead simply showed her charm as a human being.

—Regarding gender, I was impressed by how neutrally it was portrayed.

Ishida: Yes. Originally, I was going to make Shirota a character with a feminine personality, but I ended up scrapping the idea. In the end, he ended up having more of a masculine mentality. The premise of Jack Jeanne is that boys also play the female roles on stage, but it’s not a metaphor for anything and I didn’t want it to raise any questions. I simply wanted to give it my all creating plays with that setting and create something new and refreshing.

I don’t struggle with any gender related issues myself, so it’s not like I can fully understand what it’s like, but in general I’ve never considered gender to be a very big deal. If someone born male were to tell me “I have the heart of a woman” then I’d just think ‘ok cool’.

To me it feels strange to place so much weight on such an issue. I don't see why others need to be bothered by someone else's gender, I'm not since I myself am not able to speak for such experiences.

Towada: At first, it was possible to take that direction with Shirota but as I continued to write, I came to realise that there was no need to exaggerate any emphasis on his gender identity.

To those looking from an outside perspective, it may seem like a unique identity such as that is a person's defining trait, when in reality it's only just a portion of their whole self. If you consider it to be all they are, then you end up denying the other aspects of that person.

Whilst considering the individually of each character, I kept in mind to write them in a way that seemed natural for them.

—The side character, Tanakamigi Chui of Amber, had a very striking presence. How did you go about creating him?

Ishida: I wanted someone that’s easily understood to be the antagonist, so I went ahead and tried to draw someone who looked like an unstoppable genius. Despite being a second year, it’s as if he controls the school. I wanted an enigmatic and intriguing character like that. Once I named him Tanakamigi Chui I felt as though he was complete and his inclusion in the story was quickly decided on.

—On the flip side, were there any characters that you had a hard time creating?

Ishida: I had to think a little harder about the other members of Amber. They needed to have the aura of the enemy but since they’re only villains in the context of the stage, they’re not actually bad people. So it was hard to find that balance between them.

Visually they’re edgy and have a talented vibe, but they also have their own individual quirks, they’re not all homogeneous. I struggled with Kamiya Utsuri especially, I wanted him to visually look like he could be a Jeanne while also still looking like a boy, so it was difficult to get him right. I didn’t have to do many redesigns though and all the other characters came to be without much trouble.

What I actually had more trouble with, was the fact I made the cast too large. I initially created almost double the amount of first year characters, but when I looked back over the script that Towada-san created, I told her “There’s way too many characters, please cut some of them out.” To which Towada-san replied, “Ishida-san, you’re the one who created them in the first place.” (lol).

Towada: That’s because the cut characters had already appeared in the script (lol).

Ishida: I feel that when there’s too many characters a lot of them get wasted, so just like that I end up creating and scrapping a lot of my characters. I think even Broccoli were surprised by the amount of times I’d suddenly tell them “Oh that character doesn’t exist anymore.”

—Apart from characters, were there any other aspects of the game that were abruptly discarded?

Ishida: The performances I suppose… Originally I had wanted there to be a larger variety of shows, but if you were to put all of them in the script it probably would’ve ended up being three million characters long.

In the beginning of development, I had originally planned for each character's route to have a different final performance. There’s six main characters, and including Kisa’s route, that would total to seven unique shows.

Before that there’s the newcomers, summer, autumn and winter performances, so I arranged to have a script written for each. Basically I wanted to include more shows and increase the amount of sub stories, but that would be confusing to play through and development would never end. The game engine has its limits too, so I decided to keep it simple.

Towada: It would’ve been difficult to play through all that as well (lol). For the final performance, we settled on it being one show and letting the player enjoy it from each character’s perspective instead. And even then, there’s still over 20 different endings to the game, so it still took a long time until everything was fully complete.

—Newcomers, summer, autumn, winter and the final performance, were these five show’s scripts all original?

Towada: Yes. However at first, like the characters, we had planned to base them on famous productions. Like Shakespeare or fairy tales. We figured that players would find it easy to get immersed in plays that they were already familiar with.

Ishida: For the newcomers' performance, I thought we could have a show called ‘House of Biscuits and Candy’ based on Hansel and Gretel. I had also originally planned to use each character's motif to base the plays on.

Towada: Like Shintokumaru, right?

Ishida: Yeah yeah. I even went as far as getting permission to use it, but if the show were to be following a story that already exists, then the script would be bound to it. Once I understood that it would make it difficult to relate the stories to Univeil, we decided to create the plays ourselves.

Since I acquired the permission to adapt Shintokumaru though, maybe I’ll have to make a manga about it someday…

By the way, the one who was saying “Let’s do this” and then changing it to “Nevermind let’s not” was all me. I’ll start on something wholeheartedly thinking that it’s the right choice before realising halfway through that I can’t actually take it anywhere and stop. Jack Jeanne’s development was full of trial and error.

Whenever I’m about to start something, Towada-san will express her concerns with my ideas but I always end up pushing on with them only to ultimately scrap it.

I probably have at least ten books worth of scrapped drafts alone. I had no real knowledge of how to properly craft a story. I hadn’t drawn anything other than Tokyo Ghoul, so even though I had no idea what the fundamentals of storytelling were, I misunderstood that I could write other kinds of stories too. This time around I studied and revised each time… I really learnt a lot.

Towada: You learn things by doing them, so I think I just got used to it (lol). Also, you don’t commonly see stories presented within stories, I thought that it was a rare case for a game especially.

~ ~ ~

The story behind ‘Lyrics: Ishida Sui’

—You also wrote the lyrics for each of the songs used in the performances didn’t you, Ishida-san?

Ishida: Yes, that’s how things ended up. It goes without saying, but no one, including myself, thought that I’d be the one writing the lyrics.

Originally Broccoli brought in several professional lyricists and had me look over what they’d written. However I couldn’t help but feel that they were lyrics I’d heard somewhere before, or they at least didn’t leave a unique impression on me. I did feel the finesse of a professional, and they were beautiful lyrics that fit the story in one way or another… But the words used didn’t touch on the core of the story. 

The songs in Jack Jeanne are stage songs that Neji wrote for the members of Quartz. So unless you’re familiar with the setting and understand how the characters are feeling, then you won’t be able to write lyrics that perfectly fit the scenario.

While I knew that my lyric writing technique would be far from that of a professionals, I thought that no one understands and loves these characters more than me, so I approached Broccoli about it. I’d poured my heart into not only the character designs, but also the story and system of the game, so I didn’t want to compromise on the lyrics and have them pale in comparison.

So, to the best of my ability, I wanted to at least try my hand at writing them. I had Broccoli check whether or not what I’d written was viable and asked them “If there are no problems, then please let me write the lyrics.”

—Did you sing the temporary vocals for the songs too?

Ishida: When I submitted the lyrics to Broccoli, I got the normal response of “Thank you, we’ll leave the temporary vocals to you.” Along with this message they also wrote “You can hire a professional vocalist if you’d like, or you could record the temporary vocals yourself.”

Because of this I started thinking that maybe I should record them myself. Similar to how one wouldn’t be able to write lyrics for the songs without a deep understanding of the story, if you weren’t the one who wrote the lyrics, you wouldn’t know how they’re supposed to be sung either.

So, after deciding that I had to be the one to do it, I made preparations to acquire some audio recording equipment and downloaded some editing software. I divided up the parts and harmonised with myself and over the course of three days, I finished recording the temporary vocals. That’s more or less how I did it.

—When recording yourself singing, being self conscious about it can interfere, can’t it?

Ishida: I don’t think I was possessed by him or anything, but… When I tried to go all out, as expected I felt a bit hesitant, so I began recording whilst imagining I was Neji.

In the game, Neji is the one who writes the scripts, so surely he would also write the lyrics and subdivide the song and do everything himself. So I got through it thinking like that. In that pumped up mental state, I sent in the temporarily recorded songs but all Broccoli said back was “Alright, let us know your upcoming schedule”, I got so carried away that I was somewhat bewildered by the cold response (lol).

~ ~ ~

Recruiting via DM, gathering specifically selected creators

—It appears the creators you gathered to handle things such as the concept art and music are all people whose work you enjoy.

Ishida: Yes. Almost everyone was sent a targeted offer. For example, I’ve always loved the concept artist Lownine-san’s work ever since I was a student. I suppose you could say I was jealous of how high quality their artwork is… They’re someone who I thought I'd never be able to beat in my entire life. Lownine-san is an amazing artist who is especially good at blending characters into their backgrounds.

When we were creating Jack Jeanne, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to pull something like that off, so I definitely wanted to recruit Lownine-san for the job. After getting permission from Broccoli, I reached out to Lownine-san myself through Twitter DM’s. I had only appreciated Lownine-san’s work from afar, and we’d never actually interacted before, but we did both follow each other. I received a reply that Lownine-san was fully on board to accept the job.

