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There is a method to temporarily unlock every animation: Tap the white gradient near the bottom center of the screen three times within two seconds.

Update’s expected right on the 15th actually!

Yeah you can! When you buy the game, it gives you a ton of files like the Windows version you played, and among them are .apk files you can install on your Android phone too.

It me! I have come’d back once more to talk about the guiltiest of my pleasures: Mezz!!!! Is it alright to gush about it here? I know there’s a Game discussion thread but I figured I’d talk a lot so I made an individual post, hopefully it is fine!

Now, I took my sweet ass time playing this game, I had set aside a good time for every play session and man, they were a lot of play sessions because this is one meaty game! The original Cruel Serenade clocked in at a little shy of 3 hours for one of both pure and slut playthroughs, of course not counting every time I opened the game to rewatch a scene (they were that good), and y’know… the time translating it, but here? Every individual playthrough clocks in at that shy of 3 hours that the last game struggled to get to! And I had like 4 playthroughs because the game is just so open dear lord!

The absolute strongest aspect of the game is the story, the original game may have been a little shallow and hazy on world building but it still set up a great world and a Mezz living in it, and Gutter Trash absolutely builds a ton on top of it. Mezz as a character is put on a really bright spotlight and his depth shines so much, it’s nice to see him actually show desperation and reluctance after an adventure from which he can’t remember a scene where he didn’t have a smug smile, he has a lot more time and more characters to interact with in many more situations than just seconds before beating them up, it’s so much more enjoyable to root for him in the pure route where he is his cocky hero self but also see him cling to his dignity and prestige on the slut routes. The new characters though are very shallow, there’s practically nothing about Khazeem other than his position, Mahir is cool but there’s not a lot revealed about him (though that scene before the Entertainment district III with the red hypno? OOOOOOHHHH I literally shifted on my seat to the edge of it as I read) and Scratch is kinda just there, being the partner in crime of Mezz… or at least I think he is, there’s seriously nothing hinting at him being a friend, a brother, a mentor… I know he’ll probably be developed further in the coming chapters, but right now in this one, he’s the one I’m the saddest about being a new addition with not much to their character. On a little side note, while present-day Mezz was definitely expanded upon, there’s still not much about him, I mean, the mice at his Haven at least like him a little, but there’s not really a lot about what makes this supposed respected hero. The best part of the story, but also the biggest blunder, is the world building, it’s definitely weird that such important lore is presented in a little missable computer on a place you can’t backtrack to after the first 20 minutes of the game, moreso considering that the place it’s in greets you with cutscenes with very heavy use of terms whose definitions are only available to you after they end and you can access the computer. Sucks a bit because… that’s some super appreciated and interesting lore! All this talk about Havens, Towers, some kinda nanomachines that cover the sky, the freakin’ Rot!! (which btw, that may be some insane last chapter thing, but if you dare infect Mezz with it… I will do unspeakable things to society!!!!) are just so cool and interesting! I mean I wept when I read them because wanting to translate this game was fresh in my mind and that’s a lot of text, but really, the World created here is great! I just wish it was exposed better. The Haven in general could have a better storyline, spawning into the game and being set at a time before the original game, to then leave and immediately reappear where you started, but now weeks later after those events, but with no real indication that they happen… yeah, that’s pretty sluggish.

We’re here for the Scenes though right? Hooooohoooohooo these are good! And there’s so many too! Compared to the last game, they’ve got more shots, are way longer, involve way more poses and characters, some even change locations mid-scene! GOD THESE ARE SO GOOD! There’s enough variety in Mezz being conscious or under some influence, some where he’s teasy some where he’s angry, the jobs are definitely the highlights, the Bar job should’ve been my favorite, it goes on for a little longer than it should without introducing much variety (though it made me start making comments like “oh found your weak spot! let me help you with it” towards the clients and… was it successfully conditioning me? it was a funny kind of enjoyment…) but the storyline around it with Mezz’s popularity and him starting to enjoy it, being cherries on top of the great minigame, were probably my favorite part of the game… but I said should’ve been my favorite because the pornshop job singlehandedly stole that title by having the single best still of the entire series (It’s Porno 1 - D.png if you’re curious) he just looks so adorable there… Really the only “”””””“downside”””””””” of the scenes is that some of these are like DARK DARK, as in, I’m pretty sure Mezz’s death is implied in like two of them while straight up shown in Mahir’s game over, I call it a downside in a lot of quotations because sure they’re heavy, but really, I signed up for this so it’s more like “Wow that’s awful… I love it!”, and I just felt bad for the lil guy Mezz, that’s all.

