#<- is the bearer of the curse and never publishes anything

[alfairy]

The way I write fanfiction is sooo unconventional, I’ll just write a bunch of random dialogue snippets and short scenes and then try to piece them together like some sort of frankensteins monster

[satoshi-mochida]

Bushiroad Games and Frontwing announce visual novel Perennial Dusk: Kinsenka for PC - Gematsu

Publisher Bushiroad Games and developer Frontwing have announced visual novel Perennial Dusk: Kinsenka for PC. It will launch in 2025 with English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese language support.

Here is an overview of the game, via its official website:

About

Industry veteran Yukito Urushibara and prolific illustrator Saine join forces for the first time to craft a stunning tale about a group of young people in an eerie world of endless twilight. Follow their story as they struggle against limitless cruelty and confront the inescapable traumas of life and death together. Perennial Dusk: Kinsenka is the latest visual novel written by Yukito Urushibara, whose work on Irotoridori no Sekai and Sakura Moyu captivated players with stories that inspire hope as readily as they induce despair. The cast of colorful-yet-broken characters is brought to life by Saine, whose experience as the illustrator of various Vocaloid music videos (“mikitoP “Kunoichi demo Koi ga shitai”) and as a VTuber designer (“Kamishiro Kurea,” “Watagashi Unou,” “Hoshikage Lapis,” and “Kozuya Nano” among others) lets the delicate twilight world bloom with a resplendent touch.

Story

The human heart is but a vessel for pain. That’s what someone once whispered-a voice laced with loneliness, whispering directly into the soul. It’s an indescribable sadness, a love just beginning to bloom. It becomes an invisible pain that pierces the heart. And that’s what makes up life: a cyclical series of highs and lows. Tachibana Sai was born without the ability to feel pain in his heart. He spends his days eliminating any seeds of malice that sneak up on his sister, the one person he treasures, without drawing attention to himself. Sick of the never ending monotony he lives through, he chances upon a meeting with Benio Matsuri, a young girl whose aloof demeanor resembles that of a beautifully crafted doll. For the first time in his life, he encounters a heart piercing sensation that of falling in love. On the edge between day and night, in a twilight world where the dead and living mingle, stands an apartment building called Maison sans Nom, which is home to a group of boys and girls. A ruthless boy who knows no pain in his heart. A lonely girl without any friends. A friendly girl who struggles to make connections. A prickly, ambitious girl who is keen to be of help. A boy who loves his own cute self above anything else. A mess of a woman who tries to solve everything through brute force. And a boy with a tender heart who knows no pain in his body. This ill-assorted group of residents, hands stained with blood from battling the supernatural Maledicts, shall encounter the hearts they never knew and begin nurturing their souls. The human heart is but a vessel for pain. To protect this pain akin to love… To gently break the world apart, piece by piece… Even if it means abandoning humanity. That’s why the heart is but a vessel for pain. For life blazes brilliantly, while the heart goes around in an endless cycle.

Characters

Benio Matsuri (voiced by Manaka Iwami) – A girl born into the Benio Family, a powerful family of Maledict Exorcists, who is tightly bound by her family’s curse. Due to an incident in the past, causing her to close off her heart, she doesn’t speak and barely shows any emotion. Her eyes remain closed at all times, as if she wishes to isolate herself from the cruel world she lives in. Since she only moves when someone pulls her along by the hand, her demeanor evokes the image of a beautifully crafted doll. She is a Curse Bearer with the ability to give Maledicts form and use their powers freely.

Nobody (voiced by Manaka Iwami) – Another personality that dwells inside Benio Matsuri’s heart that appears when Matsuri is asleep. Nobody sees herself as a shield that protects Matsuri from the cruel world. She can be incredibly selfish, and her words, actions, and strong attitude cause her to come across as a haughty, ill-mannered girl.

Tachibana Sai (voiced by Yumiri Hanamori) – The protagonist of the story: A ruthless boy who cannot feel pain in his heart. His younger sister, his only family, is the one person he treasures, and anyone who torments her is met with a brutal end by his hands… Yet, yearning to understand the human heart, he often interrogates his victims, even though they cannot respond. Just as he begins to seek respite from his bleak life, his unexpected encounter with Benio Matsuri causes him to experience a kind of pain akin to love in his heart.

Kanbara Tatsuki (voiced by Shuta Morishima) – An earnest and sincere boy who was born with a body that doesn’t feel any physical pain. Despite the unjust world around him, he wishes to keep on the straight and narrow, even if no one else does. He began training at a young age under a master who claimed to be invincible in order to become… well, a certain something. He has infiltrated the Benio Family and is biding his time for the chance to free Benio Matsuri, his first love, from their curse.

Tsukahara Ao (voiced by Hitomi Sasaki) – A seemingly cheerful and sociable resident of Maison sans Nom. She’s especially close with her friend Ando Mémé. Born as a Curse Bearer, she works as one of the Benio Family’s mercenaries and exorcists. On top of her mischievous tendencies, she wants more than anything to be a housewife. Her cooking might not be up to par now, but she’s working on it.

