If anyone is reading this, then that means our project has gone horribly wrong... Wait, wait, let me start over. Since you are reading this, it means we here at mirror moon have finally finished our project. It took far longer than any of us imagined, but through the collective efforts of many, we finally got this thing on the road. And now, without further ado... ________________________________________________________________________________ Tsukihime Liner Notes by Ryuusoul ________________________________________________________________________________ Table of Contents _______________________________________ I. Japanese Terms 1. Japanese name order 2. Romaji 3. Some common honorifics and suffixes 4. Random terms II. Fan Questions III. Special Messages From The Staff I. Japanese Terms _______________________________________ I found out that translating things from one language to another was harder than I thought. Sometimes, there are less direct equivalents than one would imagine. In Tsukihime, we did our best to try and maintain the feel of the original Japanese. For those unfamiliar with the Japanese language, it is heavily shaded with levels of politeness. There are different ways of talking to seniors, strangers, friends, and variations of intimacy within those levels. Since we were lazy... (I mean, since we wanted to keep the feel of the original Japanese), we decided to keep many of the suffixes or titles of address in Japanese. Consequently, a brief primer is necessary for those of you completely lost. This certainly isn't presented at the level of learning Japanese... just a brief introduction. 1. Japanese name order Japanese put the family name first, followed by the person's given name. For example, the protagonist is Tohno Shiki. This means his family's name (or "last name") is Tohno. His "first name" in Western order would be Shiki. But, we decided to go with the Japanese name order. Why? Just because. It isn't uncommon for people to refer to others using only their family name. For example, Ciel-Senpai uses "Tohno-kun" to refer to Shiki. Confused? We'll get into those other terms later... 2. Romaji Romaji is just the term used to describe how one would write Japanese using the Western alphabet. Tips on pronunciation: a = hot i = heat u = hoop e = head o = hope If you see two vowels next to each other, like in "Nii-san", it means the sound is "extended". You would hold the vowel sound twice as long as usual. In Japanese, that will change the meaning. 3. Some common honorifics and suffixes I mentioned about levels of formality and all that. One of those ways is by use of honorifics. In English, we have Mr., Mrs., and Ms., for example. In Japanese, they have a lot more titles. Here's a quick list of the ones used in the game. -san The suffix -san, such as "Smith-san" is a generic word for Mr./Mrs./Ms. It implies some level of formality or distance between the speaker and the person referred to. For example, Shiki refers to Yumizuka Satsuki as Yumizuka-san. He calls her by her last name because he isn't exactly close friends with her, and tacks on the "-san" for added formality. On the other hand, he just calls Inui Arihiko by his given name, "Arihiko". -sama This is a much more polite term than "-san", and is reserved for people of a higher status. This status could be based on relationship (i.e. a store clerk and a customer), for example. Kohaku, a maid at the Tohno mansion, refers to Tohno Akiha as "Akiha-sama". She uses the term "-sama" to show respect, yet uses Akiha's given name to infer familiarity. By contrast, she uses "Shiki-san" to refer to Shiki because Shiki is uncomfortable with such politeness. By further contrast, her sister Hisui continues to use "Shiki-sama" because she is a very formal person... -kun This is a term generally reserved for males and those of a lesser standing. It is also more "familiar" term, so it may be used as a term of endearment for a younger person within an organization. As mentioned before, Ciel-senpai uses "Tohno-kun" to refer to Shiki. -chan This is a term generally reserved for younger females. It can denote a closer relationship between the speaker and the one referred to. Kohaku calls Hisui, "Hisui-chan" because Hisui is her younger sister. Onii-sama, Nii-san, Onii-san, Nii-chan, Ani, Aniki These are all terms for "older brother". Depending on the suffix, it can be more or less formal. Akiha calls Shiki, "Nii-san". It sounds a little formal, but that's because Akiha is a proper young lady! Onee-sama, Nee-san, Onee-san, Nee-chan, Ane, Aneki These are all terms for "older sister". As with the above, varying levels of formality. Hisui calls Kohaku, "Nee-san", but then again, Hisui is pretty formal... Senpai This is a term to refer to a senior in your organization. This could mean many things. In a karate class, it could be someone of higher rank. In school, it could be an upperclassman. Shiki refers to Ciel as Ciel-senpai because she is in the third year of high school, while he is only in the second. Sensei Sensei means literally "teacher", so it is a term reserved for... teachers. But it also can be used for people you respect greatly, which is why Shiki always refers to Aoko as "Sensei". In a sense, these people could probably be considered as teachers outside of the strict academic sense. Doctors are also referred to as teachers. In other words, it's a term with a lot more loaded meaning than simply "teacher". 