TADA

"TADA, on his career (translated)."

- 30 years... it's amazing. I never thought I could make it that far. I think I must have been blessed with some incredible luck. I was able to join the industry just as it was starting out, I had opportunities to grow with practice even though I wasn't very good at making things, and I met an excellent staff of people... It was 30 years spent doing what I loved every single day.

Kazufumi Tada (多田和史, Tada Kazufumi; born September 23, 1967), known professionally as TADA, is a Japanese game director, scenario writer, and producer affiliated with Champion Soft Co., Ltd. He is one of the founding members of the company’s signature erotic game label Alicesoft, where he served as development director from 1991 to 2010 and as executive vice president from 2002 to 2018. He is the creator of many of the company’s most acclaimed and popular titles, including the Rance, Toushin Toshi, and Dai Series, and is recognized as one of the most influential figures in the adult gaming industry.

In July of 2010, TADA announced that he would be stepping down from his position as development director in order to focus his attention toward the completion of the Rance series. In April of 2019, one year after the release of the Rance series’ final installment, he announced that he had entered a period of semi-retirement and would no longer take part in active game development or management at Champion Soft but would continue serving the company as an advisor.

Early life
TADA was born in Osaka, Japan on September 23, 1967. As a child he enjoyed watching Kaiju films and television and playing with action figures based on the monsters featured in them. He cites these early experiences using his imagination to create stories for his toys as the origin of his sensibilities as a game designer. During late elementary school, he developed an interest in studying the various warships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Second World War, a fascination which persisted into his adult life.

In his adolescence, TADA attended a technical high school with a predominantly male student body. He described his school life as “bleak” due to offering him few opportunities to meet and socialize with the opposite sex. As a means of escape, he developed an interest in computer games, which were undergoing a surge in popularity after the release of the PC-88 console. He would often rent and play games from a local retailer, naming war simulations such as European War and Glory to the Allied Fleet as his personal favorites. It was during this period that he was first exposed to adult-oriented bishoujo games through the titles Tenshitachi no Gogo and Final Lolita. As he grew older and bishoujo games became more prevalent, he found himself increasingly more captivated by them.

In the mid-1980s, PC gaming saw a rise in unofficial doujin software created by hobbyists rather than professionals. This trend had a significant impact on TADA, who had believed himself to lack the skills needed to pursue a career in game development. Realizing that he could make software of his own, he set his sights on becoming a game designer using the limited means available to him. His first attempt at making a game consisted of having a friend sketch a picture on cellophane and using his computer to trace over it after taping it to its monitor, but ended after only a single day of work.

Joining Champion Soft (1986-1988)
In 1986, TADA began attending computer vocational school to pursue a career in game development. During his second year, he came across a newspaper advertisement by Champion Soft recruiting programmers and applied to it on impulse. He believed Champion Soft, which released games coded in BASIC, the only programming language he knew how to operate, and was located in the nearby Nara Prefecture, to be a more viable option for him to work at than a larger and more competitive company. He also took notice of the multiple erotic games (eroge) in Champion Soft’s catalogue and hoped that he would be able produce some himself were he made a staff member.

When it came time for his interview, TADA was outspoken about his desire to create eroge and brought in a text adventure based on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland he had coded as an example of his work. He was passed over for the position in favor of his friend and classmate WAO, who he had invited along to the interview for moral support but ironically proved to have been the more desirable candidate due to his proficiency at programming in assembly language. Around one month later, he was offered a second position at Champion Soft on WAO’s recommendation and began working immediately. The two joined an in-house staff of only three other people and were the only programmers among them.

TADA only worked part-time during his first year at Champion Soft due to still being a student. The first project he was assigned was a remake of the PC-88 eroge Kidnapped Miki-chan for MSX2 systems titled Little Princess. He had no experience coding for MSX2 computers prior to his work on Little Princess, and described the process of creating it as relying primarily on trial and error. TADA wrote and programmed the game almost entirely by himself over a period of around two months, reusing assets from the PC-88 version and leaving the creation of ancillary materials such as packaging in the hands of a senior employee.

Shortly after the release of Little Princess, Champion Soft’s president Yoshiki Shiraki announced a change in the company's policy that would make it so that it would no longer produce erotic games. During this period, TADA assisted in the creation of The Road to Executive, a business simulation game helmed by Shiraki. Along with coding portions of the simulation side of the game, TADA also wrote the script used to program its ADV sequences, which was later reused by Shiraki as a template for multiple pieces of educational software released by Champion Soft.

The following year, TADA graduated from vocational school and began working as a full-time employee at Champion Soft. He designed two more games within the year: Little Vampire, a sequel to Little Princess for PC-88 systems, and Gakuen Senki, an original school-based adventure game for MSX2 systems. Compared to his previous projects, he was given full authority in the production of each game and programmed them using a custom engine developed by a friend rather than BASIC. Providing artwork for both titles was YUKIMI (then known as Hakase), a fellow recent graduate with whom he established a strong working relationship. During the production of Gakuen Senki, the floppy disk containing the game's source code became damaged. As TADA had neglected to create any backup copies, a significant portion of the game's script was lost and it was released to the public in an incomplete state.

The Birth of Alicesoft (1989)
By the end of 1988, Champion Soft’s staff had increased to around seven people, all of whom were newly out of school and of similar ages. As many of them were already close friends prior to their employment, the atmosphere of the company became very casual and unprofessional. Around this time, the Champion Soft brand also began to develop an extremely poor reputation among consumers after a string of poorly-received releases, making it increasingly difficult for it to find retailers willing to promote or purchase products bearing its name. In an attempt to improve both the company’s image and his employees' conduct, President Shiraki made his staff attend business etiquette classes and read a booklet on business administration he had written himself. TADA and his fellow programmers were similarly instructed to begin studying more complex programming languages to expand the scope of their output and compete more aggressively with other developers. Despite these efforts, the damage done to the company proved to have been too great to recover from and it was thrown into severe debt by the start of the following year.