Towards the end of Jack Jeanne’s development, I got the chance to speak with Lownine-san, so I asked them “Could you teach me how to draw?” They gladly accepted this request and taught me how to draw whilst screen sharing over Skype. However, in about 10 minutes, they’d already drawn such an amazing piece that I felt I should just put my pen down (lol).

Towada: You were a little down after that, weren’t you?

—Had you been a fan of Kosemura-san, who was in charge of music, since you were a student as well?

Ishida: Yes, I’ve listened to Kosemura-san’s music a lot since I was a student. When I was brainstorming what kind of music would fit Jack Jeanne, Kosemura-san’s ‘Light Dance’ immediately came to mind, since it fit perfectly. Because I didn’t have any personal connections to Kosemura-san however, I didn’t know how to get in contact with him, so I made the request through Broccoli. I only found out about this recently, but apparently Kosemura-san almost turned the offer down*, I was quite shocked to hear that (lol).

*When the initial request was sent, it was under wraps that the game was being made by Ishida Sui, and since Kosemura-san didn’t have much experience in writing game music, he wasn’t optimistic about the offer. However, later, when he learned that it was a game being made by Ishida Sui, he readily accepted the offer.

—How did Seishiro-san, who was in charge of the choreography, get chosen for the job?

Ishida: A very long time ago I saw the group Tokyo Gegegay appear on a program called DANCE @ HERO JAPAN and I remember thinking ‘this group is crazy good’ and I was immediately charmed by them. After that, whilst I was looking through more videos of Tokyo Gegegay on YouTube, I happened upon a studio workshop video and discovered Seishiro-san.

—What about him caught your eye?

Ishida: Whilst first and foremost his dancing was super sexy, it also had a certain strength to it. I remember thinking that he danced in a way that embraced the best elements of both masculinity and femininity. And that had stayed in my memory ever since. When Seishiro-san was recording motion capture for the game, he allowed me to interrupt and even taught me some of the choreography.

(note: you can watch Seishiro dance here, he is also the choreographer behind this RADWIMPS music video!)

—I hear you’ve known Gyudon-san, who was in charge of making the movies, since your Tokyo Ghoul days. 

Ishida: Yes. Around the time volume 13 of Tokyo Ghoul was set to be released, we held a still image MAD (Music Anime Douga) contest. The grand prize winner of said contest was Gyudon-san, who at the time was still only a student. The way they made a video by manipulating the manga panels to move so fluidly was really cool and stood out from the rest. 

Around when Tokyo Ghoul had ended and :re was about to start, I had Gyudon-san make a minute long video for me. After that, Gyudon-san grew in popularity and became someone whose work is in high demand, so they seemed very busy.

However when Jack Jeanne was announced, we were able to have them create a promotional video for us. Since I’ve known them since Tokyo Ghoul, I figured I couldn’t go wrong entrusting the job to Gyudon-san. They didn’t just deliver their finished work without a word either, Gyudon-san also made a variety of suggestions and worked on the project with a positive attitude. For the videos used in the performances, I was asked to provide materials and became very involved in the process. I think it took about two weeks… Despite the really tight deadline, Gyudon-san allowed me to catch up and was super helpful.

I was also the one who reached out to Touyama Maki-san, who was in charge of creating the in-game chibi characters and the 4koma manga used for promotional purposes. During Tokyo Ghoul’s publication, Touyama-san would draw short comics for the series as a hobby, I thought they were a nice person for doing so. Their art was great too and I was very thankful. So when it was decided that we’d be displaying chibi characters during the game’s lesson segments, I wanted to leave it to Touyama-san and sent them the offer.

(note: this is the MAD that gyudon won the contest with, they now regularly make moving manga CM's for jump titles, they make the Choujin X ones too!)

~ ~ ~

The winter performance moves into Quartz’s ending, and the divergence in the story since the beginning of the year drastically branches off

—The performances, packed full of each of the character’s skills, continue for a year and pass by in the blink of an eye. Once the new year breaks, it feels as though the atmosphere of the game drastically changes. What were your intentions behind this?

Towada: That’s when the character route specific endings begin. So we packed all the needed material to set them up into the winter performance.

Ishida: The winter performance is like an ending for Quartz as a whole, so we packed it full of good lines and scenes without holding back. I may have used up all of my cards but by using them all without compromise, we were able to make the story reach a nice peak. After that, the story switches to focusing on each character's individual ending.

Towada: We used a lot of great material in the winter performance, which meant the final performance would have to be even better still. In a good way, it gave us a higher hurdle that we now needed to overcome.

—So you needed to create even more anticipation heading into March?

Towada: From January to March, each character’s route is completely different. From the new year onwards I needed to create seven different scripts, so it was very challenging. The amount of text for the last three months of the game alone just about eclipses the amount of text from up until the winter performance. There was so much to write that I began to fear I wouldn’t even be able to finish it.

Ishida: Having more choices that drastically change the ending of the game makes the player feel more involved. So, despite it making things tougher on ourselves, around the time we were working on the autumn performance is when we began thinking about how the game’s big branches should work. Along with the main routes, we also planned for there to be the option to deepen your bonds with the side characters.

—How did you go about creating the confession scenes?

Towada: Before the winter performance, to some extent each character has already grown closer to Kisa, so I kept in mind not to disrupt that flow. Since if I didn’t make it a confession that respected both Kisa and her suitor’s feelings, then I felt it would spoil the fun.

—Is that how you approached the ‘realising Kisa’s a girl’ scenes as well?

Towada: Yes, I suppose so. As I was writing the script, I knew that a point was going to come where Kisa would have no choice but to acknowledge the fact that she’s a girl. There’s characters that realise her true gender once their bond deepens and on the flip side, there are some who don’t realise it at all. There’s also the case of Yonaga, who knew Kisa’s situation from the beginning. I guess you could say each reveal followed one of these three patterns. Those who came to realise it, those who didn’t notice anything and those who knew from the start. I think they ended up being nice variations and I put careful consideration into writing them to make sure none of the realisations felt forced.

Also, the beginning half of the story is akin to that of a sports drama about teenagers putting on shows together, so the room for romance to be added is limited. That’s why, when I first started adding romantic elements to the character routes, it felt strange to me, so I discussed it with Ishida-san. I wasn’t able to effortlessly soak the story in romance. I think I had to rewrite Shirota’s ending at least three times…

Ishida: Shirota was who you tried writing an ending for first after all.

Towada: Shirota and Kisa aren’t the sort of people who’d be all flirty, and Shirota’s initial route was already muddy, so it was difficult to pull everything together. However, once I stopped trying to write in a way that forced romance on them and instead wrote them becoming closer as partners, things went more smoothly.

It may not be a stereotypical sort of love, but it was a human love. I thought that the natural way these two would be drawn together wouldn’t be through whispering sweet nothings to one another, but instead by coming to understand one another without having to exchange words at all. Once I’d completed Shirota’s route, to some extent, I continued writing the other routes in a similar way.

Ishida: While it’s true Shirota acts like that, the other characters all act differently. To the point some aren’t even comparable. In contrast to Shirota, Suzu’s route ended up being more of your stereotypical kind of romance. I thought that it would be nice for each character to have their own unique form of love.

Towada-san’s strong suit is writing a love story with your more classic otome guys like Suzu and Kai. I have no idea about that kind of thing, so I left Towada-san to pour her own ideas into their routes. On the flip side, characters like Fumi and Neji were dyed more with my own ideas. Neji’s way of flirting especially were mostly lines that I requested.

Towada: He’d say “Make him say something like ‘Try seduce me!’ Because I want this CG to appear.” (lol).

Neji especially plays with his words a lot, so unless Ishida-san told me what wordplay to write, I wouldn’t have been able to expand on it. Ishida-san has a very unique way of phrasing things, so I asked him for advice a lot to make sure I was making Neji speak in a Neji-like way. I then arranged the lines and created events in order to reach the intended goal. I constructed the route in a way that wouldn’t disrupt the flow of the story. As for Fumi, Ishida-san wrote his route himself.

Ishida: Yes, I wrote it all myself.

—Well isn’t this quite the exciting plot twist?

Ishida: I turned into quite the young maiden myself (lol). Even though I’m clumsy at it… I began wondering why I ended up loving writing it so much. I added some lines that have more of an adult and deeper meaning to them, so when I played the route myself I was like “Woah!”.

Towada: It’s more interesting if at least one character is that way. From the early days of production, I’d quietly wanted Ishida-san to write a character himself, so I was happy. I was unsure how to deal with Fumi too, so it was a big help that Ishida-san took him on. His route ended up being a lot sweeter than I’d been expecting though, it got my heart racing (lol).