4. Random terms Shouji Those are those paper doors that you see whenever you think of a Japanese house. Tatami Tatami are those traditional straw mats you see whenever you think of a Japanese house. ... Okay, this section seemed like it would have been bigger... II. Fan Questions _______________________________________ This is where we answer a few questions from fans interested about the project. Q (darkfusion): Well, I'm curious as to what was the hardest part about making the patch? A (Ryuusoul): I'd have to say it was the distinct lack of fangirls professing their undying admiration for me. TakaJun concurs very heartily. I mean, at one point, the best I had was Konoha (Mirioki) and Royal Knight. Their cheering did keep me motivated, though. Um...maybe my first FEMALE fangirl was Murky. Thank you, Murky! In all seriousness, though, for me, it was probably the H-scenes. Being a translator who got interested in Tsukihime despite the H-scenes (instead of because of them), it was kind of a trial going through them. That, and maybe the Nasu grammar (tm). Nasu's writing style is very interesting... you can find web sites in Japanese with sections dedicated to helping people understand just what the heck he was trying to say. His choice in kanji (the Chinese characters used in Japanese) was often very... creative. From an overall project standpoint, it was probably making sure that everyone was motivated at the same time and working in the same direction. Even I originally quit the project after translation was finished, thinking that it was well on it's way to completion. I later came back when I noticed progress was a little stalled during the six months I was away. Of course, a lot of this was due to the fact that we had so many people working on the project, it was going in too many directions. After clearing our kitchen of too many cooks, we set up a head chef and went out from there. I hope you all enjoy the taste. Q (darkfusion): Also how exactly does the process of patch translation work? I'm curious as other game translation patches like the one for F/SN or Shuffle! and Tick! Tack! (those two are being done by different groups) are in the works and I'm curious as to how exactly the whole process is done. A (Ryuusoul): I'm not going to go into the exact details of everything. However, there are a few core processes that need to be done. First, is obviously the scripting side of things. You need to have someone who can work with the game engine and make sure everything comes together. Second is the translation. This includes both the game script as well as any image editing necessary to translate pictures into English. Third is the proofing. Fourth is combining the English with the game. Fifth is smoothing everything out and making sure it works. With a work as monumentally large as Tsukihime, it is imperative that everyone is exactly on the same page... we found that out the hard way. While it was common sense that we all knew, it was harder to put into practice than we originally thought. What worked best for us was to have many people checking up on the script to find errors, and to have only one person to either reject or approve and implement changes. Q (darkfusion): Another question is on average, how long did it take to translate just one of the scenarios? A (Ryuusoul): Wow, you sure ask a lot of questions! But, you came to the right place. Actually, the difference in sizes between the scenarios make that a little tough to answer. Plus, some scenarios had multiple people working on them while others just had one. Furthermore, I know my translation speed got better as time went on... Tsukihime was my first translation project and there was definitely a learning curve. Some scenarios, like the Kohaku arc, took me less than a month. Others, like Ciel's, took slightly longer. When I joined the team in September 2004, percentage translated was in the single digits. By June 2005, only 10 months later, translation was completed. Of course, the delay in release time since then highlights just how crucial all the other aspects of a project are. Q (darkfusion): On a side note, it must be pretty awkward to translate the H-scenes. Speaking of which, does this patch uncensor those scenes? A (Ryuusoul): Yeah, tell me about it. Ironically, we have two versions of the patch. One is the regular translation and the other is actually a non-ero patch. This actually removes the pictures entirely and attempts to work around those scenes. Give Message a hand for working hard on that part of the project. So, the answer is "no", we didn't uncensor the scenes. A (TakaJun): It was the worst hell you can imagine!! I don't know how many hairs I pulled out during this one scene. Thank God I only did one... (well, I did proof the four others, but translating is uncomparable hell) I don't know how Ryuusoul lived through all those H scenes. A (Ryuusoul): I wonder the same thing... Q (Decay of This/That life): What did you have to do for image editing (what did you edit, why, how was it efficiency-wise), and do you think those changes are better for the players? A (Ryuusoul): We had two image editors, Nichigo and puKKa. I'm extremely pleased with the job they did. They used photoshop to put our translations in place of where there originally was Japanese in the image files. Some of this was trickier, since some files had a word grayed out as part of the menu