In February of 1989, Shiraki gathered his staff to inform them that he would not be able to pay their salaries on time. Before leaving the office for several hours, he asked to hear their thoughts on what direction to take the company in, assuring them that they would not be losing their jobs. That same day, TADA and his colleagues submitted a proposal to Shiraki containing several ideas about how to improve Champion Soft’s earnings moving forward. Among them was a statement advocating for a return to producing erotic games, with the justification that they would be able to sell well without needing to compare to more professionally-developed software. Shiraki took note of this idea and returned to the office the following morning to announce that he would allow the production of erotic games on the condition that they be released under a new brand name, and gave his employees full control over its creation. Due to his relative seniority within the company, TADA held significant sway in the design process and naturally fell into a position of leadership.

Over the next month, Champion Soft’s employees created the company’s new erotic game label by devising original development, advertising, and branding policies from scratch. TADA described the experience as being difficult and filled with uncertainty but very fun nonetheless. The name Alicesoft was chosen through vote, with TADA’s own suggestion losing out for being too strange. To go along with the new name, a pair of mascot characters, Alice-chan and Yukichi the crow, were created to represent the brand. Alicesoft had fully taken shape by the end of March and its staff was soon split into three groups to begin work on its debut titles. Among these groups was the duo of TADA and YUKIMI, whose past collaborations had made them into a natural team.

TADA approached being the lead developer of his own project with reckless enthusiasm, eager to finally possess the freedom to create an eroge however he wanted. He decided to have his game take place in a fantasy world due to both his enjoyment of the genre and because there were few adult games at the time that used such a setting. While he desired to make an RPG with map movement, his limited programming knowledge forced him to instead make an adventure game on a static map screen that he embellished with an RPG-like combat system. To accommodate the game's erotic nature, he resolved to make the protagonist a “piece of shit” who cared only about having sex and was honest about his lust rather than someone more heroic or dignified. He also created a female foil for the protagonist, but changed the character from his initial idea of a brave woman who could stand up for herself to a put-upon slave at YUKIMI’s suggestion. He avoided trying to make the story overly complicated, having been made wary of doing so after the disastrous production of Gakuen Senki, and aimed to make it around the length of an average tabletop gaming session. Though most PC games released at the time displayed their graphics in a 640x200 resolution and used eight digital colors, TADA, having recently purchased a PC-98 VM with a 16-color palette, instead chose to format it in a 640x400 resolution with 16 analogue colors, giving it more vibrant visuals than many of its contemporaries. TADA also programmed in a staff corner known as Alice’s Mansion that included short messages from YUKIMI and himself stating various thoughts they had about the game's development, a feature which would go on to become one of Alicesoft's signatures. The game was eventually given the title Rance, after its protagonist, and the subtitle “The Quest for Hikari”. Upon its completion, TADA and YUKIMI copied and labeled the floppy disks containing the game themselves and wrote several sections of its manual by hand.

Rance: The Quest for Hikari was released to the public on July 15, 1989 as one of Alicesoft’s two debut works alongside Intruder: Exploring Sakura Mansion. Neither game was particularly popular but both performed moderately well, with Rance selling around 600 units. In the following months, TADA assisted in the production of two additional games, Crescent Moon Girl and Dangerous Tengu Legend and led the development of a short story compilation known as DreamProgramSystem (D.P.S.). He designed D.P.S. with the intention of it being the first in a loose series, with its simplistic and standardized format allowing other scenario writers and artists in the company to create their own installments without requiring the involvement of any programmers.

Early Successes (1990-1992)
By 1990, Champion Soft, though still financially struggling, had stabilized enough to resume paying its employees’ salaries on time and begin hiring new staff members. TADA acted as an interviewer during the first stages of the hiring process, where he recruited two new employees. One of these new hires was Purin, a versatile designer, programmer, and artist who quickly bonded with TADA over their shared love of fantasy. TADA also started assisting Shiraki in handling sales by accompanying him on day trips to Tokyo to meet with distributors and advertisers. As he had to pay out of pocket for each train ride to and from Tokyo, he would attempt to meet with as many clients as possible within a day to save money and often became exhausted from running around under the hot sun. These experiences strengthened TADA’s managerial skills and further cemented him as a leader within the company.

In June of 1990, a sequel to the original Rance game titled Rance II: The Rebellious Maidens was released. Production of the game started shortly after the completion of the first, with TADA and YUKIMI being motivated to make a follow-up by their mutual desire to do so rather than any outside demand. While the design of the game was still restricted by TADA’s coding abilities, he pushed his skills to the limit to further improve its RPG elements compared to its predecessor, enabling him to create a more complex battle system and a longer, more dynamic story. Initially planned to be released at the end of 1989, the game had its deadline pushed back twice due to experiencing several major bugs. Regardless, it was positively-received by critics and sold very well, causing many to take notice of Alicesoft for the first time.

After completing Rance II, TADA turned his attention toward creating a blockbuster game to release before the end of the year. Moving away from the fantasy setting of the Rance series, this new title was to be a science fiction adventure game in the style of T&E Soft’s Psy-O-Blade in which the protagonist would change genders whenever they used their spaceship’s warp drive to move between planets, solving puzzles dependent on being the right gender in the right location. The project fell through for unknown reasons in August of 1990, leaving Alicesoft with only four months to come up with a major release before the end of the year. The development team held an emergency meeting to decide the details of the replacement game and quickly agreed to make it fantasy-themed for the sake of their familiarity with the genre. Instead of another Rance game, which was deemed too complicated to complete in such a short window, this game was given a straightforward plot about a fighting tournament that rewarded its victors with beautiful women.