Ando Meme (voiced by Hika Tsukishiro) – A surly resident of Maison sans Nom and a Curse Bearer like Ao. Despite her ambitious and hard-working nature, she tends to scare people off due to her prickly attitude. However, she is keener than anyone when it comes to helping her friends, and Ao is especially reliant on her companionship. Her goal in life is to rake in the money as a top-grade exorcist.

Kirishima Tsuyu (voiced by Yukina Shuto) – The landlord of Maison sans Nom. Tsuyu is obsessed with his own cuteness and habitually declares himself the cutest person in the world. He enjoys teasing the other residents, and while they get annoyed with Tsuyu’s antics sometimes, they still adore him. He often earns himself a spanking from Yozora. He is also a content creator who makes full use of his looks while livestreaming as “Chuyu.” He has a preference for strong-willed people and takes a particular liking to Tatsuki in this regard. A Curse Bearer like Ao and Mémé, he possesses a mysterious power.

Kandori Yozora (voiced by Hana Kuga) – As the only grown-up resident of Maison sans Nom, Yozora acts as the guardian of the younger residents. She appears to be a beautiful, classy lady… until she opens her mouth. With her frank and outspoken attitude, as well as her tendency to drink cheap booze, gamble on horses, and “borrow” money from the kids without ever returning it, she’s not exactly what one would consider a responsible adult. Yozora does not possess any Maledict powers, but she prides herself on being the strongest martial artist in the world.

Benio Tsui (voiced by Takako Tanaka) – The current head of the Benio Family and Matsuri’s younger sister. Contrary to her appearance as a young girl, she considers herself the matriarch of the family, referring to all its members as her “children,” regardless of blood relations. Inside her heart dwells three different personalities, each with their own quirks and caprices. All are cold, cruel, and ruthless by nature, although she sometimes displays a child-like innocence befitting her age.

Penguin (voiced by Reika Fujisawa) – A mysterious, smartly dressed penguin with the ability to understand and speak human language. However, it is painfully shy, so normally it pretends to be just a regular penguin. It works as a receptionist and bellhop at a hotel where the souls of the dead end up, so the younger residents of Maison sans Nom refer to it as “God.” It has a huge attitude for a cute little penguin and is extremely hard to please. The best way to buy its favor is with sweets and snacks.

…and others!

Main Staff

Planning / Story: Yukito Urushibara

Character Design / Art: Saine

Developer: Frontwing

Background Music: Fuminori Matsumoto, Hitoshi Fujima (Elements Garden)

Theme Song

Title: “Anata no Kioku no Naka de” (“In Your Memories”)

Vocals: Mao Uesugi

Lyrics: Yoshikazu Kuwashima

Composition and Arrangement: Hitoshi Fujima (Elements Garden)

Watch the announcement trailer below.

Announce Trailer

[riusugoi]

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations. In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not, properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions in a similar darkness. To-day, however, we have reversed this principle. We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them. We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness; there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again. There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is, to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception than the current boys' literature of the lowest stratum. This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist. It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories. The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae, but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet; and I wish sincerely that any one had the moral courage to spread that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit. A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight. And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash. There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal. But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon the common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth of the lower orders always has had and always must have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind, and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness-- we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under discussion do not read The Egoist and The Master Builder. It is the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes. If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches. The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected from young people possessed of no little native humour. If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels, I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion. At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community, find their principal motives for conduct in printed books. Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit. Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax. The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory, and this is rubbish. So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these: the whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected, and endless. It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth century duellist, and the modern cowboy recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern. I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanised and naked narrative as this. Among these stories there are a certain number which deal sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws, and pirates, which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely the same thing as Scott's Ivanhoe, Scott's Rob Roy, Scott's Lady of the Lake, Byron's Corsair, Wordsworth's Rob Roy's Grave, Stevenson's Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton's Iron Pirate, and a thousand more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents. Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park; no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer. In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it is like their own life, but because it is different from it. It might at least cross our minds that, for whatever other reason the errand-boy reads The Red Revenge, it really is not because he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives. In this matter,as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the "lower classes" when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings. He says, with a modest swagger, "I have invited twenty-five factory hands to tea." If he said, "I have invited twenty five chartered accountants to tea," every one would see the humour of so simple a classification. But this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing: we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is, in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man. Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all. Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original and dazzling epigram. If the authors and publishers of Dick Deadshot, and such remarkable works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class, were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished, who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives, we should he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, are normal and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables. If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old book stall in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police. These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing (with equivocal German professors) whether morality is valid at all. At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency. At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving. But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are the criminal class. This should be our great comfort. The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists. But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets. It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a "many faced and fickle traitor," but at least it is a better aim than to be a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards. So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life. The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life-- have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a "blood and thunder" literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

A Defence of Penny-Dreadfuls (1901), G.K. Chesterton