screen, and then have a separate picture file with the word brightened to be used when an option was selected. This required a little more precision than simply pasting a translation in. Why did we do it? Well, we figured that if people couldn't read Japanese, then having day titles or menu options in Japanese wouldn't do them any good... Q (question): When did you start the translation project, and how long did you think it would take...... and how long did it REALLY take? What difficulties did you encounter that contributed to the length of the project? A (Ryuusoul): That question has been kind of answered in part via other questions, but I'll answer it directly here. Tsukihime is the joint project between Revolve and mirror moon. It sounds like an important distinction, but only in terms of group history. As far as working goes, it never made much of a difference... Revolve started working on it in early 2004, according to TheXev. Progress didn't really kick off until early September, when I joined up. By strange coincidence, mirror moon, which had been working independently since July 2004, joined up with us at about the same time... We thought we were around perhaps 12% when that happened, but due to a silly error (silly chendo), we were actually in the low single digits of percentage translated. From then on out, things went very smoothly in terms of translation. We divided it up by scene blocks and went on from there. When TakaJun joined us in June 2005, we had around ten percent left to translate. Both of us worked furiously and finished the translation. At around this point, I felt the project was in good hands and I retired from translation... sort of. All through this time, we had a million proofers independently working on editing files, which resulted in a giant cluster... When beta testing started, it was recognized that a rewrite was needed, or at least the style be made similar. Shirakani took it upon himself to rewrite Tsukihime, but there were a few stylistic disagreements over his method. At around this time, in January 2006, I suddenly reappeared on the translation scene. I took over Shirakani's rewrite, which was taking a long time because he literally was rewriting everything, and things took off from there. I finished my massive proof and moved on to Melty Blood. Sadly, progress on the Beta testing did not resume until a few months later, but after it did, we got on the same page and hashed out what you see today. Okay, now to answer your question... It technically took about 2 3/4 years, but as far as real working goes, a little over two years due to a big pause in the beginning. Translation took only 10 months, and I expected it to be done before Christmas 2005... and it probably should have been. What was our main problem? It was a lack of an absolute central direction. I am sorry to say that some of this was my fault, as I up and left the project, but I honestly believed it was on the right page at the time. With a project as large as Tsukihime, which you must remember dwarfs The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy combined, any mistakes become greatly amplified. I am also sorry to say that I personally believe some of our problems came from a lack of initiative and motivation by some staff members. When I returned to the translation scene, I kept much of that in mind and was perhaps a little bullying in my approach to decision-making. Fortunately, I think some of the other staff members either respected me for my work on the translation or welcomed my "energy" coming back into the project. I would be amiss if I didn't credit Message for a lot of his administrative work on the beta testing. I became the "attack dog" and the "bad guy" during some parts to keep progress going, but he kept us grounded during this phase. All of that being said, I was still pleasantly surprised by the dedication of many members in this project. There were a lot of people who signed up and were not quite able to finish what they had allotted due to real life, but even their contributions are greatly appreciated. In the end, I was happy to work with so many wonderful people! The number one lesson to be taken from the project? Making decisions. A wise man once told me that managers don't exist to solve problems, but to make decisions. Once you make a decision, you have no problems. I was always reluctant to just barge in and make decisions on this project because I felt it wasn't my place... but when things didn't go anywhere, all it took was a decision. What I jokingly called my Executive Decisions would often provide the impetus for progress to start rolling again. My best advice I can offer to anyone doing such a project where there is literally no face-to-face interaction is to make decisions. The rest will take care of itself. Q: Why was onscripter used over nscripter? A (TheXev): Onscripter is open source, so anyone is free to modify it. When we originally looked into translating Tsukihime, almost a year before we merged with mirror moon, I had formulated a method of using nscripter and allowing half-width characters to be displayed. Onscripter was still in its early stages at the time, and no one within Revolve was capable of modifying the font for half-width at the time. After a year however, and putting Tsukihime on hold, we merged with mirror moon and chendo had figured out a way to modify onscripter to support half-width