You’ll find a slightly more detailed explanation there too.

I will probably archive my vectors somewhere in a better environment than the current hacked-together gallery pages so that I can close this down for good. In the mean time I’m keeping everything up. There’s always Vectorbooru too, though it looks to be almost as dead as this site now.

In an attempt to force myself to actually put content up on this blog more than once or twice a year, I’ve decided to start actually writing a bit about anime that I finish. This is sort of continuing along the same theme that I started when talking about Slayers Next about a year ago. This is actually the third one of these I’ve started, but this time I’m finishing the bastard off.

I’m not interested really in summarising what I’m talking about or anything, since it’s not like there aren’t dozens of blogs who post summaries and have much better (and less lazy) writers. Not to mention that summary info can generally be found on ANN or Wikipedia or the like. I’ve also got no intention of holding off on spoilers. I assume if you’re bothering to read my long-winded bullshit then you’re actually familiar with the anime at hand, or if not, you don’t care.

With that aside, I should also probably admit that I apparently have an incredible tolerance for crap. I don’t particularly care if something is bad (as long as it’s not really, really bad) as long as I’m fairly entertained. Additionally I tend to hoard shows for ages, sitting on them until I suddenly get the desire to watch something and burn my way through an entire archived series in 3-4 days. This might actually have a bearing on why I can tolerate a fair amount of mediocrity - things like pacing problems end up being far less of an issue when you’re watching everything in one go instead of having to wait for a week or more for the next installment.

You’ve probably already realised where I’m going with this. Kaze no Stigma is mediocre. Highly so. Gonzo are essentially a mediocrity factory. They spent the better part of this decade churn out soulless, lifeless shows, adapting existing material with some kind of strange formula that appears to be built around sucking out all its redeeming features, lobotomising it and making it shuffle around like some kind of brainless automaton for a few months until the factory churns out the next one, then quickly forgotten. Though to be fair, their recent monetary issues have appeared to convince them to at least try and put an effort into making things that will actually sell. Shame for Funimation that they appear to have picked this one up by mistake. Before anyone asks, yes, I watched old fansubs I’ve had archived for ages, not the ‘official’ release. Not that it particularly matters in the end.

Anyway, Kaze no Stigma! There’s not a huge amount to say about this, it’s basically mediocre in every point. It’s certainly not terrible, but it feels like there was a lot of potential in the show that was hampered and effectively squandered by poor writing, inconsistent characterisation and bad pacing.

The pacing issue was probably not as evident for me for reasons already mentioned, however I could still notice that things seemed to plod along very slowly, taking a long time to resolve any given plot point. It’s no Noir, but it did feel like there was not quite enough plot to spread over the entire timeslot allocated to it, so rather than pad things out with bad filler episodes, they decided to simply attempt to spread the content they had further and more thinly as a result. Anime with poor pacing isn’t exactly uncommon, however, so this is hardly a major concern.

Characterisation was much more of an issue. I’m not so worried about the fact that the main heroine and love interest is a redhead (or more technically a pinkhead) tsundere who likes to set things on fire with magic. Sure, they’re pretty much a dime a dozen, but if we wrote off everything because it relied a bit on stereotype or convention in its character design then we’d end up with not a lot left to watch. She could be a lot worse than she is, too. More irritating for me was that the writing team clearly didn’t know what they wanted to do with the protagonist.

The real issues lie in the fact that their writing for him is incredibly inconsistent. They establish him one way, only to turn around and have him do things that seem to be entirely at odds with the character they’d already established. When first introduced, Kazuma is fairly cold, arrogant, seems to be very powerful and have some anger issues. Additionally he establishes very early that he doesn’t care about his old family at all. Yet everything that occurs subsequently is not in tune with this. His entire character changes within a few episodes. Instead of the grey, morally-conflicted character you initially expect, you end up with a cliche Diamond in the Rough-style Generic Male Protagonist.

What’s even more frustrating is that his actual motivations are just as inconsistent. He clearly has an interesting background, but it’s never expanded upon. We know nothing about how he ended up with his wind powers, we know practically nothing about the circumstances around the vendetta that he sometimes appears to have with Almagest. We get to see little snippets of his past, which just serves to make the story as a whole more frustrating, because honestly I found the flashbacks we did get to be far more interesting and compelling than the actual plot that was being developed.

The inconsistency seeps into the tone as well. Gonzo appear to have been targeting the usual sort of action-comedy niche. The problem is that I get a strong impression that this lighter tone might not be reflective of the original work from which the anime is derived. There are several spots in which a much darker tone seems to creep in, the most obvious of course being the flashback with a powerless Kazuma watching Cui-Ling, bleeding from a hundred cuts and being sacrificed to a demon while pleading with him to save her. These sorts of moments were vastly more compelling and engaging than the majority of the rest of the anime. A quick consultation of Wikipedia turns up accusations that the inconsistent nature of the tone is attributable to Gonzo, who have lightened the tone, removed many deaths and reduced Kazuma’s involvement in others to make him less of a dark character. I think that they’d have been better served by remaining faithful to the source.

