Hirano Kana's Medarot 2 Production Notes

The following is a translation of Hirano Kana's personal webpage dealing with the development of Medarot 2. The below was translated by Yume (hinata.yume on discord).

Medarot 2

Medarot 2 was released a year after the first game. I was transferred from working on the graphics, and placed in charge of scriptwriting instead. The volume of the scripts has greatly increased in comparison with the first game, so I didn't have enough time to do the graphics at the same time.

The volume of work has quadrupled in comparison with the first game. The number of staff members, as well as development times, have greatly increased likewise. While the introduction of many new types of Medarots and Medallions played a part here, the main reason was the increased volume of the scripts. ...in other words, I'm inclined to believe more than half of the newly introduced workload was directly my fault.

With our experience from the development of the first game in mind, we began with transferring Shiratama-kun from scriptwriting into the role of a director and system developer. Medarot 2 had to run both on Game Boy and Game Boy Color, which introduced a wide variety of hurdles to overcome.

The story of Medarot 2 is set seven years after the events of the first game. The protagonist has changed from Hikaru to Ikki with his signature topknot hairstyle. The main characters from the previous game, including Hikaru, Kirara, Nae, and Professor Medarot, are still alive and kicking. Also, Medarot 2 introduces a new cast of main characters who will stay relevant up until the fourth game.

All of the character names in the first game had to be tied to "米" ("rice") in some manner, and most of the main cast names had been chosen by Bonbon-san. Likewise, the names of the new cast of main characters introduced in Medarot 2 had to be tied to "酒" ("alcohol"). However, this time we were given full freedom to choose their names. And so I, as the main scriptwriter, have named almost every character, effectively becoming their "godparent." ...by this point I have completely forgotten how I came up with "Arika", the first heroine's name.

Medarot 2 received an anime adaptation just before the game was released. While the backgrounds of some characters in the anime were different from their game versions, they were still properly tied into the story. At least, that's what I think. The anime called Medarot (without a sub-title) was a real masterpiece.

And now, please enjoy the Damerot News pt.1 and pt.2, called "How I embarrassed myself by bringing weird things into joint planning meetings."

Ikki Tenryou (and Metabee)

This boy is the main character. He is a fourth-grader. He has somewhat reserved temper, and is not particularly hot-blooded. His backstory is rather sad: all of his friends have been allowed to buy a Medarot for themselves, while Ikki alone wasn't allowed to buy one. In his first appearance in Medarot 2, he wakes up dressed as a woman by mistake.

Arika Amazake (Brass)

The first heroine, and Ikki's childhood friend. She has a foul temper, and basically keeps Ikki under her thumb. She wants to become a journalist, and is seen chasing scoops all the time. In fact, starting from Medarot 2 and onwards, I have been busy with screenwriting and debugging to such an extent, I have barely had any time for Robottling up till now. I heard a certain rumor about Robottling. Apparently, Arika was supposed to be much stronger than Kouji, Ikki's rival. If that was actually true, the story would have taken a weird turn... All in all, this highlights the difference in approaches between me and Shiratama-kun.

Kouji Karakuchi (Smilodonad)

This spoiled rich boy lives in Medalopolis, a nearby city. He is notably reckless and hot-blooded. Day in and day out, he strives to protect his beloved Karin.

In the game, he fulfills a hot-blooded hero archetype. In the anime, he is a cool and handsome guy. Hikaru, the main character of the first game, had rich, handsome and reserved Yuuki as a rival. This is why we intentionally gave Kouji a hot-blooded personality. Additionally, our decision has been influenced by Hachirou, a snobbish rich boy who did not make an appearance in the anime.

His looks are more appropriate for a reserved handsome character type though. I found the discrepancy between his looks and personality to be particularly amusing. By the way, it wasn't me who suggested that Kouji should use Neo Sakura-chan as his leader Medarot. This was Shiratama-kun's idea.

