li

Here’s a behind-the-scenes story about **Shuten Order**. Reading this after finishing the game might make you see certain parts of it a little differently. And at the end, there’s one thing I’d really like to ask everyone who actually played it. There’s one route that changed so drastically between the start of development and the finished game that it basically did a complete 180. Which route was it...? Try guessing before you read on. ※From this point on, there are spoilers involving the ending. 【Major spoilers from here on ⚠️】 Out of all the routes, the one that changed the most between the beginning of development and the finished game was the **Ministry of Education route**. We took a scenario that had already been completed from beginning to end, rebuilt it, and essentially took the entire foundation of the story in a completely different direction. That said, we still made considerable use of the original scenario. Rather than tearing the whole thing down and rebuilding it from scratch, it was more like a major renovation. I think we managed to blend the old and new material together pretty well, so I doubt many people noticed while playing. Originally, the route was a straight-up dating sim from beginning to end. It went something like this. 【The Original Ministry of Education Route】 ・【No matter where they look, Rei Shimobe can’t find Honoka Kokushikan.】 After somehow infiltrating the Ministry of Education headquarters, Rei obtains information suggesting that Honoka Kokushikan may be a student at a school called Shuten Academy. ・When Rei arrives at Shuten Academy, they meet three female students who all use the surname “Kokushikan”—three sisters. But none of them has Honoka’s face or first name. And 【the three sisters get along absolutely terribly and are constantly fighting with each other】. ・For a while after that, the story proceeds much like it does in the finished game. In order to check whether any of them has the “minister’s tattoo” on her back, Rei has to “romance” all three girls and work toward confessing to them in front of the legendary flower bed. ・With help from 【a nameless background female student with no character portrait】, Rei helps the three sisters with their creative projects, solves their individual problems, becomes close to them at an incredibly fast pace, and confesses to them one after another. But none of the three has the tattoo on her back. ・At a loss, Rei is summoned by someone to the legendary flower bed. Waiting there is that same background student. She removes her disguise and reveals her true identity. She is, in fact, Honoka Kokushikan. 【This is the first time Honoka Kokushikan herself actually appears.】 Rei is stunned. And there’s another reveal: Honoka is the older sister of the three girls. They weren’t three sisters after all. They were four sisters. ・Honoka Kokushikan had given her three younger sisters two missions in order to train them to become Ministry of Education staff members—secret operatives. Mission one— Create the best work among the three of them for the Founding Festival. Mission two— Get close to a man who would appear later that day and have him confess his love to them at the legendary flower bed. Whoever accomplished both missions would become Honoka’s right-hand woman. The reason their relationships with Rei progressed all the way to a confession in only a few hours was that the sisters were trying to “romance” Rei too. Honoka had realized that Rei seemed to be investigating her, so she decided to turn the situation around and use Rei for her own purposes. ・After learning that they had been used, Rei has mixed feelings about the whole thing. Then they hear a huge roar of applause coming from the school grounds. Onstage are the three sisters. The second sister’s poetry, the third sister’s music, and the fourth sister’s puppet performance come together as one incredible performance. Watching them with a gentle expression is Honoka Kokushikan. Honoka’s true goal had been to get her constantly bickering younger sisters to finally get along. If they could respect one another and compensate for each other’s weaknesses, the three of them could bring out their full potential. That was what Honoka wanted to prove. ・Honoka thanks Rei and, as an apology for using them, says she’ll do anything within her power for them. So Rei asks: “I want to hear about the Founder’s murder case. I want you to share the information you’ve gathered.” Honoka readily agrees and invites Rei to the large library beneath Shuten Academy... ...That was the original scenario. But. No matter how much we adjusted it, I just couldn’t get it to a point where I felt it was genuinely entertaining. Rei was supposed to be investigating their own murder, and yet the overwhelming feeling was: “What on earth am I being made to do?” I think the problem wasn’t with the individual scenes. The underlying concept itself was probably off. It wasn’t a matter of who was writing it. We needed to rethink the foundation itself. And it was my responsibility that I