In the end, however, despite its schizophrenic presentation and considerable failings, it’s not a bad show. While it never fully delivers on the promise shown in some scenes, as an overall package it’s passable, though exceedingly average fare. Surprisingly, despite how cliche they are, Ayano and Kazuma actually do work as a pair, though as a love interest in an anime show she’s fairly well-tread ground and will always play second fiddle to Kazuma in terms of her actual ability to get things done without having her hand held all the time. I’m not a big fan of the whole tsundere type, but Ayano’s particular blend of about 99% tsun and 1% dere appears to work far better for me than most. Perhaps because the few times she flips, it’s when Kazuma actually does something genuinely embarrassing. I could have done without the annoying little brother, however, who spends most of the time whining and periodically gets in the way. If he hadn’t been present in the show at all, I suspect that it would have been a stronger story. Though that wouldn’t have been hard given how retarded the writing is in parts - people participating in a real-life MMORPG for example is a stupid idea that we’d normally only expect to see in dumb hollywood flicks - there are still some interesting moments spread throughout the show. It’s just that honestly, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better in other shows. I have a strong suspicion that the light novels that the show was adapted from are much better than Gonzo’s effort would indicate.

So, in summary, Kaze no Stigma is a typical Gonzo show, taking what may have once been a reasonably passable original story and running it through their special Mediocrity Factory, producing an anime that while watchable and entertaining, is ultimately inconsistent and schizophrenic, and on the occasions when it manages to line up everything properly, ends up only highlighting its frustrating failure to fully explore and capitalise on its better ideas.

Overall I think this was the best episode so far, and it practically has me salivating for the anime adaption. There are a number of sequences in this episode which will be absolutely epic when animated. Assuming, of course, that the execution is good - I have my reservations about some of their casting decisions. Additionally this installment was interesting because it significantly built upon a lot of the characters, included the first in-episode appearance of one of the framing story characters, and started expanding on some of the backstory. This also resulted in us being able to finally begin to see an overall structure to the story emerge. Everything is beginning to solidify and it is now apparent that any speculation before getting through this episode is pretty much useless since until now we really were trying to solve a puzzle blindfolded.

Finally, Beatrice has to have committed one of the most epic, elaborate trolls in literature. She had me completely convinced by the end - and she would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

This episode really helped me solidify a lot of my thoughts. Some things were confirmed, and I think we’re finally at the point that we’re getting an idea what sort of questions we actually need to be asking. It also clarifies the rules of the contest between Beatrice and Battler - we now know that what we’re seeing happen is Beatrice’s explanation for the events that Rokkenjima Battler (as opposed to Meta-story Battler) experiences. For Battler to win he needs to provide a complete mundane explanation for everything, but within the bounds set up by Beatrice’s red letter statements. Those statements will actually probably help us as much as they hinder, honestly, as they reduce Beatrice’s ability to come up with crazy magical explanations too. Less wiggle-room. Though the exact wording of some of the statements will probably allow for loopholes at times.

There were a lot of interesting developments regarding Beatrice herself. One of the major ones was the revelation that her name, her powers and her title is passed on to her successor. Beato several times mentions that she’s thousands of years old, but this may actually be misleading - Beatrice, the Golden Witch, may be that old. But it’s entirely possible that when she says this, she refers to the title and powers, not her physical self. Bearing out with this is the suggestion that the previous Beatrice, (Virgilia) appears to be Kumasawa. I don’t believe that Kumasawa is thousands of years old - if anything she’d be close to Kinzo’s age. Additionally we have Eva taking the title from Beato, and then we’re told in the epilogue that Ange will inherit the title from Eva.

The other interesting development on the backstory front is that Rosa had met Beatrice before, in the flesh, and had seen her die. The way that this was all set up suggested that Beatrice was Kinzo’s illegitimate daughter (with Kumasawa? It seems possible, though odd), concealed in the forest to hide her from everyone. Personally I don’t entirely buy Rosa’s story about her. Given the way that Rosa flips out and starts beating her daughter all the time, and that the second and third episodes have showed she certainly has a fair bit of ambition and drive herself, it’s entirely possible that she realised exactly who Beatrice was and (in the grip of one of her wild mood swings) pushed her off the cliff. This would seem to fit with some of her other behavior too. The way that she comes down so hard on Maria’s love of witches, and especially when Maria talks about meeting Beatrice, would be because Rosa has a lot of guilt about killing her. It could also explain the excessively cruel way that Beato treated her in the epilogue for episode 2.