Karin Junmai (Saintnurse)

The second heroine. Just like Kouji, this young lady comes from a rich family. She is quiet, kind, and a natural airhead. I went to great lengths to make her personality as pure and angelic as possible, without a slightest bit of evil. I had to keep myself in check all the time, otherwise I would have made her "a seemingly pure angel who hides her true, evil identity deep inside."

Kikuhime (Peppercat)

The leader of the Screws. She is not a heroine. She often tries to mess with Ikki and his friends, but her schemes inevitably backfire. In the anime her flunkies call her "Oyabin" ("Chief"), and she speaks with a Tokyoite accent. On the other hand, in the game her flunkies call her "Ane-go" ("Ma'am"), and she draws out her words which makes it seem like she's spacing out. Nonetheless, the role she plays and the approach she takes generally stay the same in both the game and the anime.

Iwanoi

The second member of the Screws. A self-proclaimed genius hacker. When he gets himself in trouble, he always starts begging Kikuhime to protect him. In the game, he always uses a transceiver, an item that is necessary to contact Ikki and his friends. It may be too late for this, but I'm having second thoughts about him using a transceiver to contact them… I think I should've made him use a cell phone or a Medarotch instead, but somehow I stubbornly insisted on him using a transceiver in every game. And surprisingly, nobody has called me out on this until the very end. This is why I have to call myself out now.

Kagamiyama

The third member of the Screws. He is a muscleman and a clean freak. While normally the cleanliness of his clothes is the only thing that concerns him, every now and then he makes witty remarks.

Hikaru Agata

The main character from the first game. In Medarot 2, he is known as "the guy from the convenience store." Also, he makes a dashing "curry" entrance as "Heroic Phantom Thief Retort."

"Heroic Phantom Thief" is specifically written as a pun on "Phantom Thief." This is not all that important in the games though, because his title is written in hiragana there. He gave a Metabee set to Ikki, so he is primarily responsible for getting Ikki interested in the world of Medarots. While he works at a convenience store, he tends to often skip work. He says "Don't worry, there's not a lot for me to do either way" as an excuse. It seems he became a floater after graduating from high school... In the game, Retort's theme song somehow ended up being enka.

"I will decorate the dining table and protect everybody from food snatching! Heroic Phantom Thief  Retort, a dashing 'curry' Medarotter wrapped up with shelf-stable love, makes his entrance!" Shiratama-kun came up with this catchphrase. My own taste is nowhere near bad enough to think up catchphrases like this.

TL note: カレー ("curry") and its derivatives like カレーなる are puns on 華麗なる ("grand/magnificent/dashing") here.

Kirara Akita

The first heroine from the previous game. In Medarot 2, she works part-time at Medarot Company. Also, she makes a dashing entrance as "Heroic Phantom Thief Retort Lady." According to her background, she works as a typical office lady in Medarot Company. So she is a career woman, while Hikaru is stuck being a part-time worker in a convenience store. ...Hikaru, I'm afraid she's going to dump you one of these days.

Nae Akihabara

The second heroine from the previous game. She is the granddaughter of Dr. Medarot. Being a total genius, she became a professor at a young age. Now she spends her time holed up in a laboratory. I was going to write her character to have a massive crush on Hikaru, but a certain somebody pointed out that it's unwise to drag out a romantic line from their elementary school days, so I changed my mind. Thus, starting from Medarot 2 and further, she has little to no involvement with Hikaru.

Dr. Medarot

As a figure of authority in the world of Medarots, he supports Ikki and his friends. The novel hairstyle of his looks like it takes a lot of daily effort to maintain.

Dr. Hebereke

Even now, this elderly man keeps plotting heinous schemes under the motto of "World conquest and popularity among bombshell girls." It is established that him and Dr. Medarot used to be classmates back in the day. While he appears before Ikki and his friends in the role of the final boss, he is not a devil incarnate. Instead, he gives off an impression of a researcher whose approach differs from that of Professor Medarot. I wish him to live a long life.

Sakekasu

The boss of the Roborobo Gang, an organization focused on evil and mischief. The officers of his gang are a weird bunch. They wear full-body tights, sunglasses, and grow a pair of antennae on their heads. As far as I recall, the anime establishes him to be 27 years old. He grew up to be an impressive adult, right?