English characters. This allowed for a much cleaner insertion with less errors. Many other new features of onscripter such as OpenGL support also enhanced the playing experience. Q: What's up with all the commas? A (Ryuusoul): That's intentional. Tsukihime is essentially a stream-of-consciousness work and as a result, the commas are used to purposely disrupt the flow of reading in instances where Shiki's mind either pauses or when people literally pause while speaking. I'm not going to go into too much detail on the difference between ellipses and commas, but suffice it to say that we (I) felt there is a distinct difference in how they feel, so I preserved their use from the original. III. Special Messages From The Staff _______________________________________ chendo: Fun fact: Two days before this release, I became legally able to work on Tsukihime. Keep both hands on the keyboard when you play and have fun! Ryuusoul: Hello, everyone. It's been a long journey full of ups and downs, but it's over. Despite the struggling through H-scenes, the wrestling with Nasu Grammar (tm), and the coordination woes, I did enjoy my time working on the project. I'd like to say thanks to all the fans who kept up hope and kept cheering us on the whole time. Yes, it does sound trite, but it really was fan energy that kept me going. Sure, our release isn't perfect, but thanks to the efforts of many project members, I think it's pretty darn good! Please make sure you thank not just the translators, but everyone who helped with this undertaking. Lastly, whether you're new to the Type Moon world or an old-time fan, please enjoy the game! With that said, I'd like to indulge myself and talk a little about my personal journey through the project. People who want to be entertained should probably just skip this and start playing the game... I first was introduced to the world of Type Moon via the Tsukihime anime. Despite being bashed for being woefully adapted from the game, I was fascinated by it back then and I still remember it fondly. I was interested in more information about it and stumbled across EvoSpace's website. From there, I got even more interested and found The Beast's Lair forums. From there, I discovered the trailer for Fate/Stay Night and fell in love with it. FSN was actually my first Type Moon game, since I was unable to get my hands on the Tsukibako at the time. FSN was what solidly hooked me on Type Moon. I probably shouldn't say this, since everyone seems to hates Shirou, but I felt like I had a lot in common with him, so it resonated deeper with me. Anyway, after playing FSN and finally getting my Tsukibako from Japan, I got to play Tsukihime. I became more active on the boards at Beast's Lair and began translating a lot of four panel fan comics and doujinshi on the side. tjm suggested I join Revolve, and I did, not expecting to have that go anywhere... the rest is history. In the end, I have no real regrets, but after helping to translate Tsukihime and translating Melty Blood, Melty Blood ReAct, and Melty Blood Act Cadenza (which I hope get their patches released one day), I think it is time for me to move on. Some people don't know this, but I am an exercise junkie and a martial arts nut... these things actually take up many hours of my day. I've always felt you can learn a lot about yourself when you go out on the old bicycle for a hundred miles... but, I digress. Translating is often a rewarding experience, but I truly wish to focus even more on the other aspects of my life. In fact, that was the reason why I took my original hiatus from translating in the first place... but I just hate unfinished business so I wanted to see Tsukihime through to completion this time. I will probably remain in limited contact just to prod and push the various Melty Blood projects along (although ArchDemon needs no prodding with Act Cadenza; he is very motivated!). However, my days as a full time translator and project manager are over. With people like TakaJun and tjm working on Fate/Stay Night, I see a bright future ahead for Type Moon translation projects! TakaJun: Hi, everyone. I decided to add a few things in here after the patch was released. Although I did not go through as much hell as Ryuusoul, I also took part in the Tsukihime translation. In all, it was a great experience and we learned a lot of things from it. I am adding things in the liner because I forgot to thank all the people that helped me along the way. (How dumb of me!) First, huge kudos goes to Ryuusoul for all the translation, editing, and taking our project forward. Really, this patch wouldn't be out without him. And I have to say I enjoyed some of his mistranslation I found during my translation check. ^^ I would like to thank TheXev for making fun of m- I mean, for his great job. Message for his non-ero patch and the easter eggs (hope people enjoy them). All the beta testers, editors, and everyone else related to this project deserves a big thanks from me. Now with the lessons we learned from Tsukihime, I and others are starting to translate other games such as MAW2 and Fate. Please look forward to those. I hope everyone enjoys Tsukihime and I hope this will open up everyone's interest in visual novels. TakaJun TheXev: So, after founding Revolve Translations however many years ago and basically starting a bunch of projects that should have been finished years ago, wefre finally releasing the one