Over the next few days, TADA devised a dungeon movement system inspired by Epyx’s Rogue that exploited the PC-98’s ability to process external characters as text to create simplistic maps on a 16x16 grid. This idea was soon revised and refined by WAO and Purin, who managed to program TADA’s maps using in-engine graphics. In addition to YUKIMI, artwork was provided for the game by MIN-NARAKEN, a student at the Osaka University of Art who had reliably worked as an outsourced artist for two previous Alicesoft projects, and Purin, who designed most of the game’s monsters and male characters. Through hard work and ingenuity, the replacement game, known as Toushin Toshi, finished production in just under four months and was released on December 15, 1990 to stellar reviews and exceptional sales.

The runaway success of Toushin Toshi was enough to drastically improve Champion Soft’s finances in the new year. Having grown in size to around 10 people, it moved offices from a single room in an old building to a three-floored office in a newly-renovated building and had its first ever employee retreat to the Shirahama Hot Spring. In recognition of his contributions to the company, TADA was given the position of development director, a title which he continued to be referred to throughout the remainder of his career no matter his actual standing. The first project that he contributed to at the new office was the Alice’s Cottage CD, an expanded version of the Alice’s Mansion development rooms he had featured in each of his previous games. Alice’s Cottage was the first game TADA had ever programmed for CD-ROMs rather than floppy disks, which caused him to take advantage of the format’s much larger storage capacity by inserting as many images into it as possible. Riding high off of his recent achievements, TADA soon shifted his focus toward making a third entry in the Rance series. Assisted once more by WAO and Purin, he was at last able to program the game to be a legitimate RPG with map movement as he had long wished to. The game’s plot was also made far more ambitious, incorporating his love for studying historical warfare by focusing on a conflict between two warring nations. Further improving the quality of its story were the contributions of Purin and Tori, a scenario writer and fellow founding Alicesoft staff member, who greatly expanded the roles of several supporting characters and created many more to broaden the setting of the series. Released in October 1991 as Rance III: The Fall of Leazas, the game was a hit of a similar caliber to Toushin Toshi and solidified Alicesoft as one of the country’s premiere eroge developers.

In November 1991, erotic video games attracted national media attention when Japanese authorities authorized a search warrant on the developers of the adult game Saori after a copy was found in the possession of a middle school-aged boy. The presidents of multiple companies involved in the distribution of the game were arrested on charges of obscenity, throwing the future of the industry into question. Initially so shaken by the news that he had to leave work early, TADA began cold-calling various industry groups in the hope of persuading them to establish a more distinct code of ethics within the industry. His efforts caught the attention of the Japan Personal Computer Software Association (JPSA), who invited him to present his case at a board meeting in Tokyo. TADA attended the meeting alone and spoke earnestly about his feelings on the situation, stating that the elimination of eroge could harm the future of software developers, and pleaded for the creation of some kind of rule or regulation to prevent it from happening. His words managed to reach the committee and he was contacted by a JPSA representative in August of 1992 to become one of the founding members of the Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCS). The EOCS was formed with the goal of supporting the production and distribution of adult games by instituting a concrete ethics system, becoming the first ever major organization of its kind. At 25, TADA was the youngest of the group’s five initial members as well as the only game developer. As a part of the EOCS, he fought hard to keep the regulation of adult games as minimal as possible, concerned that extensive censorship would prevent him from creating the kinds of games that he wanted to.

In spite of the pressure brought on by the Saori Incident, 1992 was otherwise a successful year for Alicesoft. With a larger staff, more projects could be worked on at once and more members of the company were able to take on leadership roles. Over the course of the year TADA assisted in the productions of Dr. STOP!, a visual novel written by Tori, and DALK, a strategy RPG developed by Purin. A second installment of the Alice’s Cottage series was also released, which was used as a way to train new hires by letting them create short mini-games to be included on the disk. One of these games was Ayumi-chan’s Story, an endless romance simulation game developed entirely by users of ALICE-NET, Alicesoft’s PC fan communication network, rather than any in-house staff. TADA was so impressed by the novelty of the concept that he recruited its writer, Imaam, to be a full-time employee. Work began on an all-ages remake of Toushin Toshi for the Sega Mega-CD, but was stopped for unknown reasons. A second employee trip was held at the end of the year, this time to the Chinese cities of Hong Kong and Macau, and marked the first time that TADA ever left Japan.

Industry Heavyweight (1993-1996)
In April of 1993, TADA was officially promoted to an executive position, though his responsibilities more or less remained the same. The size of the company’s office had expanded to around 30 people and was noted to be very lively, with TADA calling it the most enjoyable period of his time at Alicesoft upon reflection. He spent much of the year leading the production of a fourth Rance game, which he aimed to make the most technologically impressive entry in the series. His original pitch for the game’s plot was scrapped after being deemed too epic in scale to be feasible, leading to a second draft being written that incorporated elements of the unmade Toushin Toshi remake. The project experienced numerous delays, with the programming having to be completely redone after its first incarnation proved too demanding for contemporary computers to run. As a means of compensating for the delays, TADA greenlit an expanded version of Ayumi-chan’s Story for a full retail release. The full-length version of Ayumi-chan was unexpectedly an extreme success that outsold all of Alicesoft’s previous titles, relieving some of the pressure surrounding Rance IV’s production.

Rance IV: The Legacy of the Sect was finally released in December 1993. TADA described the numerous setbacks across its development as a humbling experience, as his career up to that point had otherwise consisted only of exponential improvement. The game was released on a hard disk to accommodate its great size rather than in a set of floppies as had been the standard, resulting in an industry-wide shift to the format.