Surume

The female officer of the Roborobo Gang. She makes her appearances with a loud laughter, and escapes in the same manner. She has an overbearing attitude. Also, she loves shiny things and brand clothes. As long as she keeps working in the Roborobo Gang, the day for her Great Brand Strategy to bear fruit will never come. Rest assured of this.

Salami

The child officer of the Roborobo Gang. While he is a boy, he speaks in a feminine manner. He is the smartest officer in the Roborobo Gang. Why would a boy speak in a feminine manner? Well, there is a certain reason for this. Initially, I requested his character to be designed as a girl, but the final design that was approved changed him to a boy. I just said "meh, so be it." And that's how it happened.

Shiokara

The elderly officer of the Roborobo Gang. He is a big guy with a scar on his cheek. It has been established that he hates kids (of course, he absolutely cannot stomach Salami as well). Why is he called an elderly officer if he looks like a tall muscular guy? The issue with Salami's design also applies here. I requested his character to be an elderly man, but received the final design for a muscular guy instead, so that's what we had to work with.

TL note: the line is bold is corrupted/mistyped in JP, translating from context here.

Mr. Uruchi

He is a referee authorized by the Robottle Association. This mysterious man appears out of nowhere immediately when a Robottle begins, saying "I see you made a deal, shall we proceed?". As the rumor has it, he was inspired by G Gunda— (I must exercise self-restraint here.)

Chick seller

An elderly man who sells chicks. For some reason, he uses a female-type first generation Medarot.

The Three Laws of Medarots

Back in the day, I used to spend my downtime at work getting immersed in Mr. Asimov's books. It goes without saying that I used his famous Three Laws of Robotics as a basis. The Three Laws of Medarots are as follows: 1. A Medarot may not injure a human being. 2. Through inaction, a Medarot may not allow a human being to come to harm. 3. A Medarot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Medarots are children's toys that can be bought in any convenience store. I thought that adding The Three Laws would make the story take a much darker turn, so I was extremely conflicted whether I should mention them or not. Upon further consideration, I wanted to avoid frivolous developments like "Metabee gets angry and fires his gatling at Ikki" that the anime did. In the end, I decided to add The Three Laws with a possibility of a somewhat darker turn to the story. During the entire time I worked on the Medarot series (up to the fourth game), I had been writing the scripts with the following thought in mind: "If Medarots actually existed, what sort of questions would their existence raise? What kinds of conflicts and stories would their existence contribute to?".

I made sure to put the most emphasis on the fundamental differences between humans and Medarots. Living beings vs machines, organic matter vs inorganic matter, carbon-based life forms vs silicone-based life forms... I thought it was imperative to establish the rules which would allow such vastly different entities to exist side by side.

The Three Laws of Robotics play a central part in the plot of Mr. Asimov's "I, Robot" short story collection. Existence of the Three Laws affects the setting and the atmosphere of a story in a fundamental way.

...though if Medarots actually existed to begin with, they would by no means be used as children's toys. Even if the Three Laws applied to them, they would still be treated as extremely dangerous weapons. The topic of "robot companions" in the real world has many challenges that still need to be addressed.

The fall of Fuyun

I have always loved stories with dark settings, so I was bummed out by the fact that the main target audience of Medarot ranged from lower to upper elementary school students. And yet I was placed in charge of writing Medarot scripts. That's why I had to continuously adjust my habitual way of thinking.

"In this world, nobody should die." "Nobody is allowed to be unhappy." "In this world, nobody is evil from the bottom of their heart." ...I had to outline these fundamental rules for myself, and continuously force myself to abide by them.

Anyhow, for all my life up until that point I have been immersing myself in various dark settings, which is why I had to constantly correct myself. I was effectively fighting a battle against my own unconscious. Not only I had to watch myself, I also asked others to review my scripts and point out excessively dark developments that needed to be corrected. In fact, I have nearly wiped out the Flying Fortress Fuyun that Medarots lived in. And furthermore, I considered such a development to be acceptable until somebody else brought it to my attention.