I’m not so happy about some of the logical arguments that were put forward this episode. Hempel’s Ravens (note it should be Ravens, plural) isn’t a name of a logical argument at all. It’s a logical paradox. The explanation given in the game is fine. “All ravens are black”. Negating both sides via the rule of implication gives us “everything that is not black is not a raven”. This is still valid (if being black is a trait of all ravens, then if the object isn’t black it can’t be a raven). Furthermore, Hempel has a raven he has observed which is black. This lends evidence to the first statement (”my raven is black so all ravens are black”). The paradox arises when we take an object that is not black. “This object is not black so it is not a raven.” This is a negation of the first statement being used to apply evidence that the contrapositive is a valid statement. It’s logically equivalent, but it is also incorrect - the colour of the object tells us nothing about Ravens. I’m really not sure how this paradox has any bearing on the game, though, aside from reinforcing that we cannot use inductive logic if we don’t fully understand the whole problem space. If anything, being forced to use a logical paradox to defend an argument strikes me as slightly desperate. However describing Rokkenjima as being like Schrodinger’s Cat explained a lot to me. At the moment, both the magical and the mundane explanations exist, and the resolution of the game will be the equivalent of opening the box and finding out if the cat is alive or dead.

The real question that I had at the end when Beatrice’s absolutely masterful deception is revealed at the final moment, was how much of her act was fake, and how much was actually a glimpse of her true nature? In previous entries I’d suggested that she seemed to be so utterly evil that it almost felt like overcompensation, and additionally the way she practically reveled in breaking apart pairs of lovers seemed to be suggesting envy was a major motivating factor in her behavior. The question is whether she was planning her elaborate deception from the beginning of the chapter onward, or if it was something she came up with later.

Personally, I suspect that she came up with the plan later in the act, because I got the distinct impression that her reaction to Battler’s vehement rejection of her seemed far too genuine, especially if we consider the revelations regarding her past. She was kept in isolation in her mansion on the island for years. Battler is quite possibly the first person she’s had significant interactions with since her ‘death’. She has no social skills, and her power has most assuredly broken her respect for life. I got the impression that a lot of the reason that we were suckered in so magnificently was that everything she says about her change of heart and perspective seemed so extremely plausible, and I suspect that the reason for that is that there’s more than a hint of truth in a lot of it. Her life of isolation and her untimely death have, in my opinion, stunted her ability to empathise with people. So when she is furnished with the power to remake anything she breaks or resurrect anything she kills indefinitely, she ends up with an extremely childish understanding of the consequences of her actions. Her wanton cruelty in the second episode was entirely to provoke a reaction from Battler, in entirely the same manner that a child might deliberately do something they know is wrong for the same reasons. It’s also worth noting that the same is true of Eva Beatrice - the Eva that gains the power of the Golden Witch is a vindictive, rebellious teenager, a part of Eva that she had buried. Where Beato’s cruelty is more of a casual disregard, Eva Beatrice is malicious and excessive, and I suspect that the difference there is at least partially due to differences in upbringing. The four siblings all seem to hate each other and with a father like Kinzo it’s no wonder the lot of them have some serious childhood trauma. I suspect that if any of them were to inherit Beatrice’s power they would probably end up doing the same sort of things, though probably in different ways.

Eva’s solving of the riddle and inheritance of the Golden Witch’s powers was a surprise to me. I had been expecting that solving the riddle was the way out, when in fact solving or not solving it in the end makes no difference. It was however quite interesting to see that the person who solves the riddle inherits Beatrice’s powers. While they undoubtedly fell into the wrong hands in the case of Eva, it strikes me that if they were inherited by someone with less mental issues. I thought that the epilogue was actually the most interesting aspect of this. Specifically, Eva inherited the powers of the golden witch, she slaughtered her entire family and apparently completed the whole resurrection ritual. If that’s the case, then she should be the all-powerful Endless Witch and should have been able to resurrect George and Hideyoshi. Instead we find that she’s a bitter, twisted old woman hooked up to life support and on the verge of death. Which means that her resurrection as Beatrice was not complete. Or more accurately that those abilities never existed in the first place :P.

Another puzzling issue there was that I believe Eva described Ange as being the ‘final’ golden witch, i.e. when Eva dies her title passes to her. This doesn’t seem to make sense. Eva intends the title to be a punishment or a curse, which makes sense given that she slaughtered her whole family and may have some regrets, but I’m not sure how this precludes the possibility of Ange ever passing the title on herself. I’m not sure if this was an inconsistency or if I missed a point somewhere in there. At first I thought that the title might be hereditary, passed down through the male line and thus unable to propagate past Ange, but if that was the case then it would not have been stated several times that anyone who solves the riddle will inherit the Golden Witch’s powers.

Probably the most important thing to keep in mind though is that the whole magical explanation is a theory. In fact, it seems like that weekend is the only time that those powers may exist. I assume that this ties into the game between Battler and Beato. If Beato wins, then magic exists and the golden witch’s powers will persist. Otherwise, it’s assumed that normal reality persists. Which in turn means that as long as Battler doesn’t give in, he will eventually gather the solution and will win. This would also explain why Beatrice tries to break him down so hard - she is actually hiding the fact that she’s at a disadvantage the longer the game lasts. I’m actually going to posit that the reason for this is that her powers are actually something gifted to her from MiyoLambdadelta because the whole ‘game’ is actually on another level a contest between her and RikaBernkastel. The entire scenario was engineered and Beatrice herself may not have ever been anything more than some kind of angry wandering ghost before LD set things up.

