Does this mean that anyone who knows the truth could create an endless number of message bottles?
…Is that what the cat box world is like…?
I see. …I guess she might also be an Endless Witch.
In fact, …maybe anyone who knows the truth can become an Endless Witch.
An endless tale, created by the Endless Witches.
The two days starting on October 4th, 1986, where my family is being toyed with endlessly.
…I have to end it.
I have to find a hint of the truth from within this story…and end this endless tale.
– Ange Ushiromiya, Dawn of the Golden Witch
Here’s a thread about Endless Witches doing Endless Witch stuff. More specifically, a thread about user-made “message bottles,” in the form of fan episodes, fangames, edits to Umineko, and so forth, as opposed to more strict fan fiction as a text-only thing.
I’ll open with an oldie-but-goodie that isn’t mine so I can maintain some appearance of impartiality: Jan-Poo’s Witches & Woodlands.
Taking place in an environment similar to Episode 4, except instead of cards the kids play D&D, and they ignore everything Kinzo is doing, and also Erika and Dlanor are there (don’t ask, you won’t get any better answer than the characters get when they bring it up). Beatrice is the literal Game Master. Erika is a Paladin. Nothing can possibly go wrong with this.
Narrative is mostly linear but there are puzzles, so it’s hard to ballpark how long it would take to read through. It is significantly shorter than a real episode however. There’s also new character art!
This all comes with a small caveat, which is that you need at least a copy of Umineko Chiru 8 to make it work (with bonus music access for having Umineko 4 installed a certain way). That’s the original releases, not the MG ones; I’m not even sure if it could be adapted to PONscripter that the new version uses. Somebody else will have to figure that one out.
But if you can get it working, it’s quite enjoyable and pretty funny assuming you’re a fan of both Umineko and tabletop roleplaying memes.
Then there’s Redaction of the Golden Witch, and honest-to-goodness attempt at a “fan episode” in the most literal respect.
Set in canon as an interquel of sorts between EP5 and EP6, with some bits set well after EP8, Redaction tells a number of intertwining and interconnected stories:
- Shortly after End, Battler and Virgilia review a “Heretic” Fragment stolen from Heaven in order to prepare for Battler’s upcoming game in Dawn. The Fragment tells the story of 1986 in a way that is… not entirely orthodox, and constantly just a little bit “off.” Battler hopes as much for useful information from the Fragment as a chance to see Beatrice again, but this Fragment was condemned by the heavenly High Censor for a reason.
- In 1996, a group of Witch Hunters from America and Japan make plans to visit Rokkenjima, but their chaperone is having second thoughts about their cavalier attitude toward their ghoulish “fandom.”
- In 2007, a Witch Hunter using the alias “Walter Absalom” details his findings on a mysterious Forgery which he believes is a confession not to the deaths of the Ushiromiyas in 1986, but to a group of college-age Witch Hunters from America who visited Rokkenjima on a pilgrimage in June of 1996 and turned up dead.
- Finally, the 72nd demon of the Key of Solomon Andromalius wanders in the margins of Umineko canon, uncertain of where and when he exists, and what connection he has to the tales of the Golden Witch and the mysterious witch born of the events of 1996.
True to form, Redaction is a genuine fan episode in format, a strict kinetic visual novel. There are no choices (except in TIP #2), no gameplay, no puzzles (except whatever the narrative has). If I had to describe it as anything it’s one part fanfic, one part shaggy dog story explanation for Battler’s cape, one part literary criticism of Umineko itself. It wears many hats.
Redaction was originally released on my YouTube channel back in 2012 or so as a series of six playlists detailing the overarching narrative of 1986’s first day, followed by 1996, then 1986’s second day. A playable version – made not with ONscripter, but in Ren’py – was released some time after the final Tea Parties came out, as well as a couple of TIPs that were either incorporated into the main program or released separately. The “original graphics” version contains new characters (including all-new art for Andromalius by AnimeSuki user ClockworkAngel and a number of sprite edits by AS user Oliver).
I do not recommend reading these. Not only is YouTube painfully slow for reading a VN, the version I released as a standalone is basically a transcription of the YouTube release sequence, which has a ton of problems with pacing and scene placement as well as some general writing difficulties.
This year I came back to Redaction and began a project to port the episode into true HD instead of the weird pseudo-widescreen 480p of the original, using the graphics of the Alchemist PS3 release (hacked up, compressed, and stripped down, so don’t expect it to contain the “real” PS3 assets). The result is a 1080p experience more akin to the ADV PS3 game and less like the NVL experience of the regular Umineko (and the original Redaction, for that matter). While kind of controversial, I am totally going somewhere with it.