In 1994, TADA began work on a sequel to Toushin Toshi. The presence of other established directors, writers, and programmers at the company enabled him to devote his full attention toward the game’s development throughout the year. Conscious of the mistakes he had made during Rance IV’s production, he approached the second Toushin Toshi with the intent of making it an orthodox RPG that improved on the quality of his previous works without overreaching. This strategy worked well and Toushin Toshi II released to critical acclaim, becoming one of the most enduringly popular games ever developed by Alicesoft. The stream of recent successes inspired Shiraki to commission the construction of a six-story compact building in Osaka City to serve as the company’s new headquarters, which was finished in April of the next year and given the name the Hanny Building.

Along with Alicesoft moving its offices to the Hanny Building, 1995 saw the launch of the Windows 95 operating system, which would quickly become the company’s preferred development software. Later that year, YUKIMI, co-creator of the Rance series and TADA’s longtime collaborator, resigned from the company after getting married. Rather than attempt to develop another tent-pole release, TADA maintained the restraint he had shown the previous year to make a duology of Rance games much smaller in size and more simplistic design than Rance IV, handling all of the scenario writing and programming by himself. Respectively titled Rance 4.1: Save the Medicine Factory! And Rance 4.2: Angel Army, these would be the final games in the series to feature YUKIMI as their main artist.

By 1996, Alicesoft was at the height of its creative and commercial success. Recognizing this as a rare opportunity for achievement, TADA momentarily abandoned the moderation he had used since the development of Toushin Toshi II in favor of attempting to create his most ambitious game yet. Mobilizing all of Alicesoft’s full-time staff members, who had each developed into specialists in their respective areas, he led the production of a Rance game that was to serve as an omnibus for the series, compiling as many ideas for the setting and its characters as possible into a single comprehensive work. The project was further buffered by the vastly improved processing power and functionality of Windows 95, which allowed for its gameplay to be done in the style of the grand strategy war simulation games TADA played in his youth. The end result was Kichikuou Rance, which went on to become one of the best-selling eroge of all time and the company’s most famous work.

Growing Pains (1997-2001)
Alicesoft continued to prosper in the years following the success of Kichikuou Rance, though TADA personally struggled to produce a follow-up. His first effort was a game known as ZERO TYPE, which centered on a fighting tournament between the pilots of various robots in a science fiction setting. Combining turn-based combat and dungeon exploration with elements of real time strategy games, he envisioned it as a spiritual sequel of sorts to the Toushin Toshi series and intended to give each of the tournament’s competitors their own unique campaign. He eventually came to the conclusion that its gameplay lacked the depth needed to sustain the player’s interest across multiple playthroughs and put no further work into the story after he finished writing the first campaign. To amend its shortened length, ZERO TYPE was released as part of the compilation disk Alice’s Cottage 4/5/6 alongside Human Hunting, a simplistic strategy game with board game-like rules he had developed on the side, and Atlach-Nacha, an erotic visual novel with writing and artwork by new staff members Fumya and Onigiri-kun. Atlach-Nacha proved to be the break-out hit of the three, though both it and ZERO TYPE would later receive standalone releases.

After ZERO TYPE, TADA revisited the Rance series. He planned on making the new game an epic RPG, seeking to replicate the success of Kichikuou Rance. The project suffered many problems, with TADA noting in particular that he had trouble finding common ground with Mucchi, who had been named the main artist for the Rance series following YUKIMI’s departure, until it was canceled after a year of work. Two additional attempts at another Rance game were made in the following years, but both were also ultimately canceled for various reasons. As he grappled with the Rance series, TADA also led the development of Mamorigami-sama, a randomized strategy game with a contemporary domestic comedy setting, and assisted in the scenario writing for the Purin-directed game Mamatoto: A Record of War, where he wrote the plotlines for the heroine characters Nalzgeis and Nozomi.

By the end of the 1990s, TADA had been drained of all confidence about producing another Rance game and diverted his attention instead toward creating short, simplistic games by himself. These included Gakuen Hyouryou Senki, a series of episodic adventure games featuring the cast of Gakuen Senki, and Adelheid, an action RPG in the style of Nintendo’s Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru. In April of 2000 he finally made the decision to temporarily abandon the Rance series to create a new property that could simultaneously be grand in scale but enjoyable and relatively inexpensive to produce. Using the basic framework of Kichikuou Rance as a template, he conceived the idea of a strategy conquest game that would take place on a single static screen, with a greater emphasis placed on domestic management to make up for the reduced number of capturable territories. To suit his personal desire to have a game with a lot of “unfortunate” girls in it, he pitched two scenario concepts that placed the player in the role of a “bad guy”: “Kaiju” and “Yakuza”, to his staff and asked them to choose between them. The “Yakuza” theme won by near-unanimous vote, and the new project immediately moved forward into development. TADA quickly became engrossed in the project as more and more ideas flooded in, leading him to abandon Gakuen Hyouryou Senki after completing only two entries, cancel Adelheid, and play almost no part in any of Alicesoft’s major releases that year.

On November 30, 2001, the new game, titled Daiakuji, was released. While TADA feared that its focus on Yakuza would disinterest fans, it was met with overwhelming praise and managed to sell out of its initial production order within its first month on sale. The creation of Daiakuji reinvigorated TADA’s confidence in himself as a developer and led to the formation of his creative partnership with Orion, an artist who had been hired by Alicesoft during the mid-nineties. While Orion had worked with TADA before, it was only during the production of Daiakuji, where he served as the lead artist, that the two came to realize the chemistry of their respective creative voices and began working more closely together. TADA described working with Orion as causing him to experience the fun of making games for the first time since the beginning of his career, and attributed many of his later successes to their friendship.