project we though would be done last: Tsukihime. Little could I have imagined when I first started tinkering with this project, that it would be finished before Melty Blood, let alone Farland Symphony (which wasnft very difficult to hack). How many years has it been since I got into this whole ordeal? I think it was back in 2004... not 2003... that I had started playing around with possible nscripter hacks, and even attempting to compile onscripter. Unfortunately none of us knew C back them, so we werenft able to patch onscripter and begin Tsukihime sooner. This was well before the release of the anime, and after hearing about the anime I assumed that I should just wait. Thatfs right, nearly a whole year. I figured gthe fans will come, right?h Well, I was right and I was wrong. I had some minor interest, but many wanted Tsukihime done before Melty Blood. Even so, the skills of most who volunteered to translate were outright terrible. Unlike many who were drawn into this entire Type-Moon universe via the anime, I was drawn in due to a seemly completely random event involving Alerith and Soulfang in the old #import-gamers channel one day. Soulfang: gMelty Bloodh Alerith: gMelty Bloodh I had no clue what they were talking about, so I googled it and downloaded a demo off a Japanese site without even knowing what it was. I had just gotten DSL, and I wanted to simply marvel at how large the number on the rate per second displayed and how I could download files that used to take me governighth using Getright on auto redial in less then a half hour. I wasnft a real big fan of fighting games then, even now Ifm not, but Melty Bloodfs short demo had me hooked. The sheer surprise of this game being a fighting game on PC, let alone such a marvelous one, took me by surprise. Unlike fighting games I had played before, this one didnft involve multiple levels of punching and kicking, but a simple gsoft, med, hard, parryh based system that I could understand easily. Hardcore fighting game fans say there is little difference, but I beg to disagree... I was drawn into the wonderful game of Melty Blood, and set out to learn as much as I could about it. I somehow managed to break out of my Melty Blood addiction a few months after ReACT was released. After discovering Tsukihime and then later EvoSpacefs Beastlair shortly after the anime premiered, I was finally able to enjoy some amount of the plot involved with EvoSpace. Without a doubt, EvoSpace was the very first person I asked to translate Tsukihime. He turned me down... :/ When EvoSpace added the forum (yeah, it wasnft always part of the site, believe it or not peoples), it was very slow and offered very little. Maybe a few active people posting random things. Now itfs the largest forum for English Type-Moonfs fans, and covers nearly all Type-Moon topics. So lots of stuff has happened, we met chendo and MirrorMoon, merged Revolve and MirrorMoon into a translating force like the world hasnft seen... just a lazy one with really bad ADD (TakaJun: imouto) and ADHD (TakaJun: I need more eroge, Ifm suffering from withdrawal!) So many faces, people, bots (asmodean) have come and gone and got banned and blocked by ompfs, itfs hard to remember it all! My real life seems far more interesting that anything thatfs gone on in the chat room. Itfs all such a blur. I kinda let go and let chendo handle things, simply because he was capable and had lots of neat ideas that I simply hadnft thought about: such as the CVS system for translation. I let go, I let him handle it. I had pretty much been the driving force in Revolve up until that point, but I knew I wasnft going to be capable of controlling a project like Tsukihime, not with the scope of people working on it, and the lac of time I had while still attempting to finish collage. I think the most amazing thing, pausing and rereading from this point, and editing a few things... is simply how much any of this matters to me. Ifve lost interest in Type-Moon and had lost interest in game hacking only up until a few months ago, when I got back into doing by taking over the Men At Work! 2 project from Top50. I guess Ifve matured to the point that my entire life doesnft revolve around what I do online, and up until I entered college in 2002, it had. The online world had been my escape from the crappy life I had at home, and filled in the time when I wasnft at school. Now, 4 years out of High School, out of college, my life isnft all that bad. Not fantastic, but Ifm fed, Ifm clam, and Ifm not built up with all the pressure I used to have. We have accomplished something though. We made many mistakes with Tsukihime, and wefve gained an incredible amount of knowledge on localizing games in an efficient manner (because we did do Tsukihime in the most inefficient manner possible). Projects in progress such as Fate/Stay Night and Men At Work! 2 are very well organized, and have a minimal number of people working on them for high efficacy. Unfortunately TakaJun is the core translator for both, so we must keep him supplied with eroge to prevent him from burning out. lol I donft think Revolve or MirrorMoon has done Tsukihime in the most efficient manner, far from it. But the experience gained on this project will lead into new endeavors that will surely live up to expectations of our seemingly gvaporwareh group. Our motto is gRevolve Translations: Wefre too good to finish projects.h So to all you naysayers