“This game is so juvenile” yeah almost like it was written by a literal 20-year old or something…
Some of you might be wondering where the hell we’ve been during those 10 years. Before I can clarify that, however, I need to clarify a couple of persistent rumors about us…
Para empezar está la calumnia de que odiamos a los latinos. Nunca, repito, NUNCA hemos dicho eso en ninguna forma, de hecho me atrevo a decir que lo poco que hemos dejado escrito ha sido honra al espíritu guerrero que le toca tener al latino o latina promedio para tolerar lo que la patria le tira a uno. Lo peor del caso no es ni siquiera el rumor, sino el insulto que uno va a ser idiota al punto de insultar a la gente de ese modo causando un desastre de relaciones publicas que no podemos tener siendo desarrollaores independientes que viven o mueren por la opinion de otros.
No le puedo cambiar la opinión a los que escuchan el rumor y asumen de inmediato que es verdad, y prefiero no tocar el tema y dejar que la gente opine por su cuenta si tenemos el tipo de carácter que hace que los rumores se sientan plausibles, pero quiero dejar a posteridad que lo considero una calumnia.
Uno es tapao, pero tampoco así…
Outburst aside, there’s also a rumor that we were “cultural hostages” or whatever? I’m not even gonna touch that one.
It’s been a busy 10 years, and part of that busywork is that we packed our shit up and went for greener pastures. I’ll speak of what I’ve gone through since it involves a traceable legal entity anyways and I don’t mind sharing this story. But keep in mind that it’s only MY story and everyone in the company has gone through Stuff one way or another.
In 2017 we travelled to Japan twice. First for Tokyo Game Show, and then for the vita release and associated stuff. Never leaving the country and when it finally happens is to Japan of all places sure sets the tone.
Then in 2018 after a bunch of things I will not elaborate on we started the process of moving our shit elsewhere. While you might think that the reason we picked Japan is because we’re massive weebs, you’d be… only like 20% right.
The biggest reason was that we already had partners here in Japan willing to lend us a hand with the establishing process. The way the plan was set out was that I would be the pioneer in the new land (so to speak) since I have dual nationality from my grandpa’s side, meaning I would be able to do flyovers to stay in Japan while the paperwork finished and I was able to get a self-funded business visa.
A company in Japan would also make a LOT of logistic elements easier which it sure did real quick…
Now, before some of you start booking a flight to follow in my footsteps there’s a few warnings to consider.
The first one is that the mental toll this shit takes on you is something I wish on nobody. Even setting aside the fact that I was on my own for the first time in my life and learning to be an adult, the mental toll of doing those flyovers not knowing if maybe next time they won’t let you in for whatever reason took years out of my life.
Moreover, you need a home address and getting any real estate thing approved with a one year visa is already tough, imagine trying to do that WITH NO VISA. I was only able to get a place to rent during the flyover period because a friend put a good word about me with my landlady.
Finally the business manager visa requirements became waaaaay stricter recently. We’re thankfully fine but I know and have heard of a LOT of peeps whose plans were canned with those changes.
So 2018 is mainly the year of me living on my own for the first time, not knowing if I’d be able to get back in the country while I wait for the incorporation paperwork to finish. The incorporation paperwork kept getting issues so we decided to basically buy an old, bankrupt-but-clean company and rename it, since that would give us everything including a bank account.
This process finishes around October and my visa application begins. I wouldn’t get my visa until April of 2019, and fun fact: After getting your certificate of eligibility you have to go back out of the country AGAIN and get your papers at another country’s Japanese embassy.
So to summarize things up to 2019: I’m living in Japan but only with a one year visa while figuring out how to manage a business since my stay here depends on that, while working on the visas of everyone else that were meant (at that point) to come here with me. I’m also living alone with no offline social outlets or support networks, a steep language barrier, and suddenly I have to think about taxes which is tied to me staying here at all.
THIS was the period where on parallel to all that I was also programming N1RV Ann-A while trying to keep myself in one piece, failing to do so, and feeling like a failure for somehow not being able to finish the whole damn thing under all these circumstances.
Then 2020 happened. I don’t want to talk about 2020. Moving on…
Come 2021 my whole sense of self is dust and I need to rebuild myself. I didn’t even know if I wanted to keep making games at this point or even if I made the right choice coming to Japan… though through the healing process I eventually realized that I do and I do.
2021 was also the year where I started to get into doll photography and realized I’m non-binary.
2021 is ALSO the year where my accountant couldn’t stand the language barrier and recommended us to our current accountant that also speaks some English. She had one condition: To open a new legal entity (read: company) since she doesn’t have access to the current company’s books from before we bought it.
In 2022 the healing process continues, which includes learning to cope with the stress of shit like taxes and visa renewal (two things that completely shut me down once upon a time). This was also the year where in-game dates and real dates lined up prompting me to not just write all of the Daily VA-11 Hall-A blogposts but write SPR. I’d been writing stuff in private for a while now, but this was the first time I felt like I had it in me to post something like that publicly.
This leads into 2023 where I’ve managed to heal enough that I feel like I can do stuff like my Uma Musume fan blog. The healing also means the queue of bullshit has reached the “HEY FUCKER, HERE’S A LOT OF ADMINISTRATIVE STUFF YOU’VE NEGLECTED” part. It’s all busywork related to the company that should’ve been done day one, but hopefully you see why it Wasn’t.