Ishida: I was also the main writer for Kisa’s solo route. There’s no romance in it, but it’s an ending where long lasting friendships are born and it ended up being the kind of story you’d see in an uplifting shoujo manga.

Towada: It’s full of Ishida-san’s flair, I loved it.

Ishida: If love is a lie, then how do you face that lie? That’s the sort of thing I thought about. Kisa is lying about her gender and pretending to be a boy, but Neji, Suzu, Fumi, Yonaga and so on, are also hiding lies within themselves.

The fact they’re all hiding their true motives is something that they have in common with Kisa. Whilst hiding, the two grow closer. I think that a confession is a scene where all these lies intersect and burst open. Everyone is lying, and I thought that was like a play, without realising it I think that slowly became the theme of the work. 

As people, we meet others whilst lacking something and some people end up becoming a necessary part for someone else. I wanted to see a drama like that. Despite it being a game with confession scenes, I wanted it to be a story that both women and men alike are able to identify with.

~ ~ ~

From thorns to rounded edges, how the style of work transformed 

—If there was a small novels worth of rejected material, then how many books worth of words made it into the final game?

Towada: In terms of paperback books, probably about twenty volumes worth.

—Because as well as the main scenario, there’s also the sub scenarios and the stage plays?

Ishida: As much as time allowed, I put my all into creating the game. However there was a deadline for things like the voiceline recordings, so I was working both day and night to get things done in time.

Towada: I was only getting around three hours of sleep. I feel like at one point Ishida-san didn’t sleep for four days.

Ishida: I was in a serious pinch so I don’t remember it well, but when I was writing the script I would hole myself up in a manga cafe for around thirty hours at a time. Multiple times a month. Once I felt as though I’d written to a good point, I’d go home only to return to the manga cafe again. Why? Because I was sleeping in the manga cafe. I mays well have been living there…

Towada: Once Ishida-san had finished writing his part of the script, he’d have me check it. So at the same time, I’d have Ishida-san check what I’d written.

Ishida: For a period of time it seemed like Towada-san was always awake. Whenever I would send a check request she always responded right away regardless of the time, so I figured she must not be sleeping.

So that my productivity wouldn’t be affected, I made sure to sleep at a regular time, however I’d be awake for like 30~40 hours at a time and then sleep for 10 and then be awake again for another 40. My sleeping patterns would repeat in this cycle. During Tokyo Ghoul’s serialisation my sleeping patterns were similar, so to some extent I might’ve gotten used to it.

—That’s just like Neji-senpai, isn’t it?

Ishida: Yeah yeah, I worked in a similar way to him. However in Neji’s case, he can complete a script just one day after coming up with the idea for it, so he works way faster than us. It took us around two months to write parts of the script, so Neji really is a genius isn’t he? I was writing whilst wishing I could be like Neji.

After experiencing writing a script, I’ve come to have a lot of respect for authors. Writing is completely different from drawing. When writing I need to really concentrate on it, I can’t multi-task or think about anything else. Whereas with drawing, there are some things that can be done as long as you can move your hand, so I can talk to someone whilst drawing or watch a movie in the background or work whilst thinking about other things. I can’t do that when I’m writing though, I was starting to wonder if I really had to think so deeply about everything I wrote.

—During the production of Jack Jeanne, as you worked on the script or the lyrics etc, did you notice any changes in how you worked?

Ishida: For Tokyo Ghoul, I was always consciously adding things, meaning I would draw everything that I came up with. I thought that it was fine to only put 20% of my output into the characters and dialogue. However, when I was working on Jack Jeanne, I began to think that my method of just adding things was incorrect and that I should also consciously remove things. It’s ok to just be left with what’s necessary. My way of thinking ended up being the exact opposite to before.

—What brought about this change in thinking?

Ishida: It was early in production, when I had asked Towada-san to write Shirota’s route for me, I got concerned about the ‘sharpness’ of the story. As I mentioned earlier, I ordered Towada-san to add this and that and sent her walking on a long journey. Except, what lay completed at the end of that road was such a painful story that even I myself was shocked by it. When I looked down at the world I had created it was as if I’d received a psychological shock. I think I even smelt the faint scent of blood.

—From thorns to rounded edges. I still remember the comment you made during a press conference saying, “I was careful to not kill off any characters”.

Ishida: Stories where characters die are usually fast paced with high stakes, however, the kids at univeil are living a different kind of story. I had to consider the best way to create drama in that kind of setting. I thought about it a lot and it may have only ended up being possible because of the fact it was a game.

—Why is that?

Ishida: Because of the flow of the dialogue, backed by Kosemura-san’s music while it's being read out by all of the voice actors. It all comes together as one… That’s what I think at least. Writing and illustrating are Towada-san and I’s main domain of expertise, but I think that it was thanks to all of the other various creators involved that we were able to create something new.

—Do you think anything about yourself changed, Towada-san?

Towada: It came down to the fact I wanted to create something for Ishida-san whilst there were also things that I wanted to add myself. This dilemma caused me trouble at times, however when I started to consider what components I should add, or which ones I should remove, I began to discover what elements I liked and what my own skillset was. 

The way that Ishida-san and I go about creating stories is different. I came to understand that Ishida-san’s strong point is creating impactful scenes, whilst mine is plotting and world building. Ishida-san being in charge of the pivotal scenes would make things more exciting, so I concentrated on writing everything else whilst keeping the balance in mind. Through working on Jack Jeanne, I’ve become able to say that my strong suit is being able to create a story that flows well.

It may be true that by working with other people, you come to understand more about yourself. Starting with Ishida-san, I also looked at what the other creators were doing and thought ‘so this is how they interpret the story.’ Seeing what they came up with made me notice different approaches that I hadn’t thought of.

I’d write whilst listening to Kosemura-san’s music and decide which way to take a scene. Or I’d watch Seishiro-san dance and think about how I could make the performances more exciting. We were all connected in some way. Novels are usually written alone by one person, so I came to learn the thrill of working on something in a team.

—The way you all came together as gears to create a single work sounds similar to the story of Univeil.

Towada: True. I never thought I’d experience something straight out of my youth again at this age. Being helped by other team members or being supported by them, being motivated by simple phrases like “It was great” or “I like this idea”.

For example, when I was working on the final phases of the story, I was just writing and writing with no end in sight, I couldn’t take it anymore and my pen just stopped moving. During this dire moment so close to the end, my proofreader messaged me saying, “You’re almost done.” And with that simple message alone, it was as if a burst of light appeared before my eyes. Everything had gone pitch black, but they lit everything back up again. Ishida-san also wrote some of the script, so I didn’t feel as alone.

Ishida: At that time I left all my drawings alone and decided to solely focus on the scenario.

Towada: Yeah, because I hit a point where I wasn’t able to write it on my own anymore… When Ishida-san sent me the script he’d written, it was interesting and I let out a breath of relief. I felt the joy of being able to see someone else's work. I was the same as the Univeil students who find joy in performing with others. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do it if I was alone.

Ishida: You’ve got that right. I think that if anyone was missing from the team, it wouldn’t have worked out. Not to mention that in my case, everyone’s contributions were directed to me, and they were all people that I’d personally gathered.

With manga, even if it comes to the worst case scenario, at the very least it would all just fall on me. However this game isn’t just something I made on my own, I need to contribute as much as I can or the efforts of everyone around me will go to waste as well. There was a moment where I felt afraid of having such a heavy responsibility placed on me. However, if I had tried to do it all on my own, I think I would have given up.

By listening to wonderful music, reading interesting scripts and moving forward together with everyone, I was inspired. Coming together with fellow creators to make one work came with a lot of challenges, but it was fun. It was refreshing being in an environment working alongside other people, and because of it I was able to experience something new.

—Has working alongside other people changed the way you work at all?

Ishida: Right now I’m still in the state immediately after being swept away by the raging waves of a storm, so I’m not sure how I really feel yet. I’m in the phase of just watching what becomes of Jack Jeanne as the waves subside.

Even though the script and illustrations were done, like bonus stages lots and lots of new tasks kept popping up. So I was still busy with work up until the beginning of October last year. When I looked at some of the thoughts people had on the demo version of the game, it felt as though what we’d all been working so hard on had finally taken shape, and I was relieved.

Working on this project I’ve come to learn both the hardships and the fulfilment that comes with creating something with others. So, I suppose I’ve started considering working on something by myself again… I’m not trying to say that it’s in my nature to want to work alone, I think I’m just experiencing some kind of aftershock. I think the waves are returning.

Towada: I’m still working overtime and supervising Jack Jeanne (lol). Like checking content that will be posted on social media, as well as the 4koma manga. Content is still being released and there have been bug reports from some people who played the demo… Meaning that my journey is still not over yet. I think that things should calm down once the game has been released for a while.