My first playthrough was an accidental Slut mode route, one that was meant to be Pure but I kept sucking (HAH!), it clocked in at 2 hours 40 minutes and played with me sneaking through the first district then magically appearing at Khazeem’s and ending the game, my second playthrough was meant to be retaken from a save I conveniently made after meeting Mahir but it like, got deleted? I don’t know exactly what happened but I ended up loading a save just before my third game over of the previous playthrough, it clocked in at a total of 2:48, I set my own timer so really, it was only about 50 minutes of extra playtime, but you’d have to add like 30 minutes of me just dying and reloading to the last wave of hyenas of the third Ent. District HOLY FUCK I HATED THAT FIGHT IT FEELS SO LUCK BASED… I’ll get to it later. Then I reloaded both saves and got the game over scenes from Khazeem (Slut mode freakin’ delivers once again with some godly scenes btw, loss is fucking fantastic!!!!) and also the Good Luck Charm scene which I got by equipping it last second as I elected to keep, y’know, the interesting part of battles, for better or… for worse… Then after I reloaded a save that had only one loss with around 1:15 playtime, where I elected to cross The Lucky Rabbit instead of the district, I guess I was a better player because the total time for it was only 2:14 (with like 20 extra minutes to be added on because I lost the minigame a couple times… damn I suck, what did they put in the drinks to get Mezz so bad?). And then once more I reloaded to the same save and went through the Plaza instead of the first District for the minigame which was pretty dang easy, making my shortest playthrough at 1:49. After that it was just some scene cleanup like losing three times but choosing the pornshop this time, losing to Mahir, etc. which I sadly didn’t time.

Oh and by the way, I decided to stick to the 1.0.5 release, skipping the newest one but applying the lighting fixes you sent me! Happy to report that there were barely any frame drops or performance issues! There’s still a half-second loading screen on first launch, but after that, nothing else! I did notice a bit of stuttering when moving in big areas, but my fps probably didn’t go lower than 50 fps, so really, no issues!

With those in mind, I’d like to raise a couple issues I had with the gameplay, which was surprisingly hit or miss given the quality of everything else, for starters, the length of the game almost works against it when it comes to the battles, as 20 minutes in you encounter your first enemy: A hyena, and up to 6 hours later on your fourth playthrough, you can be encountering: The very same hyena, with no changes other than the overpowered variants that really don’t take long to adapt to. Speaking of the first enemy, The Barrens overstay its welcome so, so much. You’ll notice I always reloaded a save instead of starting over just because it takes so long to get going, I think the first Scene you can get, y’know, the reason you’re here, is Mahir’s game over, and I met him at around the 0:56 mark, almost an hour in! And for the record, I could never get the DataCrystal thing to work :c I’m sure I put it in the right place, I tried with both Good and Trained ends (btw there’s a glitch in the original CS where if you watch the fifth gallery scene, it would overwrite the DataCrystal with an empty slut file) but I just never got anything to pop up in the Haven which is where I THINK the boars should pop up. Little side note to say that the UI in battles and the inventory is still the default from RPGMaker, of course this isn’t a deal breaker, but it’s like I said last time, we’re in a fantastic Five star buffet being served with plastic cutlery, food’s still great but the presentation could be better (also the text box cuts through Mezz’s hole and covers it in Slut mode Khazeem’s game over and that’s just unfortunate I wanted to see that gape :c) When it comes to the Battlesex though, it’s hit or miss, the gameplay loop from the first game is mostly kept, with the Obedience mechanics being a welcome addition, but Mezz slipping and forcing a game over after four (?) mind breaks isn’t. It meant the hyenas could deal damage to either my pretty-big-but-not-infinite health pool that I could always restore with an item, or towards my three-hit-KO bar that I’d have no defense towards. It makes it pretty frustrating when going for a Pure run because it can make it feel super dependent on getting lucky that the three hyenas don’t all use the three-hit-KO move on the same turn and send you to the 20 minutes of game over cutscenes. Specially when (and this is a good thing) the world is so detailed that it can identify your amount of losses, I was shocked to see characters pretty deep referencing seeing Mezz on a tape, or him failing a plan to knock out a guard by instead sucking him off because he’s so much more broken after having taken more losses. That’s some insane attention to detail that… is sadly hard to appreciate given how frustrating it can be to maintain a “True” pure run. Despite that, I found the battlesex to be quite neat, and when I didn’t care about maintaining purity, it was quite enjoyable. Where I saw it falter though, is within Khazeem’s lair in slut mode, it just becomes so awkward to still have Fight mechanics that you can’t use yourself while micromanaging Relaxation timers and obeying orders, I would’ve preferred an entirely different system or HUD rather than what seriously felt like band-aiding a solution to Mezz being more broken. Finally, to wrap up my nagging, there were two points in the game, funnily enough both in Pure routes, that I seriously didn’t like: The kitsune quests, as these felt like straight up padding, almost by definition, one is the classic “backtrack through a route you’ve already gone through to find 3 items that weren’t there before” except it’s worse because there’s decoy glowy spots you’ll only find out were fake after having fought a guy, while the other quest is almost insulting by it just being a Kitsune pushing you around to solve a riddle with an answer that helps no one. I think I could’ve done without these really.