20th Century Haniwa (2002-2005)
In 2002, Shiraki retired as president of Champion Soft and passed on the position to his eldest son Yoshinobu. He had planned to retire as far back as 1998, and at first approached TADA with the intention of making him president. TADA politely declined the offer under the belief that he lacked the character needed to run a company, which caused Shiraki to instead hire and begin training Yoshinobu to be his successor. TADA was well-acquainted with Yoshinobu even before he was hired and believed that his more diligent disposition and background in accounting made him a better fit for the responsibilities of being president. Shiraki made multiple efforts to make TADA reconsider his offer in the time between Yoshinobu’s hiring and his retirement, but eventually settled instead on naming him vice president.

As vice president, TADA took on a more active role in business administration. Having felt as though he had fallen out of touch with mainstream tastes, he made a push for Alicesoft to stabilize itself in the increasingly competitive erotic gaming market by expanding its outreach. In addition to Alice Blue, a label geared toward female players established the previous year by Fumya, two more niche labels were formed: Alice Noir and Alice Crimson. None of these new labels proved successful, with Alice Blue ceasing to produce new games after 2004, Alice Noir after 2003, and Alice Crimson never producing anything. Besides this, TADA also advocated for Alicesoft to begin releasing games in a more standardized format in the hope of creating more sustainable brand names for the company that could continue being sold over multiple years. Among the games created from this concept were Tsumamigui, a heroine-capturing game about romancing married women, and Beat Angel Escalayer, an action simulation game about a transforming heroine. While TADA played little part in the development of either game, only assisting in programming some of Escalayer’s combat system, both became commercial successes and followed through with his plans for further franchising. Due to its shorter length, TADA suggested that Tsumamigui be released at a lower price than was the standard for new games at the time, which greatly contributed to its sales and had a lasting effect on the industry.

2002 also marked the long-awaited return of the Rance series. While TADA remained hesitant about resuming the series after his multiple past failures, he was convinced to take another chance with it by Orion, who believed that they would be able to make a game if they kept the project small. What came out of this idea was Rance 5D: The Lonely Girl, which derived its unusual name from the three failed attempts at creating a fifth Rance game that predated it. Developed by a team of only five people and written and programmed entirely by TADA, the game had a very distinct and strange tone and a similarly strange gameplay loop dependent on luck and random chance. The making of Rance 5D restored TADA’s drive to complete the series, and he began work on its next installment soon afterwards with Orion again as lead artist.

While working on the sixth Rance game, TADA spent 2003 overseeing the productions of Alicesoft’s other games as development director, including a follow-up to Daiakuji known as Daibanchou. He was largely uninvolved with Daibanchou’s creation, but was called upon at various points to assist in refining its gameplay. TADA also first introduced the company’s Distribution-Free Declaration later on in the year, which allowed third parties to conditionally distribute the company’s older software free of charge. He was driven to initiate this policy to make it easier for players to access games made for older and more obsolete hardware, as well as to cultivate a sense of trust with consumers.

August 2004 saw the release of Rance VI: The Collapse of Zeth, which had the series make a much-anticipated return to the epic scale last seen in Kichikuou. Inspired by the Wizardry series that TADA enjoyed playing during high school, the game took advantage of new 3D modeling tools Alicesoft had adopted to allow the player to traverse through dungeons in a first-person perspective. As he had been playing many MMORPGs at the time, he tried to make the game in such a way that he would be able to append it with additional content and adjust it based on user comments to emulate the feeling of one. This idea did not last past the first few updates, as the game’s programming led to several incompatibility issues with older save data. He returned to Rance VI’s 3D exploration system in the game Galzoo Island the following year, which introduced elements of time and party management to diversify its gameplay. Both games performed well critically and commercially, proving that TADA’s abilities as a director and game designer had stayed strong in the new millennium.

A Great Empire (2006-2010)
In 2006, HIRO, the director and scenario writer responsible for the creation of both Beat Angel Escalayer and the popular Pastel Chime Series, was forced to leave Osaka due to a family tragedy. Seeing opportunity amid the misfortune, TADA used his exit to establish a second development branch for Alicesoft in Tachikawa, Tokyo. Consisting of around eight of the company’s youngest staff members and led by HIRO, TADA hoped for this new branch to cultivate a sense of community similar to the one he had enjoyed during his early days as a developer. The loss of HIRO as a project lead caused immediate problems at the main branch, as both TADA and Purin, two of the three remaining directors, were too preoccupied working on the next Rance game to work on any other projects. To circumvent this problem, TADA devised a strategy in which he and Purin would rotate between being the primary and secondary directors of a project, with the secondary director preparing their next project on the side.

The seventh game in the Rance series was released on December 15, 2006 under the name Sengoku Rance. At first planned to be a conventional RPG in which the player moved around an expanding map of the nation of JAPAN, TADA was persuaded to completely change the game into a regional conquest strategy simulation in the vein of Kichikuou Rance at Purin’s suggestion. Aided by the trusted trio of Tori, Purin, and Orion, he took many great risks when developing the title in order to have it measure up to mainstream strategy simulation games such as Koei-Tecmo’s Nobunaga’s Ambition series. The final product was a monumental hit, attracting new fans toward the Rance series and the company as a whole with its deep gameplay and relatively standalone setting while also earning praise from returning fans for its strong resemblance to Kichikuou Rance. It was during the production of Sengoku Rance that a rough outline of the remaining games in the series was written, creating a clearer trajectory for it going forward.

Between 2007 and 2008, TADA assisted in the creation of the third installment of the Toushin Toshi series. It was the first game in the series to not be either written or directed by him, with his role in its production being limited to drawing maps and programming event scripts. While a commercial success upon its release, Toushin Toshi III received consistent criticism for its crude 3D enemy graphics, slow-paced real time combat system, and the perceived simplicity of its protagonist, tarnishing the reputation of what had previously been one of Alicesoft’s flagship brands. Feeling the weight that had been placed on the company during the long and frustrating project, he elected to make his next work something large and ambitious that the rest of the staff could rally behind as they had done with Kichikuou Rance and Daiakuji. He envisioned this new title as a real-time strategy simulation in the style of his favorite games from childhood, and promoted it as the next installment of the Dai series as proof of his faith in it.