We have to constantly keep in mind that the magical explanation is just a theory, Beatrice essentially describing how she does things, but not necessarily the actual truth. Beatrice’s ‘truth’ only becomes reality if Battler agrees to it, after all. It seemed like Eva-Beatrice left a lot of holes open because she was a bit careless. It’s true that she completely blindsided everyone with red text toward the end, but I’m still not convinced that there wasn’t an explanation. In fact, the fact that she placed such tight restrictions around the situation by speaking in red (I wonder how they’ll do that in the anime?) could well have made the whole situation quite brittle, just needing a single hole to bring the whole thing down. Though I have no idea what the hole is, that one seemed pretty much airtight at this point. However it could well be that the solution for that situation will be the final key that unlocks Battler’s win in the end.

The other thing that bugs me is that even if Battler wins, and he can come up with a physical explanation for all the murders, it doesn’t change the fact that they’ve been murdered. In fact, if he proves that it’s the case then Beatrice becomes a normal girl with no powers, so there is no way for the world to reset. A phyrric victory indeed. So to truly beat her, he must not only solve all the murders, he must somehow prevent them from taking place. I’m quite looking forward to seeing how he achieves that.

Looking forward to playing through episode 4!

It’s amusing to go back to what I wrote a few weeks ago after playing the first episode, and see just how completely wrong I was. Since I’ve now finished episode 2, I thought I’d continue where I left off, with a ton of comments and speculation. And a hell of a lot of unresolved questions. Episode 2, as expected, asks more questions than it answers - and the answers it did give I’m not sure about, either. Anyway, same as last time - episode 2 spoilers within, and I haven’t read through episode 3 yet so please don’t spoil me.

First off, it is now of absolute certainty that an entity named Beatrice exists, and that she has supernatural powers. This is confirmed by the framing story that has Beatrice and Battler engaged in an ever-repeating ‘game’. The jury is still out as to whether the murders are carried out by a supernatural Beatrice or a mundane Beatrice, though it’s pretty clear that after her revival, she is definitely the supernatural Golden Witch. As much as it annoys me to do this, since I still think that there is a mundane explanation for a lot of stuff, at this stage there is really no alternative explanation than to accept that the murders are carried out using ‘magic’.

We’re once again confronted with a series of closed-room puzzles. The first episode had two major closed-room puzzles - The chained door murders, Kinzo disappearing from his room. We add several more puzzles to this set. More importantly, Beatrice adds some important information to each of these situations, which actually gives us a bit more ammunition to work with, though it in turn makes them that much more puzzling. I’m going to assume that a lot of her general statements regarding the situation are common to the closed room puzzles in the first episode too. There are five master keys (one each controlled by Shannon, Kanon, Genji, Kumasawa and Gohda). The windows cannot be opened from the outside, and they are all locked. There is no secret device to unlock the doors. The keys are the only way to unlock them. There are no hidden doors or passageways.

One of the two closed rooms from the first episode actually seems to have the main explanation confirmed early on. Kinzo suggests that he actually retains his memory of the previous episode’s events somehow, and that he left his office at some point and was killed when he left.

However the clarification regarding the windows means that my argument regarding the chained room murders in episode 1 doesn’t work. I suggested that the door was chained with the killer already in the room, either invited in or already present. They could not have escaped out a window. I would suggest though that if the killer was capable of hiding inside the room from Eva and Hideyoshi, then they should also be capable of hiding from the rest of them.

Battler himself finds an answer to the first of the episode 2 rooms, so there’s not much else to discuss. This may be one of the times that RikaBernkastel suggested that Beatrice chose a sub-optimal strategy to cut corners. There’s also some suggestion that she deliberately made it possible for Battler to guess the answer so that she could knock down his confidence later, and that seems to fit with the character she presents to him (more on that in a bit).

The other closed rooms are much more difficult as there is simply not enough information, but at least in the case of Jessica’s room, Beatrice didn’t confirm that Jessica’s key did not have a duplicate. Also I want to know about the design of the door lock. Given that it’s a western-style house that’s definitely recent enough to have decent locks. I’m going to assume that they have standard Yale-type Pin tumbler locks. The thing with these sorts of locks is that they are very commonly built with what is called, at least here in Australia and in the UK, a ’snib’. A snib is a button or catch on the internal side of the door which locks the mechanism when engaged. Unlocking a snib-locked door with the key disengages the snib. I’m fairly sure that most people have seen something like this before. The thing that’s significant about them is that when you engage a snib on a lock, the lock is engaged. You can engage the lock without the door being closed. So Beatrice could do her business in the room, fiddle with the bodies or whatever to mess with people, place the key inside deliberately, engage the snib, step through the door and close it behind her. The door would then be locked.

