Translation: ZackZeal

Editing: SingerOfWhiteLine

To all my supporters,

From Masada Takashi.

You have my sincerest apologies for the delays in the updates for Event Horizon Battlefront Adityas's main story over the last few months. It greatly shames me to say it, but I've been stuck in a cycle of facing the desk, unable to write, only managing a few dozen lines before deciding I don't like this and starting over.

I'm well aware that this is unacceptable for a professional writer, but an inexplicable someone inside me is putting a stop on my work, telling me that writing as I am now would be a mistake.

Put simply, I'm in a writer's block, but something about it feels different from just a simple case of a creative slump.

A famous author once said this when he suffered a writer's block:

"Is this the labor pains of a creator, or the death throes of one?"

Am I in the process of leveling up, or at the end of my creative life? Right now I'm wandering in the dark, trying to discern which one it is.

I understand, yes; this all comes across as selfish excuses. I'm being paid for this, and my duty as a writer is to keep on writing even if the outcome is a shoddy work that reeks of my decaying flesh, and even if the reviews end up slamming me as a result.

But this doesn't mean I'm writing out of resignation. If I tried to write while feeling that nothing matters because I'm already dead as a writer, it wouldn't even be a shoddy work, it'd just be an eerie letter left by a dead man.

And oddly enough, I'd be like the people of Adityas' world. Someone who can't even die properly. It would be unsightly, disgraceful and foul.

So if I'm going to die, I'd rather die properly. And if I want to keep on living, I want to put in the effort to live on.

So with this in mind, I took the time to look back on myself and my work.

Paradise Lost, Dies Irae, Kajiri Kamui Kagura, Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyojin, Bansenjin, Interview with Kaziklu Bey,  and Avesta of Black and White.

Listing all of them now, it's just seven works. And while it bothers me that seven is all I've written in twenty years of work, I want to look at my skill at the time, what mind frame I was in while writing it, how I feel about it, what I was seeking, and how it was appraised.

So believing that facing this might help me find a way out of my current predicament, I pulled up the scenario data, dug through the internet to pick up on as many voices that reviewed these works at the time as I could, and read through them all.

And in the end, before I knew it, I wrote these impressions down for each work separately.

Paradise Lost

Simply put, this is a very unskilled, infantile work.

The writing ability, composition and visual presentation all being poor is clearly evident, but it also feels terribly derivative and lacking in creative integrity, with little awareness of the fact that this is a product to be seen by the readers. I can only describe it with one word: masturbatory.

But maybe it's not in spite but because of this that I can say that it has, if nothing else, a lot of gusto to it. It wasn't meant to be very long, but even bearing that in mind, it reads more smoothly than my other works. Don't get me wrong, the text is awful, but the grammatical issues and misused words don't bother me that much. It's like how street slang prioritizes emotion over grammatical accuracy to produce a unique flavor.

Like I said earlier, it's an infantile, inexperienced story that isn't aware of its readers, but in terms of plot momentum it effectively functions well.

Especially with regards to Know. His repeated pathetic failures, misunderstandings and fruitless endeavors have attracted much negative criticism, and I myself hate it, but it's what makes Ast shine as a heroine.

Ast feels the same anger, frustration and scorn toward him as the readers do. But getting angry at him and exclaiming at his foolishness allows her to discover humanity within her mechanical nature. The description of her change, the transition she goes through—looking back at it even now, it's actually compelling.

Indeed, Ast was the most popular character in Paradise Lost. I found very few opinions speaking badly of her, and the trope that ended up becoming one of my trademarks, that of "a capable villain heroine turning to the light at the hands of an incompetent but kind-hearted man", started here.

And well, there's also Judas. Talk about a guy who really doesn't give a crap about what the audience thinks! At the time I wrote him as a smattering of things I liked, a trickster that focused on freedom, but it's quite moving to think my long-running relationship with this guy ended up becoming the core of the Shinza series

Dies Irae

It needs no introduction: My own personal Day of Wrath, the culmination of my greatest failures and many, many rewritings.

