I was replaying Robotics;Notes Elite recently, and it brought back memories from an interesting era of Kiri Kiri Basara, so I figured it could make for an interesting behind-the-scenes article. To this day, the release of our Robotics;Notes reviews and guides was probably our most hectic moment and a turning point for Kiri Kiri Basara.
It was August 2020, and KKB had been running for two years at that point. Our first high-profile reviews, where we requested review codes from the publisher, were for Steins;Gate Elite and the spin-off games bundled with it the year before. So at this point, we felt comfortable handling Robotics;Notes’s release, which was coming up in a few months. Fasty also used this opportunity to ask Spike Chunsoft if an interview with MAGES.’ Tatsuya Matsubara and the R;N localization team would be possible.
About a month before Robotics;Notes released, we started working on the interview. The idea was to collect questions from the SciADV community on Reddit; this process took one month. And it was quite interesting—we received a total of seventy-two questions from the community, from which we picked nine to send to Spike Chunsoft. We also selected eight questions as backups, in case any questions were declined.
While Reddit was busy coming up with questions for the Q&A, we received the review codes for our R;N Elite and DaSH reviews. This was about two or three weeks ahead of the games’ release date, and while that may sound like a lot of time… it was not. R;N Elite can take about fifty hours to complete, and we also needed to complete the sequel, DaSH, and prepare the interview. Back then, we were also not doing game guides yet, but it was either me or Mia who proposed that we should do guides for the two games—so that added a hefty amount of work, too.
I was put in charge of the Elite review; Rain got the DaSH review and guide since he had already played both games in Japanese, giving us a much-needed head start. Lastly, Fasty and Mia took care of the Elite guides. Our aim was to publish the Elite review right when the embargo lifted, which was a few days before the release of the game. Ideally, the DaSH review would go out on release day, and the guides would follow shortly.
During October, the Steins;Gate tenth anniversary events were also ongoing in Japan, so Fasty had a lot of additional work with reporting on that at the same time.
I wanted to finish the game before the review got released so I could get the full picture on what the game was like. That meant that I spent about 4–5 hours playing Robotics;Notes every single day. What really helped, though, was that at the time, I was studying at university, and my airport job had been suspended because of COVID restrictions. Fasty was also going crazy on Robotics;Notes for the guide—we have 175 hours of Robotics;Notes Elite playtime on our Steam account. I remember he mentioned the draft for the 100% guide was over forty pages long.
It may sound stressful, to finish a fifty-hour visual novel in two weeks, but I look back on that time quite fondly. As I had no job then, only school, doing KKB felt like a job that I really enjoyed. I was playing R;N Elite, taking notes, screenshots, and really enjoying the game.
At the start of October, we finished collecting questions for the interview and sent them to Spike Chunsoft; we received answers a few days later. Once we had them in hand, it was quite straightforward: Fasty made an article, and I designed the thumbnail. At that point, I also realized I had to prepare a lot more thumbnails—not just for the review articles. I had to do the review thumbnail for each game, then three thumbnails for the guides on our website, and lastly, thumbnails for the Steam versions of the guides.
Then a day later, on October 10, we released the R;N Elite review. To this day, October 9th and 10th, 2020 are the most visited days of KKB’s entire existence. And you could feel it, because the website got super slow.
While I’m the author of the R;N Elite review, it was far from just my review; content-wise, everyone added something to it, which meant we created what was probably the most comprehensive review of the game that is available in English. For example, the localization part was mostly written by Rain, who had much more experience with the Japanese version of the game and translation side of things. I think the R;N Elite review is one the best ones we’ve created because of how in-depth it is. It would set an example for how we would do reviews from that point onward.
The DaSH review, written by Rain, was released on October 13th, as well as the 100% guide for R;N Elite written by Mia. Two days later, Fasty published the route guide for R;N Elite—because the 100% guide, while useful for achievement hunters, is super long and not entirely necessary if you just want to beat the game. The same day, Rain also released the DaSH guide. Finally, after two long months, our R;N coverage was complete.
Our Robotics;Notes coverage changed KKB in many ways. Most importantly, we believe it may have proved to Spike Chunsoft (and possibly MAGES.) that they could count on us to make high-quality content about their newly released games for the core SciADV audience, and on time. So we were no longer just a random fan site—we were a site dedicated to doing the best job possible. I hope we were able to positively impact the sales of the games at least a bit. And Spike Chunsoft was seemingly so appreciative, our main PR contact from the company decided to send every member of KKB (even those who hadn’t been involved in the R;N coverage ) a physical copy of the R;N Double Pack. Each copy also included a personalized thank-you letter. I think everyone at KKB was surprised at this, but it was an amazing gift to receive after we’d spent two months working on the reviews, guides, and the interview.
We also realized how popular both guides for Robotics;Notes were, so we quickly started working on new guides for the series, starting with Steins;Gate Elite. If I can be a little presumptuous, I also felt that our readers’ perception of us changed after R;N. We were no longer this random group of people doing a fan website; since then, we’ve grown a bit more professional in appearance and in our approach, becoming a trusted source of high-quality news, reviews, and guides.
I also personally changed from the experience. I realized I found more enjoyment in handling the website backend, design, game guides, and testing, rather than writing articles. You can see that since the R;N reviews, I’ve actually only written one news article, released on October 25, 2020. Especially when I was working on the 8-Bit ADV guide, I realized I didn’t want to write just news articles anymore; I wanted to be more on a creative side of the website. The realization allowed me to focus on other important aspects of the website, mostly its presentation and the game guides section, which to this day remains our most popular section.
Also, the Robotics;Notes review thumbnails are used to this day as a template for new reviews. So yeah, the review thumbnail for our recent Phantom Breaker review, released just last week, was based on the Robotics;Notes template from 2020. And honestly, I still feel that the template looks great.
We started 2021 with a new, fresh and consistent design, with a team that proved to be very capable, and with a dedicated fanbase that knew they could count on us to provide the latest SciADV news, reviews, and other series information.