Development of the new game, titled Daiteikoku, began at the start of 2009, pooling together talent from the Osaka and Tokyo branches. Work on it took up the time of around 80% of Alicesoft’s employees, limiting the amount of attention that could be placed on other projects. Over time, more and more problems relating to the game began to crop up, which gradually started to overwhelm TADA, who was used to scrapping projects when they became too troublesome to continue. His mounting stress began to worry his staff, who persuaded him to push the game’s development on hold to buy himself time to rethink his approach to its construction.

In September of 2009, Tori, one of TADA’s longest-standing creative partners, left her position at Alicesoft. Later that same month, TADA was hospitalized after puncturing his neck on the external antenna of a car while visiting his parents’ home. Already at a loss for what to do with Daiteikoku, these consecutive events put further strain on him. At the end of the year, Alice 2010, a compilation disk made up of mini-games created by other staff members, was released in the place of Daiteikoku. One of the games featured on the disk was Rance 02, a graphical remake of the original Rance II created by Orion. TADA was somewhat embarrassed by the game, feeling that the script he had written for the original Rance II was amateurish, but was appreciative of Orion’s ingenuity in developing a game without needing his assistance.

Though production restarted on Daiteikoku in the beginning of 2010, TADA remained unable to regain control of the project. While he desired to rebuild the game from the ground up, too much work had been done already for this to be feasible, causing development to spiral further and further out of control. As the year entered its second half, he gathered his staff and admitted that he could no longer work as the director of the project. While he was in favor of canceling work on Daiteikoku entirely, the production continued with Ittenchirokou, a recent hire skilled at designing game systems as its new lead. Ashamed of his actions, TADA contemplated resigning from the game industry in disgrace but instead resolved to remain with the company as it dealt with the fallout of his actions. In July, he formally announced on Alicesoft’s website that he would be stepping down from his position as development director to turn all of his attention toward completing the Rance series. Alicesoft was unable to produce any major releases that year, leading to major financial losses and downsizing. Daiteikoku was finally released in April of 2011 with a completely new gameplay system designed by Ittenchirokou over TADA’s original script. TADA remained ashamed of his involvement with the project, considering it to be the greatest failure of his career.

Later Career (2011-2018)
Around the time of Daiteikoku’s release, work began in earnest on the eighth Rance game. Originally intended to be directed by Purin and center on the nation of Helman, its plot instead switched places with the planned ninth entry, a more lighthearted “festival” game that celebrated the series and its characters with TADA as project lead. TADA designed its gameplay around coordinating a large party with highly customizable characters, influenced by the game Sorcerian, and programmed it with the intention of making it easy to add additional content after its release. Working on the new game rebuilt TADA’s shattered confidence, with him going so far as to proclaim it to be the definitive erotic RPG in pre-release statements.

The eighth Rance game was released in August of 2011 as Rance Quest. Contrary to TADA’s own beliefs, its gameplay was widely criticized by players as being too difficult and overly reliant on level grinding. He took these complaints to heart and, with HIRO’s approval, began work on an extensive update that would amend its gameflow based on the issues most consistently reported by players while simultaneously adding in all of the additional content he had planned to release incrementally. This update, known as Rance Quest Magnum, debuted the next year and substantially improved reception toward the game.

In 2013, a full-scale remake of the original Rance game titled Rance 01 was released. TADA had been historically against the idea of remaking older games over focusing on new ideas, but the combination of Rance 02’s creation and aging made him soften his stance. As he and Orion were preoccupied with the production of the final two games in the series, they served only supervisory roles during the remake’s development. In their places, the scenario writer Ittenchirokou and the artist Gyoukai, two of Alicesoft's youngest staff members, were entrusted with producing it. TADA was very satisfied with the results, believing the two brought a freshness to the original game that would not have happened had he done it himself. At the end of the year, he finished writing the initial proposal for the final Rance game with a tentative release date of spring 2016.

In 2014, TADA was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease and warned that he would be placed on dialysis if he allowed his condition to worsen. While he did not report this information to the public, the new concern for his health intensified his drive to complete the Rance series. The beginning of the year saw the release of Toushin Toshi: GIRLS GIFT, an all-ages remake of Toushin Toshi II developed by Imageepoch. TADA served as a producer for the project and played a crucial role in designing its combat system by advising it to focus on one-on-one battles rather than use a party mechanic as the developers first intended.

TADA temporarily returned to his position as development director in March of 2014 after HIRO took an extended leave of absence due to stress. Three months later, it was announced that Alicesoft would be closing its Tokyo offices, with its staff joining the Osaka team. The merger caused TADA to gain a producer position in the restructured company. To combat the declining popularity of eroge in the 2010s, he began researching new revenues for profit, but was unable to make any meaningful progress. The ninth entry in the Rance series, Rance IX: The Helmanian Revolution, was released in April of the year. Directed by Purin, TADA had little involvement with designing the game’s main plot or gameplay but was responsible for all content relating to Rance and his interactions with the seven main heroines. By the end of the year, an animated adaptation of Rance 01 by Pink Pineapple released its debut episode. TADA was enthusiastic about the animation and stated that watching Sill move and hearing her speak was very enjoyable.