I got everyone caught up in my mess, earning me many, many, and I do mean many complaints and accusations. But while it is certainly the most cursed of my creations, it is also undoubtedly the most beloved.

So what was this cursed relic, filled to the brim with both the affection and hatred of so many people, myself included?

This work can be summed up as a  pretentious mess, meant to put the character cast's charm on full display.

It went through massive setbacks halfway through production, and my mental state changed during the remaking phase. Coupled with the time it took to complete it being so long, this work is a mess in terms of consistency and cohesion.

Course changes; changes to the lore; a flurry of later additions; and when you really scrutinize it, mountains upon mountains of contradictions!

To begin with, how do you even go from a story about a unit of occultists from WW2 performing a magic ritual in a fictional Japanese city to cosmic scale battles and gods by the end?!

The first and second halves of the story are completely different, and with how little time is devoted to the course change in the middle of the game, it becomes two disparate stories that are linked together by a thread.

Eternal recurrence, I wish to see the unknown—so the story veers off its original, intended trajectory. That is the true, correct form of  this opera.

That is what Mercurius would call a complete crime of conscience (misused term).

Many readers seem to have picked up on this issue, but I'm grateful to say that rather than resorting to criticism, the majority overlooked it with an exasperated smile. I believe that the previously mentioned emphasis on putting the character cast's charm on full display was what drove readers to feel this way.

No matter how messed up and disordered the story is, the characters' impact alone is massive. So people forgive its faults. So long as the actors are exquisite, the play will be sublime—I believe that is what everyone felt.

In terms of the sum total of the passion its characters had (even if not its overall quality), Dies Irae remains unmatched among my works.

Kajiri Kamui Kagura

My literary style finally came into its own here, with me cutting down on misused terms, redundant phrases and derails in context. There's still some of that in there, looking back on it now, but it's a lot better compared to Paralost and Dies. It is indeed around this time that I started hearing kind praise about my prose. Which I’m grateful for.

But, on the other hand, this work is lacking in enthusiasm.

I've seen some very scathing opinions that this game has "the most boring combat scenes in all of Masada's works", and I'm inclined to agree. If I had to say, I was so focused on making the text consistent that I neglected to make the battles as thrilling.

Sometimes it's focused on the details of fencing and martial arts, and other times battles are decided by emotional forces, like courage and guts. Sometimes I used both in the same battle, and in the end, it became a mess where it's hard to tell which sort of strength I was trying to present here.

It is said that heart, technique and body are all a warrior's strength in unison, and trying to present all three as one is the right approach. That was what I was aiming for too, but at the time I just couldn't pull it off, and I didn't even notice I couldn't.

Also, as a story, its aspect as Dies's sequel is so strong that it makes Kajiri's own original aspects weaker. In drawing it into Dies's setting, I was unsuccessful at depicting Tengudou as a contender for the Shinza world's most horrible law. I failed to let the readers properly experience how alien and abhorrent it's meant to be.

And maybe it's only natural, because Tengudou could not be complete until Yatou's presence was removed. How deviant the characters and the world really were didn't fully manifest until the final stages of the story. What's more, since Habaki and Rindou are counters to the final boss Hajun, their comrades come across as plain by comparison.

But all of this is just trying to reason things. The fact remains that I failed to depict Tengudou properly, plain and simple. Could I have possibly caught onto this flaw at an earlier stage? Could I not have maybe added even a short episode to grip the readers' hearts? To this day, I still ask myself that.

So I can definitely say Kajiri is a work of much regret for me, but that's not to say there aren't parts of it I liked.

Namely, Yakou's character. He stands out among his companions as a trickster. Always flippant, never showing his weak side, and with the sharp mind and strength to back up his words.