Medarot has a light-hearted setting, and despite my general inclinations, I do not hate it by any stretch of the word. All I'm saying here is, my mind is simply more accustomed to dark settings. This is precisely what made me pour so much love in my work on Medarot.

A phantom script

Medarot 2 has a phantom script. Usually, Medarot production went as following: representatives from every company involved in production gather for a joint planning meeting, establish the main plot points, outline the setting, and so on. Then, a script is written based on the results of the meeting. This was our usual workflow. I was supposed to finish a script in one month after the meeting has been held... And yet, surprisingly, results of one meeting have been completely overturned in the next meeting. The reason given was, "the setting is not good enough." By this point I have already written a script based on the setting outlines from the previous meeting, so such a decision came as a shock for me. ...in any case, this is how a shelved script for Medarot 2 came to exist. I don't think there would be any oddballs willing to read that script so many years later.

The full names of The Screws

One day, the people working on the anime sent me a request. "Could you tell us Iwanoi's surname?", they asked. I answered, "Isn't Iwanoi already a surname?". Because all of the character names had to be related to alcohol in some manner, it was a bit of a pain to come up with a full name for him (and this is why The Screws don't have full names). "It would be great if you came up with something appropriate on your own," I told them. I wanted to know what kind of a name they would think of. In the end, he has been introduced simply as "Iwanoi" in the anime.

As I kept watching the anime, I noticed that Kikuhime's mom who never appears on-screen calls her "Kikuhime-chan." Speaking for myself, I thought of "Iwanoi" and "Kagamiyama" as surnames, while "Kikuhime" was a given name. I was glad to see that opinions of the people who worked on the anime aligned with mine. ...in other words, coming up with character names is a massive pain in the neck. You heard it right.

Staff in Medarot

Speaking of Shiratama-kun and the origins of his nickname, when we had an in-house Power Pros gaming session, he entered his nickname as "Shiratama." (TL note: "white ball") Ever since, I've been calling him "Shiratama-kun," or at times "Shirataman." Furthermore, I called his in-game character "Shiratama," and so this nickname stuck. He has an extremely amusing personality, which is why I wanted to incorporate him into the story at all costs.

In Medarot 2-4, this became possible solely thanks to my arbitrary decision. In general, I'm not a fan of including production staff members in the scripts as an inside joke, but I made an exception for Shiratama-kun with his outstanding personality in mind. The man himself seemingly had no objections to this (as well as to his Shiratama nickname).

And so when I made Shiratama-kun a character in the story, I found that character to be addictively amusing, and got carried away devising more and more ways to get him into trouble. (This was by no means an attempt to relieve stress on my part, despite me having many disagreements with the real Shiratama-kun about the game production). 　 Following Shiratama-kun's request, I wrote his character to have a lot of interactions with Nae. I have a pleasant recollection of his character delusionally assuming he's going to marry Nae, calling Professor Medarot "grandpa" and getting fired because of that, then ending up homeless in an abandoned factory. By the way, his character viewed Nae as a flawless ideal of a woman.

Of all the staff members whom I introduced into the story as characters, Kawamura-shi without a doubt had the second highest appearance rate after Shiratama-kun. Our sponsor requested us to introduce Kawamura-shi as a character. In general, we tend to accept requests from paying clients unless some unavoidable circumstances get in our way. Fortunately, Kawamura-shi had a distinct personality, and he didn't voice a single complaint no matter how poorly we treated his character, so secretly I had a lot of fun— (I must exercise self-restraint here.)

Another staff member whom I included in the story on my own accord was Kitatama-san, a programmer whom I knew ever since we worked on the first Medarot game. Of course, "Kitatama" is not his real name. I simply added "tama" to it following Shiratama-kun's naming pattern.