Putting that aside, I’m actually starting to get the impression that focusing on the nature of the method for the murders might be the result of deliberate misdirection, a red herring designed to divert our attention away from the real issues. In the first episode, we saw what will happen if people do not believe Beatrice is real, and instead turn on each other in suspicion. In that situation, Beatrice revived and everyone was killed. There was some confusion about whether she really existed, so in episode 2 she shows that she really does exist. And even though the whole cast ends up believing that she truly exists in the end, she still wins - she is resurrected, and everyone dies. Belief or disbelief in Beatrice makes no difference, because if you manage not to get stabbed by a loli-demon, you’re going to end up the main course at Beato’s welcome home banquet.

In fact, quibbling over whether Beatrice exists or not, whether she committed the murders using magic or mundane means and so on is distracting us from the real issue. The characters are all locked into a high-stakes game where there appears to be only one path to winning, which is to discover the location of Beatrice’s gold. Quibbling about whether or not the witch or her gold exists is counter-productive. She practically comes out and tells them to stop wasting time when she puts some of the gold out with the first set of murders in episode 2. Yes, her gold does exist. And so does she.

To find Beatrice’s gold, though, we will need to know a lot more about her. She’s a very interesting and ambiguous character, really. Previously we’d only seen her directly interacting with people during the episode 1 Tea Party. Her antics in episode 2 basically paint her to be the most black-hearted, wholly evil villain in years. And I’m not sure that I buy it, honestly. There are little hints every now and then that the character that she presents is not necessarily the true Beatrice.

This is entirely speculation, of course. We really need to know a lot more about her relationship with Kinzo and the exact wording of her contract with him as well. Regardless, I struggle with the idea that she could truly be as evil as she presents in this episode. For one thing, it seems odd to me that Kinzo could have been so obsessed with her if she was going around figuratively kicking puppies and stabbing children. The impression I got was that Beatrice was Kinzo’s lover and possibly fiancee, but that Kinzo did something to her which essentially destroyed their relationship and seemingly her corporeal body with it. Whatever it was that he did, it clearly left her quite bitter and full of grief, which really comes out in the way that she takes special care to torment the various couples in this episode.

In Kinzo’s case, we know that the entire Ushiromiya family was pretty much wiped out when he was younger, and that through a contract with a Witch, whom he is described as having ’summoned’, he was able to secure gold and rebuild the family again. Is it possible that the current situation is not the first time that Beatrice has been ‘resurrected’? Were Kinzo’s family sacrifices towards Beatrice’s resurrection? If Kinzo somehow won under similar circumstances, but he chose to have Beatrice herself, then it would potentially explain her references to being a ‘caged bird’.

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding Kinzo, I think Beatrice’s motivations are going to be quite important. I wonder if the overbearingly sadistic approach she took throughout the episode might have been deliberate. Her resurrection is described as being instigated through some magical ceremony that Kinzo has enacted, and that that ceremony requires her to kill everyone. She can’t escape it, so it’s plausible that she might deliberately make people hate her as it’s the only way to motivate them into finding the method to beat her.

Her attitude towards Maria is also interesting. We found out in this episode that Maria had met with Beatrice many times before at previous conferences. The servants suggested that it was make-believe, and that she was meeting with an imaginary ‘Beatrice’. That’s quite possible, however the familiarity she showed (’Beato’) and Maria’s comprehensive knowledge of magic - which she says ‘Beato’ taught her - suggest that Beatrice really had been meeting with her. Add to this the fact that Maria lasts right until the end in both episodes, and that she even tried to shield Maria from seeing the final two murders in episode 1, and there is some suggestion that the malevolent witch may have a slight soft spot for her. Which may also explain her torment of Rosa at the end of episode 2 - Rosa was a pretty shitty mother who liked to beat her daughter. Additionally the two of them potentially could have escaped in the end, had Rosa not been greedy and taken the gold as well. It’s entirely possible that this was Beatrice somehow visiting justice on her, in a twisted way.

Finally there’s the way she behaves toward Battler. She announces that she intends to torment him by endlessly replaying through the event, until he backs down and gives up. We should remember that Battler-playing-the-game is able to see all the events which occur through each play through. Earlier I suggested that Beatrice may be deliberately being evil in order to make people hate her. She may also be doing it to try and keep Battler angry at her, so he continues to indulge her with more iterations of the game. I got the impression that she was a bit disappointed with the way that he eventually capitulated in this episode. In fact, I suspect that Beatrice wants to be defeated. She’s not going to make it easy, naturally, because Kinzo’s ritual essentially forces her hand - she must be resurrected. And she clearly derives a lot of enjoyment out of the battle of wits between herself and Battler, so making it difficult for him probably amuses her. But when you get down to it, if there is a solution to the situation, a way in which Battler can win, then giving him infinite chances means that even if he were groping around in the dark, eventually Battler will find the solution. Furthermore, he’s not performing a random, uninformed search. Every iteration he will be gathering more and more information. He should converge on the solution to everything eventually.

If Beatrice does indeed want to be defeated, then it might also explain why RikaBernkastel refers to her as being ’soft’. Very likely, Beatrice has been dropping all sorts of hints and clues and deliberately choosing sub-optimal moves in places. We probably just haven’t seen these, because we have such an incomplete picture to work with.

