Atatte!! KUDAKERO!!

About
'''Atatte!! KUDAKERO!! -The Final Super Story-''' (当って!! KUDAKERO!! -The Final Super Story-) is an unproduced strategy romance game developed by various Alicesoft staff members as a side project during the late 1990's.

The brainchild of Orion, one of Alicesoft's in-house artists and a self-described idiot, Atatte!! KUDAKERO!! was envisioned as a parody of traditional romance simulation games in which the cast of heroines each possessed outlandish and alienating character traits, such as believing themself to be a snail or being a giant fighting robot. While outwardly tongue-in-cheek, Orion's desire to make the game was sincere and allegedly predated even his time at Alicesoft. After first unveiling the concept to the public in 1998, he eventually succeeded in recruiting several of his coworkers to assist him in developing a game based on it in 1999. While the project was never officially recognized by Alicesoft, the team worked extensively on it during their free time, which culminated in the development of a working prototype only a few months later.

Despite their early success, the KUDAKERO!! development team were quickly impeded by a combination of their hectic work schedules limiting their time available to work on the game and Orion's own fickle tastes causing him to repeatedly make major changes to setting, gameplay, and character details. This led to the project repeatedly going on extended hiatuses that only further exacerbated Orion's urge to undo the progress that had already been made on it. After three years of on and off work, all further development was frozen indefinitely at the end of 2001.

A notable quality of KUDAKERO!!'s long and tumultuous development history was the extensive coverage it received in Alicesoft's bimonthly user club newsletter Alice's Battery Bomb. Content relating to KUDAKERO!! appeared in ten of the newsletter's twenty issues, with the initial pitch for the game being featured in its second installment. These features blurred the line between being genuine and ironic, playing off of the game's ridiculous premise and frustrating development by emphasizing and exaggerating Orion's overreaching and inconsistent vision for it, often to the point of obfuscating any actual information. The decision to stop work on the game at the end of 2001 was partially motivated by Alice's Battery Bomb ceasing further publication at the same time, with Orion describing its close association with the newsletter allowing for a "clean break" when it ended.

An attempt to resume work on KUDAKERO!! was kickstarted in mid-2005 by Fumya, Orion's wife and a member of the original development team. While Orion began working on a new version of the game wholesale using the company's System40 engine, no further updates were given on it past its initial announcement.

Gameplay
Described as a "Mystery-Tracking-Dice-Card-Sugoroku-Style Love Adventure" by its creators, descriptions of Atatte!! KUDAKERO's gameplay in its numerous newsletter previews were deliberately obtuse and often included blatantly false information such as claims that it would be a 3D polygonal fighting game. This vagueness was based partially on the reality of its development, with Orion's inability to commit to a definitive gameplay structure being one of the primary causes of the game's incomplete state. Nonetheless, at least two prototype builds of the game have been created, with the first receiving a substantial description in the 17th issue of Alice's Battery Bomb. Later comments from Orion include references to completely new gameplay features not mentioned anywhere in this outline, including online play and a mahjong sub-game. Whether these additional features were indeed intended to be incorporated into the final game or were merely meant as jokes is unknown.

From Alice's Battery Bomb Issue 17
The protagonist, Hattori, and the game's female characters all move around a rectangular board, the former controlled by the player and the latter all by the computer. Every turn, the player must draw from a deck of 40 cards to determine what action Hattori will take. While the majority of cards allow Hattori to move around the board, others can be used to stop a female character from moving for a set number of turns. Only one of the cards drawn can be played per turn, with the remaining ones being shuffled back into the deck. By landing on a space with a female character, the player is able to interact with them and raise their affection level with Hattori. When all 40 cards in the deck have been played, the chapter will end. There are six chapters in total, with the final one culminating in Hattori marrying the female character that he has the highest affection level with. Certain spaces on the board also contain special events with characters such as Hattori's mother and Dr. Inubushi, which grant special effects to the player.