Ishida: Yeah, probably after around five months (lol).

—After their final performance, the members of Quartz all threw a party to celebrate. Did you and the rest of the creators do the same upon the game's completion?

Towada: I celebrated with Ishida-san as siblings. And then afterwards we got swamped with work again (lol).

Ishida: Yeah, we didn’t end up meeting with the other developers or the voice cast. Big project after parties aren’t as common these days, but I do want to hear everyone’s stories of any struggles they had.

Towada: There were way too many people involved in total for me to be able to speak with them all, but I’d still love to convey my impressions to them. Like letting them know what I thought was good, or letting them know that a certain thing really helped me out.

Ishida: Ideally I would like to gather everyone and really have it feel that ‘this is the team of people that created Jack Jeanne’ and I’d like to express my gratitude to them all in person. I hope that an opportunity like that will come one day.

~ ~ ~

[blupengu]

Felt obligated to share my favorite sketch from the Virche fan book!

Sweeties 😭

[wildflower-otome]

[Translation] Shuuen no Virche - Ankou Short Story

Writer: Satomi Nakayama Source: Shuuen no Virche Error Salvation Visual Fan Book

Note: Major spoilers for the ending of Adolphe/Ankou's route below.

Lycoris ~I only think of you~

—The Drifter, the person who I made a soul contract with.

‘—Did you know? Flowers have certain meanings and words that they symbolise.’

He was a knowledgeable man of many talents.

‘For example, red roses signify “love”, and also the words “I love you.”’

‘Is that so? At the very least, when I was in the outside world I never heard of such a thing…..I think.’

‘It’s knowledge one is unable to gain without asking first, so that’s understandable. But once you do know about it, the way you think of what you took to be everyday sights will change. If it has a meaning, I’ll teach you it.’

—Ever since then, because this conversation strangely left an impression on me, each time I came across a different type of flower, I would always ask him what it meant.

‘What about the flowers blooming in the garden at your home?’

‘The ones shaped like star fragments are lilies. They bear the meaning of innocent, pure love. The flowers that look like fairies are called laurel. They are flowers that mean to vow eternity, and the words, “I won’t change until I die.”

‘And these flowers that washed up from the sea?’

‘The ones that seem to have white wings are nodding anemones. They have the somewhat disquieting meaning of love unable to be conveyed, love betrayed. The other ones are elder flowers. They’re extreme flowers, that contain meanings of zeal, joy and pity.

‘Hoh….. There really are so many of them. I wonder for what purpose they exist…..’

‘Hmph. They exist so that flowers will become meaningful for people—most likely. And so that one can pick flowers that have a suitable meaning for the person you are giving them too…..or so it is thought.’

‘?’

As I remained unable to imagine it, the Drifter pointed his index finger at me.

‘Meanings are not necessarily everything but—A person of the opposite sex would likely be much happier receiving red roses, flowers that are suitable for a proper love confession, than ones that mean ‘dishonesty’, don’t you think?’

‘Well…..certainly.’

At this easily understood example, I nodded my head in agreement.

‘But to think there are as many meanings as there are flowers….. Have you memorised all of them?’

‘Haha, surely not. No matter how much I love flowers, even I have my limits. It’s only the ones I’ve read about in books or handle as part of my work that I know about.’

Hearing what he said, a “certain question” came to mind. If he knew the meanings of all flowers within his knowledge, then—

‘Do you know the meaning of lycoris flowers?’

‘Yes, of course. They were flowers that commonly bloomed in my hometown, after all. However—’

‘However?’

‘I don’t know the meaning of “black” lycoris. It would appear that this colour is unique to Arpéchéle.’

‘…..Does the meaning differ depending on the colour?’

‘Yes, that is correct. For example, the roses I told you about before, there is a big difference in meaning depending on if they are red or yellow.’

‘…..Sounds like there’s a lot to it.’

I continued to think it over.

‘Then—outside of the black kind, do lycoris flowers have a particular meaning?’

‘Yes, indeed they do. For example, the representative red variety—have the meaning of “passion.”’

‘Passion…..’

Hearing the word, what came to mind was—. The figure of my dear friend, left behind in the past that had gone by.

‘…..It’s a flower that suits Yves perfectly.’

The Drifter did not fail to hear the words I had quietly murmured.

‘My descendant…..you say. Perhaps you might call me not a doting parent, but a doting ancestor, for saying so, but hearing you say that makes me feel proud.’

However, the Drifter, after picking one of the lycoris that was blooming at his feet, handing it to me as he continued—

‘The one other true form they have—white lycoris, are surely a good fit for you.’

With a smile, he told me that he was sure they suited the face that I couldn’t remember.

‘Me…..?’

‘—White lycoris mean “I only think of you” and “Look forward to the day we meet again”, words of faithfulness. They are fitting for you, who continues to wish for her salvation, and to reunite with her again.’

‘…..…..…..!!’

My eyes widened at hearing what the Drifter had said. To think that flowers with such meanings as these existed this world…..

All the same, despite my astonishment, I shook my head at the Drifter’s words.

‘…..…..…..They are unfitting for someone as powerless as I. These lycoris noirge are more than enough for me.

As if imitating the Drifter, I picked a lycoris. And then—.

‘—The one who suits pure white lycoris, the kind that will bloom after salvation, is not me, but her. …..Someday, I want to see her smiling happily in a flower garden of white lycoris noirge.’

I spoke of my dream of a future in which someday the flower petals blooming before me became pure white—.

* * *

———My wish came true.

‘Adolphe, over here…..!’

‘Calm down, you don’t need to sprint, Ankou’s grave isn’t going to run away.’

My dear princess…..and the ex-novice, had come to visit my grave, which had been placed at the center of a field of white lycoris noirge.

Even though it wasn’t even my death anniversary, whenever something happened, she had made a habit of coming here to talk to me.

About things that had made her happy. Things that had made her sad. Insignificant things.

Because she spoke to me about almost everything, almost as if she were able to see me—

(I really am, so happy)

After running up to my grave, she laid down the white lycoris she had been holding.

‘These are white lycoris that Adolphe and I grew together, with Yves’ advice. Today they bloomed at last, so we came to bring you some, Ankou.’

…..Dear me. Even though so much time had already passed since my death.

‘…..I wanted to grow them together with you as well, Ankou.’

(—My princess, your habit of crying hasn’t changed at all)

I stretched out a finger, to stroke her hair…..or tried to, anyway.

(No, you don’t need my comfort anymore)

After all, she—had become a “normal person”, able to stand on her own two feet.

After forcefully wiping at her eyes, just as I thought she might…..

‘Beautiful, aren’t they…..? Flowers that bloomed in the future of salvation, that you protected for us—!’

She spoke with the brightest of smiles.

…..…..…..…..

(Ah, in the end-)

It hadn’t been a mistake.

(These flowers suit you the most, more than anyone else in this world)

If the lycoris I had watched over had become a guide for you to advance into the future, as they turned from black to white—.

(Nothing else could make me happier. I am the luckiest person in the world.)

Until the end of her life as a “normal person”, I pray that these flowers may continue to proudly bloom—.

[neerons]

That whole story is fucking sexy

Fallen Agent ~If He Seduced You~: Kazuomi

[ririya-translates]

JJ Novel Ch 1 Translation

I mentioned in a previous post that there are Jack Jeanne novels by the original game creators, written by Towada with illustrations by Ishida. One is more of a light novel taking place in the summer whereas the much heftier full novel-sized one recaps from the prologue to the newcomer's performance. But importantly this is not simply a retelling of the original because we are given a window into Kisa from a third-person narrator perspective. It's a very different side of Kisa that I think is important for the EN fans to know about so I decided to publish my translation of the first chapter. It only covers part of the prologue so no spoilers to worry about.

Apologies for wonky paragraph formatting. I'm not quite used to this type of writing so I hope it reads okay.

[vynegar]

"Albie" (main story 11-21)

At the end of Episode 11 (Part 1), we find out that "Albie" is simply a name that Vyn made up on the spot when Rosa asked. He may have been inspired by his own birth name, Vilhelm Richard Albert de Haspran.

In Chinese, Vyn choose the name "阿明". "阿" is a prefix used to form nicknames, "明" can be a name but also means "bright, clear". In Vyn's Romantic Rail Getaway card "Food for Thought", he tells us the meaning of his name:

You can see the character 明 appear in the word 明亮 ("bright"), although 明 is such a common character that I wouldn't say that this Chinese text alone is enough is sufficient evidence to show the connection between the two names. It's the way that the "Albie" and "阿明" happen to coincide in the name "Albert", which made me take note of Vyn's "careless" choice in name.

