This is a walkthrough and review file for the "Divi-Dead" Windows English adult anime game from C's ware. It was translated to English after a Japanese release, and is sold by Himeya Soft (http://shop.himeya.com/). Himeya Soft says that the title of the game should be pronounced like "divided" instead of "divvy dead". Li Sun had nothing to say about this game. The game is sold on a CD-ROM for Windows 95 and 98. System requirements are minimal: Windows 95 or 98 OS, Pentium 100 or better, 24 MB RAM, 4x CD-ROM, 640*480*32k colors graphics, Windows-compatible sound capability. MIDI playback capability optional, Mouse actually optional too. You play it directly from the CD-ROM, but it will place a "SYS.DAT" file in a "CSWARE\DIVIDEAD" directory on your first hard drive (usually C:). That holds the "saw this picture" markers so you can see the pictures once you've seen them in the game once. Each saved game used also puts a "DATA#.DAT" file in the DIVIDEAD directory too. Text is in English, except for a map used for navigation during most of the game, and Japanese text shown in a few (mostly "staff") images. Japanese voice used for all characters except "you" (Ranmaru) - except for some of when Ranmaru and Nishizaki are underground when you get nothing. There is a small manual in the package with the game, but you really need the "hint paper" (essentially a walkthrough) provided by either the Himeya Soft website or me (where you should have gotten this text file). Unlike most other C's ware titles, there is no Help file with the game. I've done some work on the "hint paper" to reflect what I can personally verify. It looks to me like you need to get ALL 6 F801 points to get the F801 ending. But can anyone explain the 17 F501 points in the walkthrough? The two .BMP images provided in the Extras directory on the CD are rather good, and one is H. Convert these two enormous (in disk space) 1024*768 .BMP files to some other format though, if you want to use them for anything but Windows wallpaper. The game has very good controls, and pretty good translation to English. It starts off excellent, and then makes more mistakes as the game progresses. Since this game seems deliberately designed to not tell you the whole story at once, it can get rather frustrating when you (as the player) have no idea why Ranmaru is doing something, and it turns out to be based on something left out of the translation. Example: the way to tell that your Uncle, the Dean, is in or out of the school is to look for his car in the parking lot at the Library. Unfortunately, the crucial word "limousine" is never used when you first learn this during the game. So, it can momentarily baffle you when Ranmaru starts talking about a limousine when you first check the parking lot. I'm sure there are lots of other situations like that, where the Japanese version made things clearer, and the English translation - probably done by several people - differs enough that you go "huh?" when you come back to some subject mentioned earlier. Ranmaru also seems too quick to get nasty while talking to Yuta, and seems to jump to a conclusion about what Yuta "really" is with no explanation (and counterattacks him with an extremely unconventional weapon). There is some confusion about Sachiko and Mika's surname. It's supposed to be Itsukino, but some parts of the game use Seino for no good reason. The manual also gets Mami's favorite book wrong; it's "The Land Beyond". And, contrary to several references in the game to the Yuki sisters, there is only one - Azusa Yuki. There's one long scene with Aki where the game consistently calls her Azusa. This is the kind of stuff that can really mess up players who are trying to understand the story instead of just looking at the H pictures. So, will the game companies PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get fluent native English speakers to proofread the translations from Japanese! Click the mouse to skip the introduction movie, once the music starts playing. Press "Ctrl" key to speed through dialogue until your next choice. Use the END option on the left menu to exit the game. Doing a Close or Quit will leave a blank window behind on my system. Unfortunately, the map that you can get to see on the first day is all in Japanese. Although you can figure it out yourself, let's start from the baseball diamond in the bottom center. You can only go to the locations written in blue: Library is to the right. Main Building is several concentric squares above that. Ishii Hall is to the right of Main building, the lower half. Cafeteria is to the right of Main building, the upper half. Main field is above the baseball diamond. the boy's dorm (with Ranmaru's room) is to the left of the main field. W.C above the main field is a bathroom in front of the Boys' Dorm. Gym is above and left of Main Building. Wood Field (tennis courts) is above and left of Gym. Promenade (path to girls' dorm) is left of Wood Field. Girls' Dorm is at the end of the Promenade, in the upper left corner. Late in the game, after you're very familiar with how the map works, it stops working. You then have to navigate in the game by going from one location to another to another. By then, you should be familiar enough with where things are that it isn't difficult to navigate. The file that controls the display of the photoshop is "SYS.DAT" in the C:\CSWARE\DIVIDEAD directory. It's automatically created by the game when it starts, if it doesn't exist already. This file also holds information about the saved games, such as when you saved them in real time and game time. The saved games themselves are in separate DATA#.DAT files, where # can be 0 to 9. SYS.DAT should be 4294 or $10C6 bytes long. Use your hex/binary file editor on SYS.DAT and go to address $01EE. If you've played the game more than a few minutes (long enough to see the picture of a pair of glasses), there should be a $01 there. This is the beginning of the picture flags for the game. Change the EVEN (only) addresses starting here to $01, leave the ODD ones as $00. Stop when you get to address $031A. This should give you 100.0% on the "CG Hit Display" when you start the game again. The last 10 pictures, usually shown as a big "?", are not really from the game, and most have Japanese text stuck on them. I think they're messages from the game staff. These normally appear after you've reached one of the game endings. It's normal to have 4 blanks between the "special" images and the "location" ones, and 7 blanks between the "location" images and the "staff" ones. I don't know why the Dean's office isn't shown. Himeya Soft says that to see 100% of the CG without a patch like the above, you need to see both F701 endings ("Fine" and "No") and one of the F801 endings. There is only some minor text different between the "Fine" and "No" F801 endings; all the images and the text shown with them are the same. To understand what's going on in the story, you should see the Haruka and the Sachiko endings first. The Azusa ending adds very little, and I personally didn't try to get the Dead ending. Even so, it's a very complicated story, and I'm not entirely sure what happened in some areas. For instance, why Yuta reacts so strongly to the Mustard attack - what kind of humanoid monster is he? Overall review: Rather good translation to English, but it has more errors towards the end. Makes you wonder if the obvious disconnects and missing information are due to mistakes in translation or deliberate design of the game. Decent graphics, but has a few gross images and a bunch of momentary flashes during Ranmaru's "seizures" that can be very annoying. Music and voice nothing to complain about. The possible objectionable aspects of the sex in this game include: rape and forced sex with bondage, lesbian masturbation. No tentacles or obviously underage girls. Implied drug use by Ranmaru, probably marijuana. If you have anything to add to this file, let me know. Pete Karsanow - bishoujo.helper[AT}sbcglobal{DOT)net http://www.geocities.com/hentaihelper/