In April of 2015, Alicesoft released the game Evenicle, the final original property that TADA would assist in the creation of prior to his retirement. He began work on the game intending to make a classically-styled RPG with a world map set in the same universe as the Rance series, but soon deferred the creation of a new setting inspired by elements of the Rance games to the scenario writer Youichirou. Using Rance Quest’s engine as a base, he sought to make a game that could be completed by as many players as possible by having a forgiving difficulty and fast-paced story. Later that year, Rance 03, an extensive remake of Rance III in the style of Rance 01 developed by the same team, was released. TADA served in a supervisory role as he had during the production of the previous remake. Due to positive reception to the Rance 01 animation it was decided that the game would feature voice acting for the first time in the series’ history. TADA’s involvement in the productions of Evenicle and Rance 03 caused formal work on the final Rance game to only begin near the end of the year, pushing back its tentative release date.

Work on the final Rance game continued over the next two years. Intending to include as much content in it as possible, TADA at first attempted to divide its development between two dedicated teams before scaling back to only having one. Nonetheless, both Orion, its artist, and Yoidore Dragon, its scenario writer, went to great lengths to meet this demand by working on the game virtually nonstop even when TADA advised them against overexerting themselves. TADA envisioned the game as something that he would be able to continuously add content to even after his retirement and personally handled all of its system’s internal calculations in order to minimize the amount of external assistance he’d need to program additional updates. This plan was undermined as development continued and programming on the game became more complicated until he was unable to implement new features without help. Rance X: Showdown, the Rance series’ final installment, was finally released on February 23, 2018. While it did not include all of the features that TADA had planned, he was satisfied with the balance and composition of the finished product.

Retirement (2019-)
On April 26, 2019, TADA announced via Twitter that he had stepped down from his position at Champion Soft in June of the previous year due to exhaustion and would no longer take part in game development or management. He clarified in a follow-up Tweet that he was still employed by the company as an advisor and would consider returning to his work as a developer if his health and motivation improved.

Since his retirement, TADA has continued to assist Alicesoft as a play-tester. He additionally began working a second job as a part-time employee at a grocery store before quitting at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also maintains a blog known as the Haniwa Development Office (ハニワ開発室, haniwa kaihatsu-shitsu) that he updates regularly. The blog focuses on recounting his career and describing his beliefs about game development as well as the various hobbies he has taken up in his retirement.

In November of 2019, TADA released an unofficial patch for Rance Quest Magnum through his blog. The patch included minor story adjustments to bridge the gap between the ending of the base game and the beginning of the Magnum expansion's content and enabled access to a Double Experience Mode to allow for faster level progression. This patch was later incorporated into the release version of MangaGamer's English localization of the game.

Style and Philosophy
Throughout his career as a game developer, TADA has placed an emphasis on creating games with varied and open-ended gameplay systems that encourage user input and experimentation. He compares the process of playing a video game to playing with blocks, believing that it is the responsibility of the developer to design a structure that the player can shape to suit their own interests. While his favorite genres of games are turn-based RPGs and strategic simulations, he describes himself as someone who loses interest in things easily and so makes a point of changing the gameplay and presentation between every game he works on in order to maintain a sense of freshness and enthusiasm when working on a project. To further accommodate this thinking, he often programs the games he works on to be easy for him to modify after their release, enabling him to extensively change their gameplay based on player responses or his own changing tastes.

TADA does not attempt to mimic trends in the industry, preferring to instead make games that he himself would like to play. This behavior allowed him to assume the position of an innovator from the beginning of his career, where he chose to program the original Rance game for PC-98 systems rather than the more widespread PC-88 simply because he had recently bought a PC-98. Similarly, he does not aspire to have the games he creates be recognized as the best of their kind under the belief that it is better to stably maintain a presence as a competent and reliable game producer rather than to struggle to remain at the top. He refers to this thinking as the 80-point principle; striving to make something come as close to how he desires it to be without chasing the ideal of perfection. His favored tactic when developing a game that does not meet this standard is to scrap work on it and redesign it from the ground up, though he has admitted that this is often an impractical strategy.

Among the most noteworthy hallmarks of TADA’s work is his focus on user outreach. He has claimed that his background as a gamer caused him to adopt an overly-casual stance on communicating with players early on, speaking to them as fellow enthusiasts rather than consumers. This led to the establishment of multiple modes of staff and user interaction within Alicesoft, including the Alice's Mansion development corner, the Alicesoft User Club Newsletter, and the ALICE-NET online network, as well as the distribution of feedback cards with each of the company's games. He continued seeking out new means of cultivating strong relationships with users as he rose to a more administrative position, sanctioning the public release of internal development kits and permitting the distribution of older game titles for free to inspire a feeling of openness. Player communication remains one of Alicesoft's most distinct and signature attributes even after TADA exited from his active roles in development and management, and is cited as one of the company's primary goals in its mission statement.

TADA’s self-indulgent approach to game design extends to his approach to storytelling. He has consistently expressed a preference for character and narrative concepts that do not align with mainstream tastes, and openly refers to his style as “weird” and “uncool” for this very reason. This is most pronounced in his work on the Rance series, where he actively sought to exclude standard fantasy races such as elves and orcs in favor of strange and original races such as Haniwa. He enjoys collaborating with others, however, and is willing to compromise his unusual ideas in favor of another person's suggestions provided they do not heavily conflict with his overall vision for a work. Due to this, he prefers working alongside people who share a certain degree of his sensibilities.

TADA’s writing is generally straightforward and conversational, and often incorporates absurdist humor in the form of anachronistic pop culture references and breaking of the fourth wall. He tends to place little focus on the actual act of sex when writing erotic scenes and has stated that he considers both the build-up and aftermath to be more important for making a situation titillating. He is also infamous for having a poor memory that often causes him to forget certain scenario details, leading to many small but significant changes to the settings of his works whenever he recounts them. He is very self-deprecating about the quality of his own writing, describing it as “stupid” on multiple occasions and outright calling his earliest work embarrassing to read. As such, he usually only writes broad outlines for the plots for most of his stories, leaving the actual writing in the hands of a dedicated scenario writer.

