Sakura Spirit - 8/20 hours

My last post represented my darkest hour. I was almost completely overwhelmed by despair. But it's a funny thing about despair - it can sometimes make you see things with startling clarity. I realized that "playing" a game is actually a broad sort of goal. What actually counts as "playing the game?" Is it just pursuing the activities the designers intend, in the way they intend? Could I not reinvent the game for myself, to find a way to engage with the game that I enjoy? Does attempting to break the game count as playing it?

Of course, Sakura Spirit is so simple that it's impossible to break. What exactly was I supposed to do, make the single choice in such a way that it led to unintended consequences? It seemed hopeless, until I had a mad idea, born of desperation. What if I modded Sakura Spirit?

I did some cursory research, and discovered that this is something that has never previously been attempted. Who would bother? So, not only am I making the game more tolerable for my twenty hours, I'm also a bold pioneer, forging my through uncharted video game territory.

There was only one, slight problem. I don't actually know how to mod games. It took me two hours of internet searching just to be able to start (I have not counted that time as part of my 20 hours, because I didn't know, while I was doing it, whether it would lead anywhere). In the end, though, I managed to get my foot in the door. I now have the ability to alter the game's script, to make the characters and narration say whatever I want.

Case in point:

Mark your calendars, people. The image above is a screenshot of the world's very first Sakura Spirit mod. I added the word "Yo" to the first line of the game. As time went on, my tinkering has become more extensive, but you gotta start somewhere.

The tools I found to edit the game are actually quite powerful. In theory I could add new characters, locations, and gameplay mechanics. However, I've resolved to alter only the narrative and dialogue, and use only elements that were present in the original version. Two reasons for this - one, there's a lot of stuff going on in the scripts that make up the bulk of the game that I don't understand. In my earliest attempts, I actually messed things up so badly that I had to uninstall and reinstall the game. Secondly, while I could easily rip out the guts of Sakura Spirit and make something totally new, that's probably stretching the definition of "playing Sakura Spirit" far past its breaking point.

My current goal is a complete overhaul of the entire game, with the aim of telling the same basic story, only less stupidly. I don't think I'm likely to finish, though. After three hours of modding work, I have approximately two and half minutes of gameplay to show for it. Granted, a lot of that was spent figuring out how my various formatting errors were causing the game to crash (and looking up things like how to write in italics), but nonetheless it's turning out to be slow, painstaking work.

I suppose I should be more understanding of the makers of Sakura Spirit, now that I've had a chance to walk a mile in their shoes, but I still haven't forgiven them for making Sakura Spirit.