Howdy. Yeah, it's a bit late to make changes to Hikari's stuff, but that's ok. With her I'm hoping that her quick interest will start to make more sense as you learn more about her, but obviously with the fact that people get to play the game as it's being made, every now and then there'll be times where things will appear unintentional because there's no explanation for them currently in the game. I guess we'll see.
I haven't actually revealed the correct type of ghost anywhere. It's not even in the game files. What I will say is that there's no difference to the actual end of the ghost hunt regardless of whether you get it wrong or right, so there's truly no way to know at this stage. (The only difference is that the actual kill animation is different depending on what type you pick, as different chemicals produce different coloured flames. My personal favourite is the magnesium one.)
The actual consequence for getting it wrong isn't planned to have massively negative effects, so I wouldn't worry about it too much if you got it wrong. Whether you did or not will be revealed after the update containing the consequences. Nice logic though. That whole section has been very divisive, and many players aren't even able to navigate it, much less actually try to take a real guess at what the ghost is. Unfortunately, fixing the navigation would basically mean redoing it, at the expense of new content, so instead I've made a VN version of it for the next update that players can pick if they want to basically experience the ghost hunt, but with the game itself controlling which room you go into, and where you shine the light.
No, I have no plans to actually let Professor Brown or Logan become the Magistrate at the moment. Even if I do make it possible, under no circumstances are either of them to be allowed to actually get their hands on the girls, partially because my core audience hates that sort of thing, and partially because I just don't want it to happen. I do like to tease consequences though. I don't really want to include game overs because in my mind they're a bit pointless in a game like this. It just forces a player to reload a save and do things differently, which I'm hoping they'll do just to see everything, rather than being forced to due to a game over. Additionally, I don't want to force players to do punishments if they're not interested in that. Punishing the girls primarily changes your character dynamic with them, but the effects of doing so will start to become more apparent later in the game.
Telling Cassie not to mess with Riley is only really there as a choice for players who don't want to see lesbian content. You'll end up getting the choice for basically every combination of girls, because maybe some people want Riley for themselves, but would be fine letting Cassie and Taliya play or something. Hell, in the next update, there's even a way to tell Cassie she can play with Riley, but tell Riley she can't play with Cassie, which will result in Cassie getting rejected and being confused next time she tries something. The choice does affect dialogue in many cases as well, but it's primarily there as a lesbian content toggle, per character combination. If you wanna see lesbian stuff, there's no reason not to allow it. While the game will branch a bunch, there'll be no weird stuff like an ending where Cassie steals all the girls or whatever.
Yep, all that Japanese is just google translate, specifically because I knew it was only gonna appear very briefly, and while it was possible that someone might actually read it and notice that it's super unnatural, it wasn't really worth the time for me to get it properly translated. The fact that you're the first person to ever actually mention it kinda proves my point xD. I do change some of them sometimes to remove unnecessary watashis or whatever, but it depends on time. Some of them are just outright wrong. I think there's one somewhere where the English line is something like "He quickly warmed up to the idea." and I just slapped it in google translate and ended up with "He quickly understood the concept of heating" or something. Considering there are 4 different versions of that conversation, and all the new lines have to be done manually due to how the effect works, I just decided that drawing out the process further by making sure all the translations were accurate and natural would have been a poor use of time.
Despite this, non English languages in general are something I aim to represent well, but for some of them that isn't possible at the moment. (For example, for a side character I have coming in future updates, I'd need professional Indonesian translation for her dialogue, but I don't have access to that yet. Translation can get expensive.) I still like to include characters from various places though, as part of their actual character, rather than just so I can say "I have a Japanese character. She's a ninja, because of course she is."
Sasha for example isn't meant to be a Russian caricature who drinks loads of vodka and has a pet bear or whatever. She just happens to be Russian, and I'm hoping some of the her more Russian traits her will shine through over time without them being just stereotypical traits. Little mannerisms and things. (Let's ignore the fact that she accidentally calls "hypothermia", "hippophobia" despite hypothermia being basically the same word in both languages. I just did that for fun.)
Luckily for me, I have a Russian guy in my Discord who's super helpful when it comes to making Sasha sound more natural, as well as educating me on various Russian culture topics that I can use for her character. For example, the ghost guide that she wrote for the player uses British English. This is because apparently when Russians are taught English in any official capacity like school or whatever, they're taught British English rather than American English. Self taught Russians may learn American English as it's a lot more common in media, so whether or not someone uses British or American spelling may give a bit of a hint as to how they learned English. Sasha uses British, so it implies that either she learned her English in school, or that she copied that guide from someone who did. The latter being the more likely of the two, as the English in the ghost guide doesn't include as many English mistakes as Sasha makes, so it's likely that it's something she copied from somewhere, possibly something her mother wrote once. Obviously, this is unimportant to the plot, and I doubt anyone will really notice, but that's fine. I like little things like this.
I may go back and make the Japanese statements more correct at some point, but it's more likely that I'll address the length of them, because they're kinda supposed to be roughly the same length as the English sentences, so that the translation effect applies properly. Otherwise it looks a bit odd. In hindsight, I could have just made a random kanji generator and have it match the English characters exactly, which is similar to something I use in the next update, but I decided instead to have them at least be kind of the right sentences. The effect is purely there to show that their conversation is taking place in another language, but the player needs to be able to understand it. (Which isn't always the case. If a non English language isn't translated in game, and a character doesn't then tell MC what was said, it means it wasn't important enough for the player to need to know.)