Hopefully Episode 3 will expand a bit more on the past, because I’m fairly confident that learning the nature of Kinzo and Beatrice’s relationship and Kinzo’s history will give us a lot of ammunition to work with.

I did quite a bit of searching and couldn’t find any documentation explaining how to get this to work, and decided since no one else has done it and a couple of people had asked me about it I thought I might as well write it down. My distro in this case is Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and I’m using the Umineko Episode 4 package.

First thing to get working is to install Onscripter-en for Linux. Unfortunately Onscripter binaries are not provided by anyone and you won’t find the latest versions in the Ubuntu repositories as far as I’m aware. This means you’ll have to build from source. Luckily it’s easy.

1. Prepare Your Build Environment

Note: if you’re in Ubuntu and have never built programs from source before, you will need to install the build-essential package. You will also need to grab gnome-devel as this is the quickest way to make sure we also grab the X11 headers - otherwise your onscripter will build without the ability to draw graphics.

sudo apt-get install build-essential gnome-devel

I also found that my default Intrepid install was missing one library, libasound, which you can also pick up easily via apt-get:

sudo apt-get install libasound

2. Build ONScripter-EN

Next, grab the ONScripter-EN Source. You want to grab source code with dependencies version, unless you want to track down all the various dependencies yourself. It’s mainly just sdl, sdl_mixer, sdl_ttf, sdl_image and bzip2 libraries. Personally I do a bit of tinkering with SDL periodically so I already had the development headers for these. If in doubt, grab the dependencies version! Untar the file and enter the created directory.

./configure
make
sudo make install

Check Onscripter runs by invoking it from the command line:

onscripter-en

It should complain about not having arc1.nsa and a few other things.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Ubuntu Intrepid (and I suspect Hardy - 8.04 - and possibly even Gutsy - 7.10) use GCC 4.3 as their standard compiler. It likes to throw up warnings telling developers that they don’t understand the precedence of the && and || operators and should add parentheses. Helpful sometimes, but in this case Haeleth treats warnings as errors so building will fail. There’s fixes for this in their Subversion repository but they are not yet in the current code release. So by default, the make step will fail. To fix this, after you run ./configure, open the Makefile that ./configure creates, search for all instances of -Werror and delete just that text (not the whole line). Or check out the latest unstable build from SVN.

3. Installing the Game

Make a directory for the Umineko install. I just placed this in a folder in my Home directory:

mkdir ~/umineko4

Insert your Umineko 4 disc, or mount the ISO if you’re a dirty pirate. I’ll assume you understand about mounting ISOs if you are, if you don’t there are lots of guides out there (consult google). The manpage for mount is a good reference too. The disc should mount normally, but for mounting the ISO make sure you use -t iso9660 -o utf8. There are some files with Japanese characters in their names and you definitely need them.

We’re going to copy the BGM, ME, movie, screenshot, SE and sys_se directories to ~/umineko4, then copy the contents of the fullsrc directory to ~/umineko4.

Assuming that your disc is mounted to /media/cdrom (if not, replace /media/cdrom with your mount point):

cd /media/cdrom
cp -r BGM ME movie screenshot SE sys_se ~/umineko4
cp fullsrc/* ~/umineko4

4. Installing the Patch

Grab the Episode 4 translation patch from Witch Hunt:
http://witch-hunt.com/stage.html

Unzip the Episode 4 zip to the ~/umineko4 directory. This should give you a subdirectory in there named [WH] Umineko English

5. Running the game

Change into that directory and run Onscripter-en. If all goes well, you should see Umineko start up with the english translation. If you want, you can rename the directory - I renamed mine from [WH] Umineko English to just english.

Late last week I finished playing through the first episode of this. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and will be starting episode 2 ASAP. I realise that I’m extremely late to the party and pretty much everyone’s already talked this one to death probably, but I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts. Naturally this is going to have spoilers for episode 1 so if you don’t want to be spoiled then don’t read. Additionally I’d really appreciate it if people who have played subsequent episodes would please not make knowing comments or whatever, or spoil the coming installments.

Additionally I already know that I’m completely wrong about everything.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about here, visit this site for more info including the english translation patch for the first three episodes.

First off, I want to take a quick second to be an ungrateful whiney asshole and complain about my free translation. I noticed a few grammatical errors which were a bit distracting because they were repeated more than once. The major one was referring to servants, esp. Genji, as being someone’s ‘aid’. ‘Aid’ is a verb (except in the case of a ‘visual aid’ or a ‘hearing aid’ or the like). The word that was being searched for is ‘aide’ but it doesn’t make sense in that context, so it should really just be ‘assistant’.

The one that really irritated me though was Battler’s constant references to ‘turning the chess board over’. I’m not sure if it’s a literal translation and the Japanese actually says exactly that or not. If it does I guess that there’s no escaping it. But the phrase doesn’t make sense as it’s given in the translation - if I turn a chess board over then I will dump all the pieces on the ground. The whole point with the chess analogy is that there are two ‘ends’ to the board, the black and the white. Battler’s phrase is referring to viewing the situation from the opponent’s end of the board. So rather than turning it over he is mentally turning the board around. Semantics, I know, but it doesn’t make sense otherwise.

