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Hello, I’m Ryouko Seki.
I was in charge of writing this novel for The Caligula Effect.
It’s a spin-off novel about one of its characters, Marie Mizuguchi. How did you enjoy it?
When the director, Mr. Yamanaka, brought me on for this job, he told me “I’d like you to focus on Marie, but I’ll leave the rest to do as you like!” It was an incredibly luxurious offer with a lot of background material to work with, and I was able to write as much as I pleased with little worry. (Of course, he still supervised it very closely all the way down to the little details, so don’t worry too much about the contents!)
Instead of just following the plot of the game, we wanted to go into what Marie was thinking during the story, and of course, how she got to that point in the first place, so we hope people who have already cleared the game can enjoy the story.
But, of course, we also wanted everyone in the Go-Home Club to make an appearance, and we wanted to show more interactions with μ!
We also took into account any readers who hadn’t played the game (this novel has some pretty intense spoilers, but I imagine there will be quite a few people like this), so we hope it’ll be as easy to understand as possible, and still enjoyable as sheer reading material. We put a lot of huge demands on ourselves for that, and crammed as much as we could as possible.
It was a great honor to be involved with a game for which I loved the world concept and the themes this much.
I truly hope I could get more readers to see how wonderful The Caligula Effect is.
And finally, my thanks.
Mr. Yamanaka and Mr. Satomi gave me tons of assistance and advice. Thank you very much for your patience and guidance on everything I couldn’t figure out myself, even despite how busy you were.
And to Mr. Matsumoto, and the rest of the GA editorial department, I was very happy to work with you for the first time in a long while!
And, once again, I would like to express my sincere gratitude towards all of the readers.
I hope you will all continue to enjoy the world of The Caligula Effect.
As yet another audience member, I look forward to seeing what comes next!
I hope we will meet again somewhere.
An afterword…uh, that doesn’t normally come up in games, so I’m very nervous about this. I’m glad to have the opportunity to speak with everyone after they’ve finished experiencing the story.
I’m Yamanaka and I worked on planning, drafting, and director for The Caligula Effect.
When we made this game, the story writer Tadashi Satomi-san and worked together to develop each character’s personal complex, and what they would actually look like in reality.
But as you know, there are many things that weren’t actually brought up in the game and never revealed to the player. The reason is that, within the game, the player can only ever have the same position and viewpoint as the Go-Home Club’s President. Only the Go-Home Club members are close enough to the player to reveal their origins when pried into. If you never managed to get into a position where you could do that with someone, then they wouldn’t reveal their darkest secrets to you.
That was something we had to keep as a “core rule” of this game, but at the same time, we wanted people to know about the characters they couldn’t delve into in such a manner. So I was very happy to have the opportunity to develop this further through this novel, and to have μ and the protagonist go on a mysterious pursuit and memorable journey and delve into the young girl named Marie Mizuguchi.
Actually, for this novel’s initial planning, we drafted up the detailed background info for Marie Mizuguchi, which I had made together with Satomi-san, in such a way that the writer, Ryouko Seki-san, could use her freedom to expand it. But when Satomi-san and I read the actual manuscript and felt Marie Mizuguchi’s breath through Seki-san’s delicate pen strokes, I was seized by a certain decision.
I immediately discussed the concept with Satomi-san, and requested to have the ending changed so that μ would propose “a certain action” at the end.
We arrived at that choice because μ herself had reached Marie Mizuguchi’s end alongside the protagonist, and it was a huge choice that allowed us to expand the world of The Caligula Effect. Thanks to everyone involved, including Seki-san (who responded to the last-minute development change with enthusiasm — very sorry about that!), I feel we managed to convert this novel into something that went far beyond the limits we’d originally envisioned for it.
And finally, I would like to take the opportunity to give my thanks…
To the writer, Ryouko Seki-san. To the editor-in-chief, Matsumoto-san. To everyone in the GA Novel editorial department. To the open-mindedness and adventurous spirit we all had in committing to making a novel before the game had even released, bringing forth this novel that expanded this game’s world.
And to all of the readers who picked this up, I truly thank all of you. Did you enjoy it? It hasn’t broken your heart, right? We’ll continue to work hard so that everyone supporting us can enjoy even more out of it, so thank you for all of your support.
Thank you so much for your hard work in translating this amazing novel ;;;
Im very happy I finally got to read it after years of looking for a place to do so (and even started to learn the original language just to be able to read this)
That was a rollercoaster of emotions；； I finished Caligula Effect years ago and I just heard that there was actually a sequel and that this novel would provide extra context for its story, so thank you so much for the amazing translation!