After all that nagging though, I can confidently say that Cruel Serenade: Gutter trash has some insanely higher highs, with lows that realistically, aren’t that bad. Pitting the bad things I brought up against the great things I loved, I would still call this a fantastic 9/10 experience. Mostly thanks to it’s incredible story and world building, dark and kinky and very well varied scenes, and these two mixing so well together! Really, I could still go on and on talking about this game, talk about the music that I really loved, the drawings that were really were made, the environments that are (mostly) well crafted, just how each scene tugged at either a heartstring or scratched a really niche ich! But this post has gone on a little longer than I expected. Agh, this is such a great game, such a great series… I can’t wait for the next chapter! I’ll also be looking into translating this one too! It may be… intimidating, but this was also an experience I seriously enjoyed, so I’d like to help this one too!

Of course, totally understandable to want to avoid those places, but if you just have to extend to them, I can help with managing those accounts if you need me to, I just wanna help out however I can!

So much for helping your games reach a larger audience, heh… Lucky I downloaded the game before you took the files though!

But I’ll choose to be optimistic with CS though! It may be very dark and twisted, but this isn’t an issue with it specifically, the whole internet is banding together against these jerks trying to shape the world to their will. I’ve yet to see anyone fully side with them, this’ll be a rocky time for sure but I believe we’ll get through!

You’re already sending us to FA or Substar, but if I may continue offering help, I’ve got good experience in Community management and could help out reaching over to other socials if you want me to!

OH NO NOT THE LITTLE BRAIXEN HEAD aw man I was quite happy with how I drew that :c, buh it ain’t copyrighted because it has sunglasses and that makes it my extremely original character Kyle!!!!!! Okay enough of that lol, totally understandable, I thought you’d have an issue with me adding myself to that screen at all, so I guess we’re okay with that.

I had put a lot of effort into changing those assets myself to make sure they did look good enough on their own, not counting on your extra help, but checking, yeah yours look way better!

Loading and Game Over actually do pop up in game by the way! My pc sucks so during initial launch it does flash that screen for like a second, nowhere else but like, I really wanted to do a good, full job. And Game Over… I actually saw myself on my first play through… because I lost to the very first… boar gang… the one that welcomes you in the second screen… oops…

As far as the text characters go, I actually did not find any issue at all, the inverted question mark, accented vowels, the very sexy letter Ñ. Not a single problem surprisingly.

I personally wouldn’t make any other changes, sorry about the missing puns buuut it is harder to make them in Spanish sorry, the title bar can stay as is if you prefer. But we can change the HowToInstall.txt file so it’s worded more officially rather than clearly being me talking (also slid my Ko-fi there, I also didn’t know if it’d bother you so we can remove it too) if you’d like to!

Am just happy this got done! Any other person would’ve made fanart of the game but as you can see, I’m not exactly very skilled with my hands, otherwise I would’ve made a lil drawing kissin’ lil mezz, BUT I hope this opens up the game for other people to play it! I am fully intending to translate GT as well, y’know after I can afford it first lol, but I just really liked this series and your work on it, this is my way of showing that admiration!

Why yes mr lazy goddamn game designer, I did notice how three of the five outside maps are doubled because ones are the originals and the others are a Return trip, and it did end up making a duplicate of their dialogs, I knew they probably can’t be seen there but I still made sure they were translated!

Most of the translation troubles popped up because of this guy -> ¿ <- like why did Spanish decide to use an inverted question mark? Of course in conversations we only use the one at the end of the sentence, but in more formal texts, it’s weird to not include it, plus with all of the accents and rules regarding commas… it was a lot, but as you look forward to my thoughts on GT, I also look forward to hearing your thoughts about my translation! Funny how that turned out.