Actually, the references to game theory seemed a bit out of left field. Battler’s suddenly talking about the holes in his chessboard mentality are not quite accurate either. He’s right in that the analysis assumes that both players always choose the optimal move, however the reason for that is that if one player makes a sub-optimal move, in the case of a zero-sum game this will result in the other player winning. Which is actually what happens when the remaining survivors decide to leave the study. However the fact that game theory has been mentioned several times in this episode leads me to believe that the author believes that using it will help figure things out. We should probably assume that ‘Beatrice’ will always choose optimal moves. There are some more fundamental questions we have to ask first, regarding the nature of the ‘game’. Is it a zero-sum game, for example? It appears to be on the surface, but I have my doubts, primarily because different characters stand to gain more or less. The other thing that’s interesting is that solving the riddle properly will require cooperation, but given that this is essentially a winner-takes-it-all game, cooperation is a sub-optimal strategy as you stand to gain nothing.

I, like Battler, am still unconvinced that Beatrice really exists. She certainly provides a workable explanation, but I’m not sure that there can’t be a plausible explanation for anything that happens. The major sticking point is the chained door, as there seems to be no workable explanation for that, at least not yet. The best I could come up with is that the killer was already in the room somehow. I just can’t accept that the whole thing is the work of a supernatural witch, as if it was then, among other things, there would be no need to kill people with physical objects. Additionally there are several situations where there is reason to believe somebody was physically present, such as Kanon’s death - why would the door to the courtyard be open otherwise? It gives the strong impression that there was a physical person present at that time. The golden butterflies phenomenon is more of a sticking point, however Higurashi had a similar phenomenon, maggots in the flesh. There’s no reason why this couldn’t be something similar. What I’m suggesting is that we should take a lesson from the author’s previous work and accept that we may not be able to rely upon the characters’ perceptions. It should also be pointed out that all the characters who died were in a heightened emotional state.

There are a lot of questions still completely unanswered about Beatrice. It’s clear that a woman named Beatrice may have once existed - Kinzo’s obsession with her suggests strongly that she was alive once. So at this point in the story, she appears to be dead, and Kinzo’s black magic ritual was intended to revive her. This means her physical manifestation - delivering the letter to Maria onwards - is a bit problematic. If she was able to do that then she’s not dead and is able to interact with the real world, so why does she need to be revived? There are several times when other characters also suggest that they can actually see her, the best example being when Battler is in the kitchen with Maria and the servants, and they all act like Beatrice is standing right there with them. That whole seen was strikingly odd. Additionally, wouldn’t being ‘revived’ as a physical being be limiting? She seems to be more powerful in her formless state, assuming that she exists at all. Finally there’s the suggestion that in order to be fully revived, everyone involved must believe that she exists. This seems like it’s pretty significant - her existence is contingent on people believing she exists. Does this mean that if no one believes she exists, she would be completely powerless?

Questions also remain about the riddle. It’s a bit odd. There are a couple of important questions. First, who is it written by? Is it Kinzo or Beatrice? Is the resolution of the second part (everyone dies) part of the riddle, or what will happen if they don’t solve it? It doesn’t make sense that it would be written from Kinzo’s perspective, it seems more likely that we should interpret it from the perspective of Beatrice, but Beatrice as Kinzo knew her. Beatrice-the-woman, rather than Beatrice-the-golden-witch. We really need to know more about her.

As far as we can tell Beatrice-the-woman was a real person, Kinzo’s mistress who died at some point. If this is the case then there may be other ‘heirs’ to Kinzo’s riches. There are also suggestions that he supports an orphanage - the orphanage that Kanon and Shannon (and Genji?) all grew up in. While the probability is admittedly low, it has to be suggested that there’s actually an outside chance that Genji could be the son of Beatrice and Kinzo. I have never seen an official age for him, so I am assuming that Kinzo is in his 80s - he was described as having been born in the Meiji period (which was 1868 to 1913) and that he took over as the head of the family following the great Kanto earthquake (1924) and if we assume that he was at least 20 at that point, then he would have been born in in 1904 at the latest, which means he should be around 82 in 1986. Genji describes himself as having served Kinzo for over 30 years, and if we assume that he came from the orphanage like Kanon and Shannon, at around the same age, then this would place Genji in his early 50s. The gap between their ages if my assumptions are correct means that Genji being Kinzo’s illegitimate son is plausible. But probably way off. It certainly would give him a motive, and makes his constant stoicism seem very suspicious.

