天下制覇

To this day, I have no idea what the Kamidori/God Captor part of the title refers to.

I’m sure it could use another editing or pass too, but given A.) How long the game is and B.) How much of a disaster the writing and script formats in general are, there’s no good way to edit it short of actually playing the game. I don’t want to drive my editors any more crazy than they already are by grinding out the endgame stuff repeatedly, so… here we are.

I’ve already said pretty much everything that I have to about the game itself. It’s still extremely fun if you have any interest in SRPGs at all and is meaty enough to last a good 60 hours or so in a single playthrough which’ll get you through about half of the dungeons in the game. The gameplay’s long, deep enough, fun, and if you’re trying to collect 100% of everything fairly, then good luck. You’ll need it. That and a lot of time for all the grinding… especially because the last Append/Expansion added a bunch of quests that are literally nothing BUT grinding.

Thanks to everybody who helped out with this project; hackers, and especially the editors for reasons I’ll get to shortly. The errors and issues, technical, typo, and my occasional incomprehensible lingual spew were many.

I’d also like to thank everyone who showed up to the little Melty get-together. I only lost to about five or six people (although almost all of that was in the expected spikey 4-8 delay), but ended up giving the patch to whoever was nice enough to come and play, so fie on those of you who didn’t. Here’s a pack of all my replays of the night and next afternoon if you’re curious. Any sets where neither of us change characters for a while are likely the lower delay/better play ones, especially late last night and most of today. I got to play against some actual P.Ciels and good Roas for once, and let me tell you, I still have no idea how to deal with P.Ciels. And was embarrassed badly by that F.Roa.

I will now proceed to rant aimlessly about everything wrong with Kamidori because months of being subjected to every single inch of the worst parts of it have severely embittered me. It was loads of fun at the start going through all the items and dictionaries because they were so bland and horrible that I couldn’t help but inject a little character and fun into them. For example, the ‘descriptive’ popup for an Iron Sword was literally: "Iron Sword [ahy-ern sawrd] / An iron sword." Plus, all the weird furniture they created didn’t have any description at all, just how to pronounce its name, a copy/paste sentence about where in the house it belonged and what stat it affected. Not how it affected the stat, just that it had an effect. So you might say that there was room for improvement that I don’t think anybody would argue with.

But then I had to start working on the actual scripts, which was a ‘special’ fun that I do not soon wish to duplicate. The ‘scripts’ for this weren’t really scripts, but a split set of instructions and then the associated list of strings. To duplicate the fun, try opening up a playscript written by a teenager, strip out all the speaker tags, remove 75% of the pronouns since this is Japanese, and then sort all the scenes by props instead of chronologically. The tutorial in the first dungeon, for example, is split across 4 different scripts, by trigger type. The script wasn’t going to win any awards to begin with, but with a highly contextual language like Japanese, that made gross errors… how to say… frequent, not to mention inevitable whenever there were more than about two people in a scene, and not helped because Wil shifted his speaking style when talking to certain people. That was a big reason I didn’t want to release any partials. With a cry of "Now it’s an editing problem!" I just made an assumption about who was talking and what implied subjects (like… "me"… or "you") they were referring to, and moved on. More than once it ended with characters seemingly referring to themselves in the third person.

What makes this slightly funnier is that some doofus apparently got into my (admittedly ‘secured by obscurity’) folders, and found an old package of the scripts. Not the instructions that go with them, just a semi-unsorted list of strings that he proceeded to spam on 4chan hoping that someone could take random strings and turn them into a game. Great work there, brainiac.

*ahem* The not-so-good writing itself was also a big part of it, but it was more of Eushully’s shoddy editing/playtesting that ground down my soul. For example, at the route split, there are three scripts for a nearly identical scene on each, except that they’re all different editing revisions. In one, a character says "um", in another, they say "er." One has a comma for some reason, others don’t. It’s… baffling, but most of the editing problems were far more mundane. Fixing all the times that the writing misremembered or misquoted past events was fun, but the best part was when I got to completely rewrite a short scene because it was an obscure victory script attached to a game over trigger. "We drove off the marauding trolls and saved the forest! –GAME OVER–" Brilliant work, Eushully. There are lots of other little things that really seem to indicate it was rushed out of the door at the last second, but it is a testament to the game that you’ll probably get about 20-40 hours in before you start noticing all the little cracks.

The takeaway message here is basically: Good god, whatever you do, expect nothing from this game’s writing. Especially emotion. And especially on Elftits route. Her route’s just… not there. It’s almost strange. And stop ending every scene with "I’ve got to work hard," you dip and show some passion, damn it. *ahem again* Amazing how that starts to grate on you so much more when you’re writing it out for months instead of just glancing over it to get back to killing things. Words cannot describe how I would’ve longed for more of Daibanchou’s sex scenes instead of "Clean water’s nice/I’m going sightseeing in the east" just for something with a bit of passion.

Anyway, here’s two files. One patches the game, the other is 512 images of distressed cats. It’s up to you to discover which is which.

http://games.seiha.org/patches/Kamidori%201_0.zip
http://games.seiha.org/patches/Catmidori1_0.zip

If you downloaded the ghetto/Melty patch, be sure to grab the first text fix on the forums. I accidentally didn’t account for some of the pre-existing files that the 2.0 append edited itself and the patch was ignoring them since they already existed. There’s a number of other useful things at the forums too, like lists of materials, requirements for costumes, how to soft-mod game resources, etc. Additional editing/typo fixes will also be posted there weekly for probably a month or two yet.

Have fun.