Plot
Note: The following is based on setting information included in ORION SCRIBBLES WITH CROQUIS and may conflict with later revisions of the scenario. Atatte!! KUDAKERO!! follows Sanzou Hattori, an expressionless yet highly perceptive high school student, as he lives out his day-to-day life with his eccentric friends and classmates. At the beginning of the game, he meets and befriends Makiko Katatsumori, an underclassman who believes herself to be a snail, and Destruction Robo Q, an 18-meter-tall super robot-turned transfer student. The game's six chapters each cover a portion of the school year and end with a special seasonal event, including a trip to a hot spring, a school cultural festival, and Christmas break. Who Hattori spends these events with is dependent on who he has grown closest to at the time they occur. Hattori will consummate his relationship with the girl he spends Christmas with provided he has spent the events of each of the previous chapters with her.

The story sees a sudden shift toward action during its climax, in which Hattori and his friends are forced to do battle with the evil MT Army, which was revived after being destroyed by Q under the leadership of the son of its former director: Hattori's friend Nanasu.

Trivia

 * The title Atatte! KUDAKERO!!, is a Japanese phrase that literally translates to "hit and break" and is used to describe striving toward a goal with everything you have similar to the English phrases "go for broke" or "give it your all".
 * The name "Sanzou Hattori" is a play on the famous Sengoku era warlord Hattori Hanzou. The historical Hanzou is remembered in pop culture as a silent, fiercely loyal, and highly competent ninja, closely matching how Hattori is described.
 * Makiko Katatsumori's last name is the Japanese word for snail.
 * Yoshinaga Kaibutsu's last name is a Japanese word that literally translates to "monster".
 * The kanji that make up the name Chiyoko can alternatively be read as "Thousand-Year Child", referencing the character's childish appearance relative to her adult age.
 * The character Nanasu Arihori strongly resembles Nanas Alphoria, the protagonist of the Alicesoft game Mamatoto in both appearance and profession. His first name is phonetically identical to Nanas' but spelt using kanji rather than katakana while the kanji that make up his last sound similar to two of the syllables in Nanas'. The MT Army that he is eventually revealed to lead uses the two letters that make up the stressed syllables of Mamatoto, the country that Nanas leads in his game. Furthermore, Nanasu's father, who appears only in silhouette in concept artwork, resembles Kakaro Alphoria, the father of Nanas, while the MT Army's main battleship, the Pandora, is named and modeled after the summon used by the final boss of Mamatoto. Various giant robots used by the MT Army are similarly modeled after certain Kids featured in Mamatoto, including Fightan (renamed Taitan and resembling the gigantic Fightan featured in Mamatoto's manual), Blocken, Wap-Wap, and Wiz. These numerous references are presumed to be a side effect of the majority of KUDAKERO's scenario being written during the development of Mamatoto.
 * According to Orion, Makiko Katatsumori and Destruction Robo Q were envisioned as the game's two main heroines over the rest of the female characters. The two are consistently displayed the most prominently in artwork of the cast.
 * According to Kuribayashi, Orion prepared naked version of the character portraits for the game's entire female cast and Nanasu.
 * According to Kuribayashi, Orion attempted to incorporate Alicesoft's development director TADA into the game as a "secret character" but was vehemently refused permission to do so.
 * Artwork featured in the 14th issue of the Alice's Battery Bomb newsletter displays a character not featured in other promotional artwork for the game: Polymatus (ポリミタス, porimitasu), a snail-like creature ostensibly from space that accompanies Makiko. Artwork included in ORION SCRIBBLES WITH CROQUIS depicts Polymatus assuming a "battle mode" where it obtains a large and imposing humanoid physique, though it is unclear if this was actually intended to appear in-game or was simply a joke drawing. The name Polymath is derived from the Polymita genus of snail.
 * Artwork featured in ORION SCRIBBLES WITH CROQUIS depicts an additional female character added around 2001 that goes unnamed in her design sketches. At first resembling a stereotypical alien with pitch black eyes and elongated fingers, she is seemingly redesigned to resemble a one-eyed hitotsume-kozou yokai. As the character is not featured in the cast list given for the game in the Haniho retrospective, it is unclear whether she was incorporated into the scenario or not. The latter concept would eventually be repurposed into the Rance Series character Nogiku.