If the Chinese name was intended to subtly reference "Albert", I can certainly imagine imagine this as one way to preserve that reference through translation, even if it becomes more obvious. We do have an example of the translation preserving plot-relevant wordplay in a name: Lowe Leare ("Lowly"), originally 萧仁 ("小人", both pronounced "xiao ren" but with different tones). However, there's also an incident of a plot-relevant name being missed through translation, though it was in an event (not the main story) that probably foreshadowed a distant plot point and had infamously bad translation issues.

Anyway, it remains possible that "Albie" is a coincidence. However, after Vyn and Rosa wrap up their conversation about Albie's name, the narration makes a comment on the importance of that moment:

It isn't until the whole case is settled that you are surprised to realize something... You had briefly touched on the key to cracking the case at this very moment.

...which at least gives me enough confidence to not feel silly writing up a whole post about it. We've only seen part of this case, and there's a lot of mystery still surrounding Vyn's behavior so I don't have any definitive hypotheses on why Vyn might have chosen his own name for Albie. Is there something that made Vyn seen himself in Albie? Did the delinquent's attitude remind Vyn of the cruel, stratified world that he was born in? Is he reminded of how people who have imperfections will be tossed aside and abandoned? I guess we'll see when part 2 of this episode is released.

[arnethmyndraavn]

JnKnA Preorder CD ~Maker Ver.~ Download + English MTL Patch

DL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zcy8FSI597xukH78-JRq99MK1jkGwhUl/view?usp=sharing This is a download for the preorder CD you'd get if you pre-ordered JnKnA from Quinrose back in the day. It contains some messages from voice actors and a short story focusing on Nightmare.

The CD has been tweaked to make it easier to play.

Tweaks include: Removed code requiring disc to be inserted into CD drive to play Code updated to run on English locale PCs English machine translation patch added patch.xp3 contains the English translation, so just delete it if you'd like to play in Japanese. This machine translation patch is not intended to be a replacement for official or fan translation. It is intended as an alternative to playing with VN OCR or just using google translate on your phone. It will have occasional nonsense translations or funny wordings.

If you encounter any game-breaking bugs please let me know.

[themuffinsavenger]

3/13/2024

Okay guys, it looks like the original version of Yuzu from the exe still works, but the maintenance tool is broken. Hopefully, just pulling and using it directly into the AppsData will be able to make it work for others. For now, I can still run the game and therefore, run tests, so I will resume work on the game.

[ga-yuu]

~🌸Gayuu's Otome Game Translations🌸~

~🌸🌸~

Ikemen Genjiden MasterList

~🌸🌸~

Dream Meister and the Recollected Black Fairy MasterList

~🌸🌸~

Ikemen Villains : @gayuu-the-necromancer

[amnesiaotometranslations]

AMNESIA LATER X CROWD PS VITA PATCH RELEASE

Hi guys! I know it's been a LONG wait, but I am happy to say the Amnesia Later x Crowd PS Vita patch is now ready for download!

Here is the link to the folder containing the patch, multiple guides on how to hack and install the patch, and credits!

Just a quick reminder: Due to the official localization, the patch is being released as is. There are menu settings that are untranslated due to difficulty in coding, however all dialogue, choices, main menu selections and images have been translated.

I hope you guys enjoy the patch. This was an intensive labor of love by myself and many, many people over 3+ years. (•̀ᴗ•́)و ̑̑

[daytaker]

The Adversary

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

AN: This is a modified chapter from a longer fic of mine called "Let's All Be Shadows". (Link leads to ao3.) There are references to events from that story, but this can be understood without reading the long-fic.

POV: Satan Nightbringer Timeline Word Count: ~ 4500 Synopsis: Satan recalls his earliest months in the Devildom and a new revelation that hit him just recently. CW: violence, rage, blood, manual choking

Most of the fic is below the cut.

----

Nominative determinism.

That’s a philosophical theory that argues that people gravitate towards interests, careers, or behaviors that align with their name. Nominative—named. Determinism—fate.

The name Satan comes from an ancient human language; the Hebrew word הַשָּׂטָן (hasattan), which means “accuser” or “adversary”. So, following nominative determinism, that is my role. I am the opposition. I am the adversary.

And, following this human theme, if you asked the average human today, they’d probably tell you that Satan and Lucifer are both names for the same entity.

They wouldn’t be completely wrong.

----

The first thing I knew was a white hot pain. It exploded through me, starting at my core and bursting outwards. I was on fire. I was dying.

It’s ironic that birth and death must feel so similar.

I was in a fugue, then, for what felt like a long time. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t speak. I could only rage. Everything that approached me, I tore to shreds. I was feral. I was out of my mind. Flashes of memories are all I have of the beginning. There’s the taste of copper in my mouth and blood smeared over my face, on my hands, in my hair. I’m tearing at something that used to be alive. Then oblivion, and the next thing I recall is writhing on the floor in a dark room, the rough masonry scraping my bare back. I bled all over the Demon Lord’s dungeon, and I never stopped screaming.

I screamed until my throat bled, and after that, I screamed in choked, gargled bursts of sticky blood and saliva.

After the rage, the blinding heat, the blood, the broken nails and torn hair and shattered restraints… After that, there was him.

I hated him.

I knew who he was; what he was to me. It was instinct, the way a baby knows its mother. Lucifer was my mother.

I’ll never forgive him for that. I’ll never forgive him for making me.

Because he did. He made me. He put me here, a struggling, suffering, raging mess of tissue and blood and bile and hate.

I don’t think I can effectively put into words how badly I wanted to die. There’s no way to say it without sounding pathetic. But I wanted death in a way I can barely understand now. Everything hurt, and now he was here, and every nerve ending in my body seared with a sort of fuming hatred that I couldn’t understand. I still don’t understand it. The idea that I could end my own existence never crossed my mind, though. That didn’t feel like an option. He made me. I was his responsibility. He should be the one to liberate me.

Instead, he tied me up, cast enchantments, and put me into bondage; he prevented me from moving. 'For my own good,' he said. And there, where I couldn’t lash out with my body, when I couldn’t strike and bite and rip, when I could no longer express myself physically; that’s when I spoke my first coherent words. They were like pebbles on my tongue, awkward and slathered in saliva, garbled, but intelligible.

"Traitor," I growled in a strange voice; a voice I'd never heard before. "Look at the mess you made."

I used those words to remind him what he was. That was my violence. Words like:

Coward. Failure. Hypocrite. Pathetic. Weak. The worst thing to ever happen to the people who trusted you.

It was a chorus of insults designed to burn him. Babies nurse on their mothers. So did I. I nursed on his pain. I wanted so badly to hurt him the way he hurt me. And maybe, possibly, he’d do what he should have done the instant I was born into this world. Maybe he would lose his temper. Maybe he would kill me.

He didn’t. Obviously. He never even responded to what I said, in those early days. He’d just look me over, examining my body, treating the rash of scabs on my back and shoulders. He’d put this cooling salve on the sores, and it burned like ice on my skin. I screamed and I bit at him and I tried to show him what words, still so new and ineffective, refused to do for me. “I hate you. I will kill you.”

Sometimes he’d get this look on his face… This awful, sick… sad… sour look. Pity. It was just pity.

And it enraged me. How dare he pity me when this was his fault? I told him as much.

I told him everything back then, in those earliest days. Every thought that entered my head. I only knew three things: pain, hate, and Lucifer. And only one of those things could understand me.

My memories from then are fuzzy. Rather than a narrative, I recall a tapestry of impressions and sensations; reds and whites and blacks, flashes of green, and long stretches of gray. But some incidents stand out in my mind, clearer than all the others. In one, I was bound and naked—I wouldn’t wear clothes then, in the earliest days; I just shredded them when I had my hands free, and I screamed and tensed and scraped my body on the walls when I didn’t. I hated how they felt, hot fibers rubbing against nerve endings that were so raw I could barely think. But I was naked, and I was bound to a bed or a chair or something in the Demon Lord’s castle, and I was screaming, and tears and blood stung my eyes, and I told him:

“This was inside you all along, Lucifer! Look at me! I was inside you! This is you! I am you!”

And he sighed. He looked so tired, so pathetic. He ruffled my hair with a gentleness that ignited the rage inside me to a maddening level. And he said to me:

“I am me. You are you.”

I told him to eat shit, and he shrugged and cleaned me up.

I wonder if he was punishing himself, the way he always took care of me on his own. Or maybe it was just one of his self-imposed responsibilities; another thing he could do to convince himself he didn’t deserve to be miserable.

Back then, in those early days, he treated me like I was his child. I was his child. It always makes me sick to think about it that way, but he was my parent. He gave birth to me. He nursed me. He raised me. And just like so many parents since the dawn of time, he made me into a miserable facsimile of himself. I was Lucifer, but worse. I was Lucifer, but broken and ashamed and out of control. I was Lucifer, if Lucifer hated Lucifer. I didn’t want to be Lucifer.