2024 rolls around. A lot more administrative stuff is getting solved, it’s the first time I feel in enough control of my life that I can start thinking about non-crisis matters too like… what project do I wanna work on next? I even started a webnovel and a personal blog!
Then 2025 happened.
Let me tell you about 2025.
One of the administrative things I’d been working on in the background was setting up a proper way to transfer our money from overseas to Japan bit by bit. We had to eventually move everything to Japan, but because of steep taxes and whatnot, we pushed it lower in the priority queue.
2025 starts with the normal amount of bullshit where the bank wants to update their KYC (Know Your Client) database. On my side this actually lined up with my passports expiring. I had to renew them one way or another but it means that from January to at least May I had the bank breathing down my neck weekly while I waited for the new passports to arrive my way.
Around this time the card company starts shitting the bed with my money, sometimes the money just deadass doesn’t reach the card for example. This leads me to a game of hot potato with different cards of variable efficacy that will go on until October.
While this is happening, June arrives and we’ve been trying to register all the info into their new whackass database. Their whackass database is whackass and doesn’t work properly for whatever reason. This is an issue because their policy of unfinished paperwork meant that our accounts were now restricted due to this. Meaning that on top of the fucking cards being unreliable now we had limited access to our own damn money, the money we use to pay living expenses and staff.
My favorite part of the process is the one where I finally finish the god damn registry (which involved me making attempts while LITERALLY SCREEN RECORDING MYSELF IN HOPES THEIR IT PEOPLE COULD FIND WHAT THE PROBLEM WAS) and you wanna know what happened next? The PDF generated by the whackass registry was corrupted.
And that was somehow our problem.
I finished the last paperwork holding our bank account hostage and they went “yeah but the PDF is corrupted so it’s still unfinished so it’s still locked”.
Come late September the account has been unfrozen after sending literally dozens of strongly worded emails and calling my bank representative literally dozens of times daily, we have unrestricted access to our money. At this point we’ve gone through enough bullshit that we’re like “Fine, we need to find what to do to move our assets elsewhere”.
Then October comes and they tell us that our accounts will be closed (no reasons given at this point) and to tell them where to send it all. Also restrictions will be set on the account AGAIN after a certain amount of time.
Had I not endured everything I’ve endured in life until now God knows where I’d be after this happened.
The next month or so was a race where I spent EVERY DAY putting in applications on any bank I could. Oh also, the owner of the unit where we have our office died, and the heirs didn’t want a company being rented so I had to start looking for a new office while all of this was happening.
November rolls around and I get two out of the god-knows-how-many accounts approved, ones that allow me to get foreign currency in it too! So you’d think after this the bank would be fast in sending our money, right?
That money arrived in February of this year after like 4 months while I had a case of strep throat so severe I’m sure I would’ve ended up hospitalized if I waited even one more day to get myself checked.
By the way, we finally got an official letter and reason and whatnot for the closure… ON APRIL
Why go into so much detail about all that? Because I feel like I can do anything after having survived that nonsense as well as I did. All the bullshit before felt like it was preparing me for that test and like hell I would be found wanting. I don’t know how I would rank all of 2025 in terms of Bullshit In My Life, but if nothing else it was one hell of a test.
That’s where I am ten years after VA-11 Hall-A released. It’s been a busy ten years and that’s just my side of the operation. Remember that Kiri is the co-owner of the company so if I suffered some bureaucratic nonsense Kiri suffered it too, and that’s not even counting the myriad development struggles .45pb might’ve had.
Why put up with the bullshit? Why tolerate all the nonsense? Because we’ve built something magical off the back of an anxious 27 year old girlfailure, something worth fighting tooth and nail for. Unironically one of the many things that kept me sane during the bullshit in 2025 was seeing people continuing to post about VA-11 Hall-A as if it’s just 2 years old instead of 10 and thinking “I’m doing it for this”.
After all, I wouldn’t have the chance to do reckless incorporation in Japan, much less suffer all the bureaucratic nonsense if I didn’t have all the hundreds of thousands of people supporting us and publishers that cared personally about us and have supported us through all of this.
I’ve learned to do all of this for me, but before then and even now I also do it for everyone that saw us make a piece of dystopia and decided we were worth supporting. I don’t take trust lightly and this is no exception.
So if you’ve read this all the way here I want to thank you and I’m also going to give you something for your trouble.
You see, I’ve been working on a game project myself. To be more specific it’s an idea I’ve been bouncing around with a friend since 2022, but as you might expect from all the stuff I just said finding development time has been… tough. There’s been false starts and attempts since then, but I’ve been feeling emboldened this year after surviving all the bullshit.
I don’t have much to show right now, this development attempt barely started around April… though it’s been more consistent than past attempts so far. So consistent, in fact, that I wanna show you all something.
While the codebase and the gameplay details are still in the air, the story and characters have been solidified for at least two years now and it’s only a matter of putting it all into game form. One such solidified idea is the main character.
Everyone, please meet Yuri. Illustrated by my ever-talented close friend @nashirasauce
.45pb and N1RV Ann-A aren’t the only things on the horizon. You’ll also be hearing from me soon enough.
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By the way, the owner of our current office ALSO died recently, and while we don’t have to move offices again, apparently nobody knows who the fuck was meant to inherit it to the point that my landlady told me that as soon as I get any letter or whatever informing me of the ownership change to tell her ASAP.
I’ve come to live an interesting life, and as a storyteller there’s worse fates one could endure.