In a sense, I made him as a stand-in for Shirou, but whether they're on the side of the good guys or the bad guys, capable characters like him always get the win, emotionally speaking. Even when they lose, they always get what they want with a dashing grin. That's what being capable means, after all—or so a younger Masada would say before this.

I did depict Yakou as all of these things, but by the end of the story he experiences painful setbacks, shouting in shame and anger as his mask of a dashing rogue who looks down on everyone else begins to slip. But he makes his comeback, becoming a true companion to Habaki and co. in the process.

Allowing a genius to mature by rising out of the muck like this is something none of my other works have, and if I had to come up with one original aspect that distinguishes Kajiri from the rest, it's this.

Soushuu Senshinkan Gakuen Hachimyojin

 A story that's completely detached from the Shinza series.

Maybe I just wanted to compensate for how sparse the original aspects of Kajiri were. Before the game went on sale, we repeatedly stated in magazines and on Twitter how it isn't part of the Shinza series, and within Hachimyojin's setting Dies and Kajiri were treated as video games. The persistent effort that went into parodying ourselves probably stands to show just how badly we wanted to differentiate this work from Shinza.

And what did we end up making? Reading it now, what surprises me the most is that the protagonist’s friend group really feels like a group of buddies. In most cases, that would seem self-evident, but it's simply not the case in Shinza.

Ren and Shirou’s relationship is probably the most classic example. Protagonists in the Shinza series have their relationship with their friend group dictated by the last boss's curse, and so their friendship is strained and they're fated to kill one another. Many times they don't even see each other as friends.

But Hachimyojin's protagonist and his buddies are different. The friendship they have is as fulfilled and established as relationships that only fully materialized right before Kajiri's final battle, or at worst in a post-credits scene. And it doesn't feel like shallow friendship, they're all people who look at their friends with sincerity.

…Well, except for Mizuki, but her character theme is having faith.

Seven companions that are worthy of the motif of Trust and Truth—each of them a person that is unlike any previous Masada character.

In superficial terms of character voice and personality, there's no one like Yoshiya, Harumitsu, Rinko or Ayumi. Akira and Atsushi are more the delinquent type, but they're incredibly kind. I've never written such gentle-hearted, honest delinquents before.

And Mizuki… She alone is a lot more warped than the rest, but the cause and direction of her warped nature are rare. If I had to compare her to other characters, she'd be Eleonore with Lisa's sensibilities, and Beatrice's naivete added in. In other words, she's young, so she doesn't stick out among her friends.

Their interactions are like something out of a juvenile teen drama.

...How was I able to write something like that?

Quite a few readers have expressed a question to the beat of "What got into you, Masada?", and the friend group's relationship was very well received. It's also different from the Shinza series in that there are actually really cool parents in this story, which many people have expressed they liked.

So far so good. But how does the game fare when you look at it as a whole?

Frankly speaking—it's horrible. I let personal feelings take over, and reading it makes me hate myself. I wrote so much anger and resentment toward the world into this story, and it's not even thinly veiled.

I have no doubt in my mind that I was mentally haunted when I wrote Hachimyojin. To a near-dangerous degree. Yes, I've let my personal emotions show in my work before, but not even during Dies's worst setbacks did I let so much warped emotion seep into my writing.

Seriously, Masada. What got into you?

And unlike the time that question was asked about how I write friendship, this time it was something that confused and disturbed the readers, earning me some scathing criticism. And of course it did—I was pretty much picking a fight!

What made me so bitter? Looking back at myself at the time, I had no personal woes to speak of, and if anything this was a time of great personal fulfillment for me. So why was I so negative at the time? It baffles me in hindsight.

But maybe, that success was exactly why I became so embittered. I had some accomplishments under my belt, my peers praised me, and that made my feelings of jealousy and inferiority toward the rivals that had me beat in terms of numbers grow.

Aah, now I remember. That must have been why.

I became aware that games that were half my games' number of CGs, scenario size and production costs were scoring three times more than me in sales. And most insulting of all, it was the kind of moe games that I couldn't and wouldn't write.