TADA has been an outspoken proponent of the importance of adult gaming to the greater industry. Along with considering it to be a medium that allows for the expression of ideas that could not otherwise be expressed, he also believes that the novelty of eroticism provides smaller developers with a means to promote their games without the pressure of needing to compete with mainstream companies. He is very candid about the instability of eroge as a commodity, at one point comparing the industry to a raft inching toward a waterfall, but has expressed certainty that it will continue to exist in some form for as long as video games continue to be produced.

Trivia

 * TADA almost always uses a haniwa to represent himself whenever he is depicted. It is generally accepted that his personality and quirks were used as the basis for the eccentric behaviors displayed by hannies. He occasionally refers to himself as the Hanny King and consistently used a portrait drawn by Orion of the character as his avatar on Alicesoft's website from 2002 to 2012, leading many to assume that the Hanny King was intended to be a stand-in for TADA himself. Beginning in 2013, however, TADA began being exclusively depicted as an ordinary green hanny holding a Japanese flag he had drawn himself, with the Hanny King being more concretely established as a separate yet similar entity. Though the reasons for this change are unknown, its occurrence aligns closely with his resignation from the position of development director at Alicesoft.
 * TADA is known for having questionable artistic abilities. While he served as the artist for all of the Monsters featured in the original Rance game out of necessity, he passed the responsibilities to more conventionally talented staff members in subsequent games in the series. Despite this, monsters drawn by him are often included in the games he develops as secret opponents, most notably in the form of recurring Doodle Beast enemies.
 * TADA's favorite type of girls are meek and unfortunate girls wearing glasses. He has clarified that it is not the glasses themselves that make such characters attractive to him but rather the sense of modesty that is conveyed by wearing them. Despite his love for these types of girls, he has also stated that he prefers they remain in the minority within a game's cast, feeling the they lose part of their charm when they are too prevalent.
 * TADA's preferred age range for girls is 14 to 15, but he also enjoys women aged 28 to 29. He has referred to himself as a "semi-lolicon" and enforced a policy on the Rance series' artists to only ever draw pubic hair on women aged 20 and above.
 * TADA's favorite erotic scenarios involve serious and straight-laced girls being forced into lewd situations against their will, either through coercion, manipulation, or mind-alteration. He has stated that he is disgusted by sexual assault in real life but that he still makes liberal use of it in the games he creates due to it being easy to write erotic scenarios around.
 * TADA is a noted military enthusiast with a particular affinity for the Imperial Japanese Navy during the Second World War. He often incorporates elements of military history into the games he develops through character, location, and object names and plot details.
 * TADA's two favorite games in the Rance series are Rance 5D and Rance Quest Magnum. He has at various points credited both games with reinvigorating his interest in developing the series.
 * TADA's favorite Rance series character is Copandon Dott, saying "It's great that she's a bit older. It's also great that her personality's kind of bad."
 * Following the release of Rance 5D, TADA would occasionally mention his desire to develop a remake of Kichikuou Rance that would allow the player to choose which of four major nations of The Continent Rance would become the leader of at the start of the game. He abruptly stopped making such statements around the release of Rance Quest, and confessed in an interview after his retirement that the combination of old age and his already poor memory would make keeping track of the complicated story branching needed to direct such a game impossible for him.
 * TADA believes himself to be cursed to never be able to produce a game in the science fiction genre due to all three of his efforts (the untitled predecessor to the original Toushin Toshi, ZERO TYPE, and Daiteikoku) ending in some degree of failure. He has stated that he is a fan of science fiction in spite of this.
 * The three genres of games that TADA refuses to ever make and his reasons why are:
 * An action game (because he isn't good at them)
 * A mahjong game (because companies that released mahjong games during the 1990s tended to close soon afterwards)
 * A pure-love romance game (because Alicesoft is Eroge Maker)
 * TADA's favorite food is croquettes. Part of his daily routine while he worked as development director at Alicesoft involved making trips to buy croquettes for the rest of the company's staff. This habit earned him the nickname of Croquette Hero, which he is occasionally credited as in certain games.
 * TADA prefers dogs to cats. He owned a dog named Chikuwa (ちくわ, chikuwa) throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s and often included his name in the games he developed during the period as an easter egg.
 * TADA dislikes western-produced pornography, describing it as "Overly done-up ladies (who to a Japanese person look older than they say they are) saying stuff like 'ahh~, mmm~, great~' and having sex that's just slamming into each other while writhing around." The Hazure Onna Gal Monster, the only gal monster that he is responsible for drawing, is an amalgam of the various qualities he hates in western pornographic actresses.
 * Outside of his job at Champion Soft, TADA has also worked as:
 * A parking lot security guard
 * A bicycle race attendant
 * An assembly line worker at a subcontracted factory
 * A supermarket employee
 * The computers that TADA has used across his life include:
 * PC-8801 (1982)
 * PC-8801FR (1985)
 * PC-9801VM2 (1986)
 * PC-88VA (1987)
 * EPSON-386M (1990)
 * PC-9801NA / C (1991)
 * FM-TOWNS UX (1991)
 * PC-9821Xa10 (1995)
 * PC-VS26 98NX (1997)
 * NEC Value Star TX (2003)
 * NEC PC-GL22FSGG1 (2005)
 * NEC Lave-G-RX GL14MWXG1 (2006)
 * NEC PC-GV28WTZM3 (2006)
 * NEC PC-GV30HBZG3 (2006)
 * NEC Value one (2007)
 * NEC Value Star G (2008)
 * Epson-MR4000 (2010)
 * Epson-TY5100 (2012)
 * Epson-ST180E (current)