Returning to the problem with Eva’s closed room scenario. In the Tea Party segment at the end of the game, Beatrice displays how she would have killed the pair through the chained door, firing evil head-seeking devil spike missiles through the door. I think it’s a weak explanation personally. It certainly works, if you assume that a supernatural explanation is acceptable. However if Beatrice is such a powerful supernatural being, then why would she be constrained by a chain on a door? She is supposed to be amorphous and without physical form beyond clouds of golden butterflies. We’ve only seen her to be seemingly constrained by doors once, and in that case it was because Natsuhi had wrapped a magical ward around the door handle. Why couldn’t she pass through the chained door directly? Why did she have to stand outside, open the door a crack and fire things through the opening, unless she is as corporeal as everyone else? And if she’s constrained by a physical door like that, then isn’t she just a normal person? Battler challenged her to come up with an impossible scenario, and she created a scenario that is seemingly impossible, but not necessarily completely so. It strikes me for example that a strong enough magnet in the right place could probably be used to slide the chain back and forward, assuming that the chain is made of steel. I’m sure there are other ways to open them. Once you’re in, it’s easy enough to close it from the other side and then hide somewhere, or simply go out the window - I seem to recall someone saying that the windows could only be opened from the inside, meaning that they’re essentially one-way. There’s also the possibility that whoever the murderer was was known to Eva, and that she actually let them into the room, chaining it behind them. That’s actually probably the most plausible explanation.

Another thing which I’m still struggling with is the appearance of the letter in the study. We’re clearly meant to believe that it was not placed there and instead appeared by ‘magic’. But this is problematic, because we had previously been told that the study was the most secure location because it had an anti-magic ward placed on it. It was impossible for Beatrice to pass through that door. This assertion is also backed up by the fact that Natsuhi survived the first night despite someone apparently having tried to get through her door. So if that’s the case, how did she get a letter into the room? Even if we assume that magic has a different set of rules, this action seems to contradict the rules we’ve been told. The only plausible explanation is that the letter was planted by someone in the room, or that the letter itself was some kind of shared delusion and didn’t exist. Also, there is the outstanding issue that Kinzo managed to be removed from the room without the door having been opened.

The final puzzling piece is the epilogue. It states that when the police arrived they found the remains of the whole family, but they could never identify who was who, except for a segment of Maria’s jaw which was identified via dental records. While it’s true that the initial murders were pretty gristly and Kinzo’s body was only identifiable because he had twelve toes, this doesn’t bear out with what we saw of the fallen. Most of them should have been very much identifiable, having only been staked. Could the actual culprit subsequently destroyed the bodies, jumbling the remains up and making them impossible to identify to hide the fact that they were still alive? The fact that Maria’s was the only remains that were identifiable seems to be highly suspicious to me, in fact given her supremely creepy second personality (even Kinzo suggested that there was something seriously odd about her) I’d say that this is incredibly suspicious. Additionally the epilogue acts as if the entire family was wiped out, however several times Battler mentions he has a sister, but I got the impression she was a bit of a black sheep. I wonder if she might have been involved with events somehow.

There are a ton of questions at this point and it’s all pure speculation. I’m going to try and get to the second episode this week, hopefully it will answer a few niggles. And I know it’s probably going to completely destroy all my theories and ideas and make me go back and make entirely new, crazy theories. Which is fine by me.

I managed to escape from Azeroth for long enough to actually complete a vector again. This time it’s Touko & Yumi from Marimite. I tried a slight variation on my usual style and used coloured lines. Not sure if I like the effect or not. I initially thought this was going to be easy, but the source was a lot worse than I thought on closer inspection, plus there’s a fair amount of detail obscured by the giant falling snowflakes and the elaborate gate / fence thing which I ended up leaving out. I also ended up having to sample colours from some promotional material of the pair too, since the colours in the source image were completely whacked (purple hair?). I’m still not 100% happy with how this turned out, but I think it’s reasonable enough. I’m also not sure why this is, but the usual colours of their hair ribbons are reversed - don’t know if that was deliberate or a mistake.

I upgraded to Illustrator CS4 and greatly regret doing so. The ‘enhancements’ that they made to the path / anchor system included making anchor points you put down snap to the edges of previously drawn paths. Sometimes that’s cool. Most of the time it irritated the hell out of me because I generally don’t want that when I’m colouring. Unfortunately in true Adobe fashion, there’s no way to turn it off. Every iteration of Illustrator leaves me more and more convinced that the development team hate their users. For every annoyance they fix, they add one or two more.

EDIT: I found out how to turn this off.

Can’t be bothered cropping this to 1600×1200 for the rapidly shrinking 4:3 crowd. Sorry, you’ll have to do that yourselves.

Just wanted to point out this excellent essay exploring the aspects of the Touhou series and its incredible fan popularity. I must admit that it’s hard not to be swept up into the Touhou fandom - personally I quite enjoy the games and have a fair amount of the doujin music releases, but aside from that and a small chunk of fanart I’ve never really been into it as heavily as some people I know. Still, it’s an interesting series of games and its popularity is a fascinating achievement given that ZUN is a hobbyist programmer who I believe makes the games in his spare time. At this point I think the only thing left for him to tick off his list is an anime adaption. Which would be awesome. Make it happen, Japan.

Now if only I wasn’t so crap at the games.