hadn’t realized that sooner. Meanwhile, the deadline kept getting closer and closer. This was bad. So I took over the scenario and decided to rebuild it extensively while reconsidering the core concept itself. We had about two months left. I urgently gathered the writing team, and we all threw ideas around together. After that, I went into full concentration mode on my own. I sorted through all the ideas, discarded some, developed others further, and rebuilt the story. But there was no time. So I also had to preserve as much of the original scenario as possible. More importantly, implementation of the in-game content was already well underway, so there was a limit to how much we could change. Production of the cut-in illustrations (event CGs) had also progressed considerably. There was no time to redraw them, so we had to make use of the artwork that had already been completed. Under those conditions, this is how I started changing things. 【The Great Ministry of Education Route Overhaul】 ・Honoka Kokushikan didn’t stand out enough as a character. So I decided to have her appear right from the beginning—and to make her entrance as impactful as possible. Rei goes to meet her. Honoka falls in love at first sight. And for some reason, Rei almost gets killed. I decided to emphasize Honoka’s madness and make **“love and madness”** one of the central pillars of the route. ・To reduce that feeling of “Why am I being made to do this?” in the school dating-sim portion, I turned the whole thing into a death game forced upon Rei by Honoka Kokushikan— a kind of **“Psycho School Rom-Com.”** Rei is poisoned. If they don’t want to die, they have to find Honoka. Why would Honoka poison someone she fell in love with at first sight? “Don’t worry. You’re not going to die. After all, we’re destined to be together.” That’s how she thinks. Completely crazy. And on top of that, Honoka poisons herself too. Whether they live or die, they’ll do it together. ・I also added mystery elements to make players want to know what happens next, and changed the setting itself. When Rei arrives at the academy, there’s strangely no sign of anyone else around. The truth is— this place was never a school in the first place. ・Honoka’s appearance at the end was already a twist, but simply having her casually show up after the reveal felt like a waste. So I turned it into a confrontation. If Rei can’t expose the truth, they die. ・The assistant girl Honoka disguises herself as also felt too weak as a nameless background character with no portrait. So I decided to make her into a proper character. On the surface, she’s a Ministry of Education employee carrying out a secret mission from Honoka. Her role is basically that of a completely unhinged “missionary of love.” We gave her a proper design as a supporting character as well. Her name was created by rearranging “Kokushikan.” (It was surprisingly hard to make it sound like an actual name...) And I thought: Let’s have Rei expose her true identity during the confrontation with Honoka. ・But even then, the twist of “They weren’t three sisters—they were actually four sisters!” still felt too weak. Then I thought: Fine. Let’s make them all the same person. One person playing five roles. They can’t exist in the same place at the same time, so I’d just have to structure the scenario carefully enough to make that work. ・...Actually, why stop there? Why not make **every single character at the academy Honoka?** If players start reading the story on a meta level, Assistant = Honoka might be difficult to hide completely. And really sharp players might even figure out that all three sisters are Honoka. But surely nobody would imagine a ridiculous twist where **every character at the academy is Honoka**. Of course, I also made sure to plant proper clues so that the twist wouldn’t be unfair. ・As for the dating-sim gameplay sections themselves, we kept the basic structure intact because the in-game implementation and event CGs were already well into production. Instead, I decided to make everything more chaotic. And so that the contrast would be even stronger when the girls went insane with jealousy, I pushed their speech patterns and personalities much, much further toward the extremes. After all those additions and adjustments, the Ministry of Education route became what you see in the finished game. Personally, I feel that under the circumstances and limitations we had, we did everything we could and somehow managed to land the route in a form that worked. But I did have one concern. By leaning harder into the death-game elements, I wondered whether we had weakened one of the original concept’s unique qualities: the fact that this route had gone all-in on being a school dating sim. So, what do all of you who played it think? Would you have liked to see what might have happened if we had kept polishing the original concept instead? Or do you think changing the fundamental concept and taking the route in its current direction was the right decision? I’d really like to hear your honest thoughts.