"Die, you pieces of shit! And the shitheads that praise this vapid trash can drop dead, too!"

What a pathetic loser, what an arrogant, conceited wannabe. All I did was shout and yell about how much better I was than the competition while seething in envy at people who had the things I lacked.

"Give me that. I'll put it to better use. Because I'm better, I'm more, I'm a genius!"

And that's how I created the character of Hiiragi Seijuurou.

Shinno, Amakasu, Mizuki's sin, all the toxicity and distortion in this story were borne solely from Seijuurou. So as far as the story goes, Seijuurou is the source of all evil.

I guess that the way I kept acknowledging, denying and mocking him was all just a form of self-therapy. These are, after all, my own personal feelings. Not something I can be proud of.

But reading it now, I'm taken aback by the sheer passion emanating from Seijuurou. Like I said, it's all malicious grudges, a poison that eats away at the entirety of the story, but looking at it from another direction, it has that much of a punch to it.

This is a forbidden tactic I must never use again. As a writer, this is a shameful blot on my work, and Seijuurou's darkness surpasses any character from Dies Irae. His complexes alone can give the entire cast of Dies a run for their money.

He is, for better and for worse, an outrageous character.

I would go on to carry Hachimyojin's patronizing writing style, borne of my feelings of inferiority, with me for a while longer. But even now I feel that the act of creating Seijuurou's character was an experience I shouldn't have put to waste.

Bansenjin

I wrote this game while looking at Seijuurou, or perhaps Hachimyoujin as a whole, with more sober eyes. That is how I came up with the character of Nanten, who emulates Seijuurou but follows different values, leading to the conclusion where she’s given salvation at the hands of Nobuaki, the unfortunate boy from Hachimyoujin.

It's a similar structure to what I alluded to in Paralost, "a capable villain heroine turning to the light at the hands of an incompetent but well-intentioned man", but refined to completion. Reading through my past works back-to-back like this, this was one part where I could vividly feel my growth as a writer.

On the whole, it still has an annoying tendency to make patronizing sermons, and many readers were fed up with this, but Nanten's character and Nobuaki's efforts were well-liked.

Also, as a personal note, I really like the main heroine Shizuno. The scene where she fights her other self to defeat Huang Jinlong left me in tears.

"Who cares, what does it matter, it's just something to be toyed with and consumed for fun? That's nonsense! Who would be bored enough to make something like that?! People don't have enough energy in them to waste it on things that don't matter!"

That line left me in a state of shock. I could write things like that at the time?

The whole idea of the Senshinkan series is that it envied high-selling moe games, it scorned them, parodied them out of spite, cursed them with every breath. Bansenjin, by contrast, mocked any and all derivative works.

"You probably thought this saccharine teen drama exists with no reason or purpose! You just jumped to that conclusion, never once pausing for thought, saying all those things without a worry in your little head! Moron! Of course there's a reason, of course there's a purpose! But naturally, with your stupid, shit-brained perspective you'd see nothing! You see nothing, Ishigami Shizuno! So this time, I'll give you a lesson in reality, and crush your very soul against the rocks!"

That line is from Nanten, and it's by no means something a heroine should say, but that's how this game is as a whole. But Shizuno would say she created that saccharine teen drama because she loves it. Nothing about it is a flippant joke, she was serious about it.

The truth is, I love moe stuff. I can admit that now, but back then I was pigheaded. Shizuno, however, would claim I did it because I loved it. No matter how unsightly it may be, there's love at its core. Otherwise, I wouldn't have spent the time and energy creating it.

So you do get it, me from ten years ago. That's how you were able to make Yoshiya's relationship with his friends in Hachimyoujin.

And when I thought about it that way, I felt like I could forgive my younger self for how foolish I used to be.

Interview with Kaziklu Bey

With Dies Irae getting an anime, I made this spinoff to generate hype. It was also a bit of rehabilitation, given it's been years since the last time I worked on something Dies-related.