“I am me. You are you.”

That’s easy enough to say when you’re the original. What about when you’re the parasitic thing that exploded from someone’s wounded body and heart? What then, Lucifer?

----

In spite of everything, I somehow made progress. I learned to dress myself, and to wear clothes without tearing them to shreds. I learned how to walk without erupting into an inferno of fury. I learned to speak without screaming. And that awful mother of mine was always with me, it seemed; always by my side. “Remember to breathe,” he’d say, or “Focus on what’s in front of you.” And I’d mutter curses at him, and I’d try; I’d try to do what he told me to do, and I’d feel so ashamed . But when I did what I was told, he’d give me things. Books, mainly, but also different foods, changes of scenery… So I did what I was told.

In some ways, I was as naive as a child. I remember the mystery of my first snowfall, touching it and putting it to my lips and staring at the impression of my handprint in the white blanket on the ground. But there were also plenty of things I never had to learn. I knew how to read and write; I understood, conceptually, that there was a Celestial Realm and a Devildom, and which one I was in. I knew that Lucifer had brothers and a sister, and I knew the sister was gone.

I knew about Lilith.

Lucifer says I often talked about Lilith in my early days. I don’t remember it myself, but he says I seemed fixated on her. I would sob and rage at him for letting her go, letting her die, twisting what was left of her and warping it into something ugly.

Lucifer said he thought it was because he was so heavily focused on Lilith when I was ‘born’; he supposes he must have imparted some strange impressions on me in his grief. I don’t remember any of that though, like I said, so I had to take his word for it.

I don't think that's the real reason anymore, though.

----

I remember meeting my brothers. Tch. My ‘brothers’....

“This is Satan,” Lucifer said to them. “He is your brother. I expect you to treat him as such.” They all stared at me as I sat bound and chained to a chair, gritting my teeth, and then they glanced at each other. They didn’t know what to say. And then they stared at me again, and I knew they were told how I’d erupted from Lucifer’s body, and I knew they had heard me screaming in the dungeon and down the otherwise quiet corridor of unused rooms, and I knew they were afraid. I knew.

But I was just six weeks old, and I was terrified too. And being terrified made me so angry. I struggled to swallow the rage, but it was only a matter of seconds before I choked out the first coherent thing that entered my mind, the words crescendoing into a grating scream by the end.

“They’re not my brothers!”

My vision wobbled, my head ached, and my muscles burned with an energy that could only be expelled with violence. I broke free from the chains around my wrists, and soon I was throwing things. Whatever I could get my hands on. A table. A painting. A priceless vase. Levi and Asmo and the twins scattered, and Mammon looked like he wanted to join them, but he didn’t. He stood uselessly in the middle of the hall as Lucifer grappled with me.

“O-oi, whadda you need?” he asked Lucifer, who responded by flapping his wings in irritation and grabbing onto my throat.

I grinned at him. I wanted to show him the worst, most sickening face he could possibly imagine. Lucifer’s expression hardly changed, but he squeezed, and I knew I’d succeeded. “Kill me,” I spat. I was crazy. I had lost my mind. It was empty of everything besides the hate. “Kill me, you scum. Kill me like you killed her.”

For a short while, I thought he might really do it. His fingers dug into my throat, his jaw clenched, and there was a rage in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before as I used some of my last stores of strength to strike him with my tail. Yes. He fed off my rage, and I fed off of his, and it was an infinite feedback loop. The border of my vision started to grow hazy, and my pulse was pounding in my ears, and…

He released me far too soon. Far, far too soon. I didn’t even fully lose consciousness; didn’t even get to enjoy a moment of oblivion. I’d just let myself go limp. I surrendered so easily. And that second of lowered resistance was all he needed to cast some binding enchantment on me and leave me irate and screaming, wheezing for breath, my pulse pounding in my face as my blood resumed circulating, and I wriggled on the floor like a worm. I felt like a worm. 

Time was still so new back then. I couldn’t follow how it passed, and it seemed to dilate, stretching and squeezing, becoming longer and shorter based on my moods. And now, it all feels so long ago.

It was a lifetime ago, I suppose. From then to now, for me.

I wasn’t kept under lock and key. Not normally, at least. I was allowed to wander the Demon King’s castle. While Cerberus stalked the labyrinth below, I was treading the hallways above. I wonder how Lucifer convinced Diavolo to agree to that…

It never got better, though.

The rage.

I just learned to manage it. Slowly. Bit by bit. I’m still learning to manage it. Sometimes I slip.

I slip a lot, actually.

Books were my main solace in the Demon King’s castle, just as they are now in the House of Lamentation. Because I understand how little I know, and how valuable books are as resources.

But funny enough, that wasn’t why I became so interested in books at the start. I was far less interested in nonfiction than I was with novels. Reading a good novel…a really good novel… It can feel like a possession. Like you’ve entered someone else’s body and attuned yourself to someone else’s mind.

I wonder if others understand what a relief that is? I wonder if anybody can have any idea what others actually feel, and how it compares to yourself? It’s a question I sometimes get stuck on. The question alone takes me out of myself. I like that.

I didn’t care much about the real world when I was new. Why should I? The only things in it were Lucifer and his brothers, and I got enough of that already. I would rather be Azaz the Summoner, the demon who forged pacts with other demons in defiance of all natural laws. Or a young human boy living in the wilderness with wolves. I like stories like that.

No, what piqued my interest in the world outside was the butler.

I don’t know where he got the time, or why he cared enough to be bothered with it, but he told me about his own life. Only in the vaguest terms, of course; never touching on anything that felt truly personal. He talked of how ancient he was, and how he’d walked in the human world before humans ever did. And he told me about his room. He even let me look inside once. It’s shocking. Doors and stairs all over the place, leading to different places and times… 

There’s no way for me to know if he was being honest with his stories, but he knew so much, it seemed insane to believe he was making it all up. He knew about the way the Devildom smelled when it was first inhabited by demons; he knew about the sulfur mines that shut down millennia ago, and the infrastructure that transformed the place into somewhere livable… 

So I read some books about the ancient history of the Devildom. From what I could tell, his descriptions were accurate, and though he could have learned those things the same way I had, I didn’t feel he did. It felt more as if he was speaking from experience.

But when I read about the early Devildom, I wanted to learn about the fae. And when I read about the fae, I wanted to learn more about magic. And when I learned about magic, I wanted to learn more about curses, and magicians from all three realms, and soon I was no longer reading about fictional worlds, but my own. And I wanted so badly to see it.

----

When we moved into the House of Lamentation, Lucifer gave me the scroll. It was shiny and strange, and he told me it belonged to me, and that I should look it over when I was ready. He told me it had information about my birth. He made it sound like some sort of legal document, and it seemed to me that he wanted me to look at the thing sooner rather than later. So I tossed it on a high shelf and ignored it. I ignored it until you came to my room and started asking questions.

Lucifer came into my room the night I had you over. No knocking. He just burst in, arms crossed, wearing that disgusting look of beleaguered disappointment on his face. Like I’d let him down again. Like I owed him the consideration of trying to do anything else…

“You had a guest today, I heard.”

I was sitting on my bed, reading a book about who-knows-what. I’ve forgotten. He made me forget. And I was suspicious. Why was he speaking like that? Why wouldn’t he just say what he meant? I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of an answer, so I glared at the page of my book without seeing a single word.

Lucifer continued. “Did you become angry? Or were you cruel out of some new, cold sadistic streak?”

I threw my book at him and he dodged it with ease. Then he continued as if I hadn’t tried to smash his face in. “Or perhaps it was unintentional. But it seems you left our attendant in a state of deep distress. What did you discuss?”

“Get out of my room, bastard.”

I turned and lied on my side, back to him, and I dragged my tail over the bedspread. I was working away at it, slowly turning it to ribbons as the threads hooked onto and snapped over the sharp spines. I knew he hated it when I did things like that. And he knew I knew, so he pretended not to notice.

Irritating.

For about three minutes, I laid there, and he stood there, and neither of us said a word.

“Why does it matter?!” I finally snapped. I found myself tugging at my hair in irritation. Every part of my body feels so unnecessary when I’m agitated, from my hair to my horns to my skin. “Why won’t you leave?”

“You should be more careful with whom you share family matters.”

I actually spat out a laugh. Was he serious? I rolled back over and sneered at him. “Why’s that? Anyway, isn’t this all more or less a matter of public record? The entire Devildom knows how I came into the world.”

“Hm. So that’s what you discussed.” He nodded, and there was something supremely cocky in his mannerisms that made me want to strangle him. But I couldn’t strangle him. So I did the next best thing.

“Lilith came up.”