out there that think wefve been sitting around with our thumbs up our butts, tooting our own horn and making ourselves seem all high and mighty (I still have yet to fully understand where that came from? Sorry if we get excited about something we love to do :P), this project represents the gigantic middle finger from all of us. And if you seriously think you can do a better job on this project, please feel free to do so. Start from scratch, and make it better. I welcome it. When it comes down to it, when I set out to start Revolvefs Tsukihime project, I had hoped that the Type-Moon fans would help us draw in talent to increase the groupfs power and ability to produce finished projects. To my satisfaction, it has. With as many ups and downs as wefve had over the last few years, wefve become a pretty tight nit group of friends, and I wouldnft trade the time spent with them for anything. In closing, I probably come off sounding a bit bitter. Well, I am. People think wefre all fantastic and great, but wefre just real people just like you, with a few additional skills and a lot of luck. Just remember this before expecting us to perform another act of super hero like proportions. Michael gTheXevh Reed Message: It is done! And not a bit too soon. I have not experienced the full range of bumps and bruises the other staff members have had to endure over the past three years, but from what I've seen... Let's just say that Tsukihime was probably a whole lot bigger an undertaking than anyone had expected at the beginning. I first joined mirror moon in September 2005 as an alpha tester, after following the translation of Tsukihime from the sidelines and having off-and-on contact with TheXev for about a year. For about a month some alpha people worked while others didn't, until the term 'rewrite' got invented and the testing was abandoned for 7 months. It was about this time that I started thinking about helping to create a non-ero version of Tsukihime, first of all because I really don't like having to fast forward through adult scenes all the time, but also because I want to be able to recommend this game to people who feel the same way. Now I'd like to say that I was given a green light on this deal at some point, but the truth is that I kind of forced the idea unto the world by just starting and seeing how far I could get. As a consequence the non-ero version became a rather detached project, running in parallel to the translation, and I had a very hard time finding people who could proofread my first draft of edits. cyanoacry was a huge help however, spending many hours reading, fixing, polishing, testing and discussing. IT. WAS. AWFUL. The editing was. Nasu's style is bad enough as it is, but his eroscenes are just horrible. Of course I can't be sure that he wrote these himself, but what do these people get their kicks from!? "Nether Petals" has become an internationally accepted term for awfulness. I'll refrain from going into detail, suffice it to say that I've wanted to throw the whole idea out the door on several, no, many occasions. But in retrospect it was worth the trouble, very much so considering what we can now prevent other people from going through. We ended up with a version of Tsukihime that, I think, loses extremely little of its content and none of its meaning. Of course you always lose something when you start cutting and pasting, and in a game where sex and sexual violence is used more often as a plot device than as fanservice it can be very difficult to strike a balance between story and censoring. Nevertheless I believe Non-Ero Tsukihime to be every bit the original, only without the awful junk called H-scenes. Once again, a great many thanks go to the many discussions I had with cyanoacry about what to keep and what to cut out, or how to move a certain meaning or detail outside of an adult scene. My advice to all players is simple: Play Non-Ero! By the time Ryuusoul finished the rewrite, I had more or less become a member of the mirror moon staff and I moved on to take care of the initial beta project management. That was a stressy time for me, having to divide my attention between near-fulltime school and near-fulltime beta. I hereby extend my thanks to the rest of the staff for putting up with me during this period without complaining. Three months of beta testing later, I started working on release engineering. I am still amazed at the many small things we kept finding that had not yet been done. Some of the tasks were interesting, like learning to work with NSIS, others were a genuine pain. A very helpful push forward was supplied by zalas when he fixed ONScripter's archive loading algorithm and compiled it to win32 for us. And that brings us to today, with the release of Tsukihime only a few days away (hopefully...). Three years is much too long for people to work parttime on a project and I would not be surprised if this is the last big translation project for some of us. But I greatly enjoyed the year I worked on Tsukihime and I'm content with how everything turned out. What I will be doing from here on I don't know yet, there are several projects that I imagine I could be useful in. But having dissed school over the past two months in order to finish Tsukihime, I'm not sure if I will have time for anything substantial for the rest of the year. Tsukihime is an awesome game, I really hope everyone will enjoy it. Maarten "Message" Groen