At the moment, the first half of The Redacted Redaction has a test build of 95% of “Part 1,” basically all the events of Oct. 4 1986 and June 12-14 1996 except the crucial ending of the 1996 segment, all in a brand-new order guaranteed to be way more compelling and thematically meaningful and also just generally more fun. I anticipate that it would take about 6 or so hours to read Part 1; it’s shorter than a regular episode but is also only part of a whole that is not complete just yet. In theory it’s roughly 1/3, which would make the whole text about equivalent to an episode and a half, but that’s subject to major changes due to editing, which has already helped to make this section tighter and shorter.
The reason for the not-totally-complete part is simple: I don’t have a working HD sprite of Andromalius yet, and he’s fairly prominent in the back half of the narrative. I am working on that however, as well as UI features, in order to create a “proper” release of Part 1. From there I’d eventually get to Part 2, which I expect to feature some significant changes over the finished second half of the original release (though if for some reason you just can’t wait, that second half in rough draft form does exist). From there I’d update the Tea Parties and TIPs and add a third and final TIP that wraps up a dangling plot thread almost nobody noticed or cared about.
And then we’ve got… this thing.
Do you like Erika Furudo? Do you like weird-ass Borges-goes-drinking-with-Terry-Gilliam stuff? Do you enjoy alternate timelines? Do you think the Chiesters would’ve been way cooler if they were in Apocalypse Now? Did you ever wish Umineko had more gameplay, and in fact were an adventure game more akin to Phoenix Wright than, uh, Umineko?
This may or may not be your jam.
Set at some point possibly after EP8 but honestly who knows/cares, Erika has upset Bern yet again and has been cast back into the Abyss to think about what she did wrong (made Bern angry). While there, fearing for her own existence, she dives into a Fragment she finds at an inexplicable depth. The result is not what she expects.
Instead of a standard tidy 1986 Rokkenjima mystery, Erika is swiftly hustled by Zepar and Furfur between a delirious dreamworld mashup of 1986 elements and a bizarre “real world” circa 1995 where she’s a student at St. Lucia Academy, a girl named Hachijo with an all-too-familiar face is her roommate, and Maria Ushiromiya survived 1986 to be raised alongside Ange by their aunt Eva. And then things get really weird.
Though there are extensive VN sequences, this still-freaking-untitled Erika project has a lot of gameplay, making it more similar to a traditional VN or Adventure Game than its source material. In addition to dialogues, some quite detailed (it took me 4 months to write parallel dialogues with Maria and Ange at the start of ACT 1), there are genuine walkaround segments where Erika must make observations, solve puzzles, and try to understand the Fragment she’s trapped in and what mystery, if any, she is supposed to be solving there.
The deck may be stacked against her, but this is Erika we’re dealing with: Cheating isn’t just expected, it’s encouraged, and meta-knowledge is almost always to the player’s advantage. Just be wary of changes, for there are far too many for comfort.
So how do you play this one? Wellllllllllllll you can’t, yet. The way the game is structured, there are a series of parallel acts (TCAs) that precede and “mirror” the regular ones (ACTs). My intent was to get a build out once 1 TCA and ACT 1 were both finished. I finished 1 TCA over a year ago, set the project aside, and didn’t come back to it for a long time. Good news is I’m back at it. Bad news is ACT 1 is pretty complicated, so there’s a lot left to do. If you’re super duper interested a partial build might be available through PMs but in general I’m working on getting this part finished before proceeding into 2 TCA / ACT 2. The overall project is anticipated to have about 5 overall acts and for all I know I will never actually finish the whole thing, but there’s still quite a lot of gameplay there right now, maybe a good 6-8 hours or so. Particularly if you try all the optional or mutually-exclusive parts of ACT 1.
I’ll try to update things as I get to it, but it’s hard to even talk about this project because of its oft-nonsensical nature. It’s very much meant to be a sociopathic comedy through and through.
So that’s what I got. Feel free to discuss these things or other things, fanworks I’m not familiar with, or whatever else. Just bear in mind, if it weren’t obvious from the thread tag and content here, that full spoilers are assumed! Though I’m not aware of any other 07th Expansion fanworks (in English or otherwise), assume this thread has spoilers for all such things in case it turns out there’s a Higurashi fangame or something.