I stared at him, and I saw the flicker of emotion on his face when he heard that name. That name… Lilith… It’s a name I could use to hurt him. That’s all I was thinking when I sharpened it like a knife.

“I don’t understand why anyone would be cautious talking about Lilith with me,” I said nonchalantly. “But I guess my ‘guest’ thought I would be bothered. Tiptoeing around the fact that she died. As if I would be devastated over it.” I laughed, but it was hollow, and I wasn’t getting the reactions I wanted.

I doubled down.

“Really, I’m glad I never had to deal with her. She sounds infuriating. When you get down to it, the entire war was her fault. All because she couldn’t stand some human dying ten or twenty years before he would have ended up dying anyway.”

I could sense his rising annoyance, but it was too tempered. He knew I was trying to get a rise out of him, so he wasn’t as angry as he might have been otherwise.

“She was your sister,” Lucifer said. He had a strange voice when he said it.

I laughed again. “Right. Like they’re my ‘brothers’. But I never even met her. She’s just some idiot who threw away her life and all your lives for a single stupid human. She’s a stranger. She means nothing to me. She has nothing to do with me. And she deserves what she got.”

Lucifer was quiet for a few seconds. I couldn’t tell if I’d struck a nerve or not. He wasn’t so upset that he reacted, though, which annoyed me.

“She has nothing to do with you?” he echoed.

“Nothing whatsoever.”

His eyes roamed around the room, and they quickly fixed on that damn scroll, as if it was a homing beacon.

“You haven’t read that yet, have you.” It wasn't a question.

I felt another sharp jab of annoyance. “It doesn’t interest me.”

“Don’t be pointlessly stubborn, Satan.”

“What do you care?” I snapped. “Did your attendant come crying to you? Did that break your heart? You just can’t stand seeing someone in pain, is that it?”

“It’s not like you to be intentionally ignorant.”

“Didn’t you say it’s just a record about my birth? I don’t want to know anything else about how I was born. I hate what I already do know.” I jumped out of bed and stalked towards him. If he wasn’t going to walk out the door on his own, I’d gladly help him get there. “And it’s completely like you to dodge a question.”

“You weren’t asking that to hear the answer.”

Again, irritating.

“Why does it matter if I read that thing?”

“Because it concerns you. You should understand how you came to be.”

“I know how I came to be,” I growled. “You pulled your wings off and bled all over and cried. Am I wrong?”

Lucifer lowered his arms to his sides and frowned deeply at me, but he didn’t say anything. Something about that...scared me. Something about that filled me with dread, like I’d suddenly found myself on the edge of a precipice. But dread can’t exist inside me for long. Soon, it had churned through my body and hardened into something more familiar.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I growled. He didn’t say a thing, and he didn’t move. My stomach roiled in my gut. The frustration and disappointment were no longer evident on his face. Instead, I felt like I was a newborn again, “Stop looking at me like you’re worried about me! Like you pity me! It makes me want to vomit!”

I lunged at him. He reacted with the strength and dexterity I’d come to expect. I could never land a blow on Lucifer. If I hadn’t been so damn angry I wouldn’t have even tried. But my entire being ached with rage, and I acted without thinking. I felt so weak. I felt so helpless. I stood there, struggling to free myself, and he stood over me, my fists in his hands, that same, awful, pitying look on his face that he used to have back at the Demon King’s castle. Seeing that look…

“Why do you look at me like that?!” Hot, angry tears blurred my vision and burned my eyes. “Your face always makes me sick, but I can’t stand it when you look at me like that! Why can’t you hate me?!”

And before I could do anything else, I was bound up. Again. Just like I used to be, back in Diavolo’s place. I screamed, and I sobbed, and I felt like I had felt when I was first born. Like nothing but wrath, poisonous wrath, was coursing through my veins. And I felt arms around me—his arms, and I couldn’t push him away, so I just screamed as he embraced me. Like he had any right to embrace me! Why couldn’t I make him leave?! How dare he touch me?! I’d kill him. One day, I’d kill him!

It had been a long time since I’d been that angry. I think it took a toll on my body, because I slipped off to sleep without realizing I'd ever slowed down, and when I woke up, I was in bed, unbound and alone.

My body was sore from straining all my muscles the night before, and I felt groggy and unwell, like I’d been drunk on rage and woke with a hangover. I stepped out of bed and looked around the room. I felt I was searching for something.

Again, like a homing beacon. The celestial glow drew my eyes.

My fingers twitched.

I took the scroll from the shelf and untied it. I hated that I was giving in to him so easily. But what choice did I have? I had half a mind to burn the thing unread, but it slipped open and the words appeared before my eyes in a language I barely recognized. A human language, bizarrely. It appeared to be Latin. It used Latin characters, at least.

ANNO MMCDXCI REGNI GARDONI MAGNI A SANGUINE LUCIFERI ET CORPORE LILITHAE IN REGNO QUOD INTER REGNA EST CREATURA NOVA E PACTIONE SANGUINE CONSIGNATA APPARET. EX AMATO AD AMATUM IN ACERBISSIMO MORTIS DOLORE CORPUS CORPUS ITERUM FIT ET SANGUIS SANGUIS ITERUM FIT. HAEC PACTIO IN TERRA NEUTRIUS PARTIS CONCELEBRATUR AB INFERNO CONFIRMATA NEQUE A CAELO RECUSATA. SATANUS, ADVERSARIUS, NATUS EST.

TESTATUM PER DIAVOLUM, GARDONI MAGNI FILIUS NATURALIS TESTATUM PER BARBATOS, DAEMONUS TESTATUM PER LUCIFERUM, ANGELUS LAPSUS

----

I wandered to Lucifer’s study. It was empty. It took awhile to find the right sort of dictionary, but eventually, I had what I needed. And I got to work.

Within the hour, I was rampaging around the house. Mammon tried to get me under control, but he was never able to contain me. Only Lucifer ever did that.

“What happened?” he kept asking. “What the hell happened?!” But I was Wrath, and Wrath doesn’t speak with words.

----

Playing the adversary is hard work. It’s exhausting. It makes me miserable. But I have to do it. It’s my role. It’s my name. And I’m made out of Lucifer’s wrath. He must feel so much lighter without all that anger weighing him down. How nice for him. But when I learned about what else I was…

I’m Lilith, you know? I’m made out of her.

For some reason, that made me crazy.

----

IN THE 2491st YEAR OF THE REIGN OF THE GREAT GARDONUS, FROM THE BLOOD OF LUCIFER AND THE BODY OF LILITH, IN THE REALM BETWEEN REALMS, A CONTRACT SEALED WITH BLOOD BRINGS FORTH A NEW ESSENCE. OF BELOVED, BY BELOVED MADE, IN THE AGONY OF DEATH, BODY AGAIN BECOMES BODY AND BLOOD BECOMES BLOOD ANEW. THIS DOCUMENT BEING LEGALLY SOLEMNIZED ON NEUTRAL GROUND, SANCTIFIED BY HELL, UNCONTESTED BY HEAVEN. SATAN, THE ADVERSARY, IS BORN.

WITNESSED BY DIAVOLO, NATURAL SON OF THE GREAT GARDONUS WITNESSED BY BARBATOS, DEMON WITNESSED BY LUCIFER, FALLEN ANGEL

[salty-hakuouki]

Hi! I recently got into the Hakuouki fandom and I really appreciate you taking time to translate the game for us who can't play it. Thank you!

How is your cat Hillys? I hope she'll recover soon ♡

Anyway, I've been meaning to ask if you know where is this CG from and what's the context? We all know Harada is the short tempered one, but it seems weird to me that he's acting like this towards Chizuru

Hello ! Thank you for your concern for Hillys. She is still very ill from her eye but she is seeing a specialist. She’s been suffering from an agressive bacteria in her left eye since October 17th that is dissolving her cornea. The bacteria is now eradicated but the reconstruction process takes time. She might stay blind from one eye, which will stay blurry and white if it’s too destroyed to heal completely. Her next appointment is December 26th with a vision test so we’ll know then.

Here is a pic of Hillys with her eyes before she got ill. She’s 11 years old and a beautiful lady who loves when I make her some salmon soup with my leftovers.

About the Harada CG, you’re in luck!

This CG is coming from Ginsei no Shou and is gonna be part of the route translated and posted on YouTube next !

For now, only chapter 1 of this route is posted on my channel :

And a Bonus chapter from Tsukikage no Shou :

But your CG will be posted pretty soon so Stay Tuned !