I really put in a lot of effort, made sure every line sounded natural, that it was properly written, and that I used words that have about the same impact on the tone as the ones you used (Its just that overall, Spanish words have a ton more impact), also you’re an artist and I’m not, sooo don’t be harsh on my image editing skills? Please? Lol, they’re minor, but I really made sure this was a full translation, lemme know what you think!

Hey! It’s me, a fortnight later!

I have always wanted to translate a game because I thought it was a greatly effective but easy way to contribute to a project I really liked, and today after all that’s happened, I can say I was wrong about the easy part lol

I downloaded the tool you recommended and got to work, completely forgetting that RPG games have a buttload of text. But honestly, I learned so much about Spanish, and it’s supposed to be my native language! It truly was an experience to get every grammar rule right on top of keeping the dialogues contextually correct BUT ALSO making them sound natural. I even had to consider what rhythm and breaks the reader would be taking, and writing around that!

I didn’t think it’d be that tough until Google Translate struggled to give me one straight answer for Slut, that’s when I knew this was gonna be a soulful. But, I can say that I’ve finished the translation, I was pretty thorough testing so I think everything’s in order, here’s a link!

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K0S-Lq6gPLDo1APl4adnJo3DUPRKXbD7?usp=sharing

Making the translation made me appreciate the world you crafted even more, SO ANSWER ME WHO IS THIS “WEIRD GUY” THAT TAMPERED WITH MY BOI MEZZ BEFORE HE GOT INTO THE ISLAND AND HOW DID HE DO IT, I WILL FIND HIM I WILL PUNT HIM… I… I suppose it’ll be answered in GT, which I’ve yet to play but I’m still really excited about it. Maybe I’ll be playing along with the new people that I hope are now able to enjoy it thanks to my translation!

But yeah, phew, that was a pretty nice use of my vacation break, I dunno if I can use such dark and twisted game as reference of newly-developed translation skills in my resume, but I’m happy with the result, and I hope you are too!

Ouch, didn’t know about that notification detail, sorry about that accidental low blow hah.

That said, I didn’t need any more reasons to be excited for Gutter trash but here you are you just providing them!!! I agree this original one is a bit rough around some edges but you just saw me gush about it so color me excited to save some change for what seems like an infinitely better version. I’ve no joke been reopening the game constantly, specially for the final bad end and slut mode scenes which Mmmmmmmm, just hit the right buttons man.

Cruel Serenade is clearly a party I’m late to, but one I’ m really happy is still going, I am going to be following it very closely from now on, well y’know after catching up with GT which seems like a great fuckin’ time. Expect a skyscraper of text in the coming weeks about my experience with that!

Lemme research too about making that unnoficial translation, I’ve dabbled with locales in the past but not ones from RPGmaker, nor really getting anything remotely officialized, though it’s effort I’m willing to put in to help get the game more known because right now this is a criminally, illegally, insultingly overlooked game.

Hey so, I found out about this game, downloaded and holy shit I can’t stop thinking about it, it’s been like half a month omg I love it, I’ve got a friend that’s gotten like five earfuls just of this game.

It’s genuinely nice to see something actually well made that doesn’t just scratch an itch, it’s practically pulling on it, the setting is great, the gameplay is alright, the scenes are GODLY. Plus I’m seeing scenes from a second act and news about a third, seems like it’s the perfect time to dive in? Really my only complaint is the ingame menus, title screen and gallery are alright, but inventory and fights… It’s like going to a 5 star buffet and being given plastic utensils, like sure it’s still fantastic food but that detail is a lil cheap. Also some backstory would be nice, specially around the lil guy Mezz, I wub him but there’s just not a lot about him :/

I’m getting that second act sooner rather than later, hopefully that infamous Gutter everybody’s mentioning so much is just as Ruthless and unforgiving as the boars here!

Ps. if you want help expanding the game to Spanish, hmu!

yes yes yes yes YES, I’m so excited for this!

Question, is this just tailbound or does this include the Deluxe extras? Is there a discord I can join to talk about this? Will it add steam extras like cards and achievements? Will the soundtrack also make its way there? Is this the first step before adding other games like Thirstcharm?

Well now I look dumb lol, sorry I must’ve missed it by accident

Have you thought about releasing the game directly on Steam though? I’ve been watching the development for around a year, now that I’ve been saving up I’ll definitely pick it up but I’d really prefer adding it to my steam library