And as for the outcome, hmm… Well, I did replicate the original work's style, but it still had some of those patronizing sermons that afflicted my work due to my personal feelings. Especially that last battle. The sermon ruined it!

Claudia was a cutie, though. My heroines tend to be a little toxic, if not crazy, and there's no denying Claudia had a little bit of that, but much cleaner. Purer.

It was a case of the light side being the most dangerous. I've done stuff like it before, and my junior, Takahama, was really good at it too, so Light's works ended up having many Dark Lords of the Light. But Claudia was absolutely an angel. Physically speaking, too.

With her love interests being Wilhelm and Lui, both of whom are very dark-aligned, the relationship was very chaotic, but you know… It's not Claudia's fault.

She's a heroine without a mean side, but she definitely has a sense of presence. Which is an unusual case for me, as the only other girl in my roster who was like that at the time was Beatrice. And if I had to say, maybe Senshinkan's Akira? Eriko is too good-natured to the point of it being scary.

So the fact I wrote a heroine that's universally loved was a big achievement for me, which led to me making Pantheon's Hirume.

Ah, Hirume… Now that's a cute girl. She'd totally get along with Kasumi and Claudia.

Avesta of Black and White

This work has me at my peak in terms of writing acumen, composition, logical progression and how complete the characters are. I said this when I first started crowdfunding, but when I looked at what remained after all my many setbacks, I realized all I had left was my gratitude to my readers, and that allowed me to write this story. The many failures and frustrations I went through will stay with me for the rest of my life, but I will keep writing, remembering this gratitude.

Which is why all the patronizing sermons I've been writing since Hachimyoujin are gone now… I mean, they're gone, right? The story itself has gone from one vicious twist to another, but it is exciting, and I think it does work as a story about salvation.

Maybe that's why Magsarion ended up being the most popular character in the cast. It's the first time I've had the protagonist be the readers' favorite, and I'd like to give myself a pat on the back and say it was worth starting over.

Plus, all the female characters are cuties. The ratio of "heroines without a mean side that are universally loved" is high this time around.

Huh? What about Shinga? Who cares about her.

I could go on singing my own praises, but the story's bad points are actually very clear. It's lacking in roughness, which makes it too plain. Svirios is the only character whose maddened screams strike emotion into the reader's heart.

Aah, maybe that's my issue, then.

And so, having looked back on my seven creations, I think I've realized why I can't write at present. I've improved, in the technical sense, and I was able to suppress my bad habit of marring my works with personal grudges. But in exchange, I can't express passion and soul anymore.

My strength lies in my strong, well-defined characters, in drawing their contentions and beliefs in vivid, colorful detail. But right now, I can't put my soul into them—the most crucial part of that process.

So how would I go about putting my soul into them?

Through my grudge. I don't have enough anger in me.

The Shinza series is a tale of wrath, but Masada's becoming a peaceful old man. I gush about my cat, taking pictures of it and watching my niece become an otaku who’s growing aware of my work. So I end up sitting on the fence, trying to play things safe.

But that's not to say I should create another Seijuurou. I mustn't repeat that process, to be exact. I need to rationally, practically tame my grudges and put the Seijuurou in me to good use. And right now, that's probably what I'm trying to do.

In other words, my struggle are the labor pains of a creator, not the death throes of one.

So with all my apologies, I ask that you stick with me a little longer as I try to find my way. To take Seijuurou, with all his ardent passions, customize him and utilize him for Adityas' characters.

And while I can't say for sure I can do it, I did recently find an example I can follow. That being Fujita Kazuhiro's Sōbōtei Kowasubeshi, and namely its last boss, Sakamaki Deido. I believe he's a character born of a grudge, just like Seijuurou. But despite that, he is tragic, compelling and beautiful.

"No matter how crude, I love paintings that warm the heart."

Those are the words of Sakamaki Deido's beloved sister. Words he could never understand or accept.

But I think that I found my salvation in them.