[satans-my-spirit-animal]

*spits out drink*

[wildflower-otome]

[Translation] Shuuen no Virche -ErroR:salvation- Visual Fanbook Short Stories

Lis ~Innocent• Pure Love~ (Yves Short Story)

Laurier ~Glory • Betrayal • I won’t change until I die~ (Lucas Proust Short Story)

Pulsatilla ~Love unable to be conveyed – Love betrayed~ (Mathis Claude Short Story)

Sureau ~Zeal • Joy • Pity~ (Scien Brofiise Short Story)

Chrysanthème ~Flowers of the dead • Unchanging Love~ (Adolphe Short Story)

Lycoris ~I only think of you~ (Ankou Short Story)

[ririya-translates]

Kokuto Neji's Story

Translation of Neji's concept art short story (original) for his birthday on March 22nd. Story by Shin Towada (JJ lead writer and Ishida's sister). Art by Lownine. Much like the others, there aren't really any spoilers as it's at the very beginning of the game before the first play.

The stage is a gigantic machine. Jacks and Jeannes are the gears and I'm the mechanic who assembles them all.

The darkened room is lit solely by a clattering computer with light strong enough to rival the midday sun. The bookshelves along the walls are crammed tight beyond usual capacity. The remaining books that couldn't fit have been turned into a fort on the floor. "Hmmm." Out of that pile, he easily picks out a book while holding a cup of coffee in his other hand. The one craning his neck towards the computer screen is the owner of this room. He's a third-year at Univeil Drama School. Working under somewhat special circumstances, he's the leader of Quartz: Kokuto Neji. His classmates include the Quartz Al Jeanne, Sarafumi Takashina, and Jack Ace, Kai Mutsumi. Taking liberal advantage of Univeil's culture of respect for personal autonomy, Neji doesn't just write and perform. He's able to act as both a Jack and a Jeanne, using his many talents to bring the performance together. Even now, he's in the middle of making preparations for the newcomers' performance. His eyes dart around as he scrolls through the screen. He's fidgety inside his head. For this reason, a knock at the door rings out unusually strongly.

"Yes, yes, come iiiin!" As Neji snaps back to reality, he opens the door with a feeling of anticipation. "Thanks." Behind the door stands a person with pale skin and soft hair. So soft it's as if the colour has faded and dissolved. This utterly adorable person raises his eyes towards Neji. "Why on earth would you call me over here then ignore me? I have things to do too you know." The edge of criticism in his voice gives a very different impression from his outside appearance. "Sorry about that, Shirota!" Mitsuki Shirota. He's a second-year, one year below Neji. As one would expect from his looks, he's been assigned to female roles as a Jeanne. "Honestly, I didn't think you'd actually show up." Shirota's eyes grow sharper as he speaks without hesitation. "Using a first-year as your carrier pigeon, what kind of excuse is that?" Neji had casually requested one of the brand new Quartz students to send Shirota to his office. "Well weren't you the one who told me to stop asking Kai to do things?" "Obviously. You shouldn't be using our Jack Ace for your trivial errands." "Right, so instead I asked this new person to be a pinch hitter." "I said to stop doing that too. Ugh, what do you want?" "How did that kid get you to come here? What kinda trap did he use?" "…You called me here for no reason didn't you. I'm leaving." "Hey, wait!" As Shirota turns to leave, Neji holds out both of his hands as if to say 'I'm sorry, I'm screwed up!' Shirota's expression darkens, recognizing that Neji hasn't reflected on his actions one bit. "So? What do you want?" Neji prefaces his words with, "I guess I messed up a bit," before finally cutting to the chase. "What is your impression of the first-years?" Shirota furrows his brow. "You asked Fumi and Kai this too, didn't you?" "You're right, I did!" He had asked both Fumi and Kai the same question. "If you have answers from both the Al Jeanne and Jack Ace, that should be enough. Why do you need to ask me too?" "What are you talking about?! You're our Tresor. You're our flower too!" Tresor is the name for Univeil Jeannes with strong singing abilities. The title suits Shirota perfectly. His outstanding vocal talents add vibrant colour to their performances. It's popular with audiences too. "I am glad you're with Quartz still though. I know you're pretty in-demand with Rhodonite." Shirota stays silent at the mention of that name. Univeil is divided into four separate classes with their own special traits. As the "transparent" Quartz class, they are primarily made up of inexperienced performers who have yet to find their true colours. This could put the class at a disadvantage, but really there are quite a few who enrol brimming with hidden talents. Quartz gives them the space to let those talents free. The content of their performances are tailored specifically for the current state of the class. The songs, dances, acting, all of it.

In contrast, classes like Onyx and Rhodonite have clearly defined colours. Powerful Jack dancers are the main selling point of Onyx, whereas Rhodonite pushes the dazzling singing talents of their Jeannes front and centre. Considering Shirota's abilities, it wouldn't be strange at all for him to have been sorted into Rhodonite. Actually, Rhodonite's class leader is pretty taken with him. But whatever class you look at, all of them are desperately aiming for that top spot -- now more than ever.

"So? What do you think of this year's new students?" Neji's tone of voice drops for the first time in this conversation,"You know it won't be good if things stay as they are, right? What with Amber and all…" That's the name of the fourth Univeil class. But it's hard to act as if the others are on equal ground with them. Shirota seems to grasp the weight of these words. He grips the sky blue tie around his neck as he appears deep in thought. He finally opens his mouth. "…There are three people I noticed," he says bluntly. Starting with Person 1. "Orimaki. I don't know how he got into Univeil with his singing skills so low, but his voice is strong and direct." Onto Person 2. "Yonaga. Him being as he is, he's a late bloomer who's constantly nervous about how he even got into Univeil. But he also thinks twice as much about the meaning of each song. That being said…"

Shirota's immediate answer suddenly hits a pause. "It's possible both of them just got my attention because they aren't very good." "In that case, they should consider themselves lucky you graced your eyes on them." Neji jokes then stares at him intently. "And the third person?" Mitsuki sighs at being asked for his final answer. "It's the one you made into your little carrier pigeon." A voice deep in Neji's heart whispers 'I knew it.' "So then, does our carrier pigeon also have a glimmer of sparkle out of a mountain of problems like Orimaki and Yonaga do?" "No, that guy is…" Shirota hesitates a moment as he chooses his words carefully. "I still don't know yet." "You don't know, which means…?" "Exactly what I said." He speaks as if to say he will give no further comment on the matter. "Is that enough for you now? I'm leaving." Having finished what he was asked, Shirota heads for the door. "Ah, one last thing! How did this pigeon get you to come over here?" Shirota is the type who prefers not to group up with others in class. He keeps a distance between himself and other people. He's not the type someone could easily convince by just asking outright. Even moreso if it comes from a student younger than him. "……" Shirota responds to Neji's hastily thrown words with silence. He opens the door to leave. That's as far as we're getting today, is it? "…It wasn't anything special." Neji's mood suddenly shifts at the sound of a reply he didn't expect to ever hear. "I was just taking a short break during practice and he came up to me and said 'Neji was asking for you'." A surprised 'ohh?' slips out of Neji's mouth. "So in other words, he chose when to make the request based on timing that would work for you?" There are times when Shirota is busy singing of course; however, there are also a lot of times when he appears to be doing nothing, but is actually busy arranging music in his mind. Figuring out the timing of when he's truly taking a break is no easy task. Even aside from the music, there are times when he doesn't want to be hassled with having to talk to someone. Using this understanding of his quirks, that carrier pigeon was able to start up a conversation. "Isn't that actually quite special after all?!" Neji says with a nod of admiration.

Upon hearing this, Shirota restrains himself from turning around and calling him a bald-faced liar. "This was all part of your plan, wasn't it?" His eyes sharply say, 'You haven't fooled me.' "Turning him into your carrier pigeon worked out just as you planned. Getting me to show up here and to name him as one of the students I noticed. You already knew all these things. It was just a ploy to confirm them." Shirota states his assertions strongly. Neji grins. He keeps up the act that there's no hidden motive behind his actions, but it smells like a lie. Shirota's face fills with disgust. He passes through the door, speaking as if he cannot bear to be around Neji any longer. "Please don't use me as a ruler for measuring other people." He shuts the door immediately to not let the conversation linger. "My my, Shirota is quite clever isn't he." Listening to the footsteps fade into the distance, Neji stifles his smile. "But regardless, the fact that pigeon was able to navigate this sense of distance with Shirota shows he might have quite a number of uses." This could be precisely reflected on-stage too. Neji's mind overflows with so many different ideas at an intensity that could give birth to a whole other world. "However, the 'I still don't know' part is there too. Fumi and Kai said the same thing." It seems difficult to learn the true nature of this bird. Even for Neji, there's many things about this younger student he's still unable to grasp. "The stage is a gigantic machine. Jacks and Jeannes are the gears…and I'm the mechanic who assembles them all. What shape will these talents take? Just watch and see." Neji takes a sip from the coffee he's been holding all this time. It went cold ages ago, but in this moment it's just what his body needs.