By the way, when Shiratama-kun asked me "Miru-san, why won't you include yourself as a character?", I fooled him by saying "Because my character name would come out as Milky." I really didn't feel like including myself in the game. While Shiratama-kun was seemingly satisfied with my answer, there is absolutely nothing in common with me and Milky (although HN is related to her). ...Ah. Milky has a keen interest in handsome young boys, while I have no such interest at all.

Cutlet Curry Udon Special

This dish was on the menu of a diner I used to walk by on my way from work. A cutlet and curry udon were served with a bowl of rice. The serving was too large for me, so I used to watch my cheerful friends eat it in front of me instead. One day, I told Kitatama-san about this "Cutlet Curry Udon Special." He asked, "do they add some udon to a bowl of cutlet curry, or do they add some rice to curry udon with a cutlet?". I found the way Kitatama-san phrased this to be utterly amusing, so I quickly worked it into the script as a line delivered by Ikki. By the way, that diner also had a "Cream Stew Udon" dish on the menu. I wasn't brave enough to try it myself, but I was told that it doesn't taste half bad, lol. I wonder if that diner is still in business...

Romance events

Just like it happened with the previous game, I made the story for Medarot 2 by piecing together script source materials selected by Bonbon-san. Because I was not the director for Medarot 2, I couldn't attend the joint planning meetings of the three companies. This is why I didn't understand minute details of the decision process regarding those script source materials. The person who got to attend those meetings was Shiratama-kun, the director. Thus the source materials which I received could have included bits and pieces of Shiratama-kun's work.

In particular, the "skirt flipping incident" that took place during Ikki's debut appearance was among Shiratama-kun's favorite themes. It's not like there had been zero objections to inclusion of such themes. However, generally speaking, I had to utilize every single source material handled to me, and incorporate all of them into a script. Among those source materials were romance events and romantic endings involving the heroines, Arika and Karin.

That being said, I was given only broad instructions along the lines of "create romantic events for couples, an Arika ending, a Karin ending, and such other endings." Specific details and wording in those events were left to my own discretion. At the time, I had virtually zero interest in the matters of romance, and no experience in writing such topics or reading about them. It could also be said that I had absolutely zero understanding of the thing presently known as "moe." (These days I do have a cursory interest in moe, though.)

All these years later, I still have my doubts whether the scripts I wrote back then qualify as true romance events. Did I succeed in making the heroines feel properly heroine-like...? I hope these events could successfully reach the hearts of all the male players. By the way, if you asked me about my personal favorites... I would be struggling to pick a clear favorite. I think I would've preferred an ending in which both of the heroines win... This is precisely why I tend to get bad endings when I play romance games. Having said that, Ikki and his friends are elementary school students, aren't they? Hmm.

Shedding the light on the origins of Kodain

The flying ("fuyuu") fortress is called Fuyun; the ancient ("kodai") kingdom is called Kodain. I couldn't come up with better names for these, because my brain was exhausted after naming the main characters. (There were no retakes.)

At the time, there was an ongoing RPG M*ker contest. According to A*ki's comment in a certain magazine, one of the most prevalent themes in the entries submitted for the contest was "a hero summoned from another world." This comment caught my eye, and so I decided to make Ikki a hero summoned from another world, too.

A certain thought suddenly occurred to me: what was going to happen if I took a seemingly overused theme and gave it my personal spin?

My first take on the script was as follows: Ikki, who was supposed to be summoned as a hero, is falsely accused of an unspecified crime, locked up in a box and thrown into the sea. This is what I initially came up with. I didn't realize how tragic my script was until Shiratama-kun pointed it out to me. Then I had to write a new script from scratch. I had a problem on my hands: despite my best attempt at writing a lighthearted story, I still ended up with a tragic one, and didn't even realize it without other people's input.

Thus I tried my hand at another popular theme from the RPG M*ker contest, namely a story set in a fantasy world. Consequently, I came up with the ancient kingdom of Kodain.

If I decided to use both "a hero summoned from another world" and "a story set in a fantasy world" themes simultaneously, I wonder if this would've been enough to have my work disqualified from the contest. I guess I must be too pessimistic to have such thoughts going through my mind.

And this is how Kodain came into being.