How Things Changed After Yuugiku Kanbe’s Scent Spelled Bad Influence on Drillimation’s Fanbase

On Friday, July 25, 2025, Drillimation Systems will launch the demo for their newest game Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality. Their previous game, Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity launched over three months ago. They received a lot of feedback from Studio Emiko and players pointing out non-gameplay flaws including characters, plots, key events, and dialogue. Within the two months that the demo was in production, Drillimation did all they could to not return to old ground. Below are two things that Drillimation improved upon during the demo’s development.

Limiting Long-Haired Girls

Here's one of the bosses for a future fangame project (not my current one): Fusana Midorigawa.#gamedev #indiegames #indiegamedev #touhou #touhouproject #東方Project #retro #nintendo #90sanimestyle #イラスト #メイド #oc #originalcharacter #オリキャラ pic.twitter.com/uMFCG1mTVU

— Drillimation Systems Co., Ltd. / 株式会社ドリリメーションシステム (@Drillimation1) July 14, 2025

The previous game, Touhou Chouhatsuyou ~ Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity, relied way too much on giving female characters floor-length hair, and was one of the primary flaws, even from Studio Emiko. In the event that a future Drillimation game features a girl with hair longer than waist-length, they will be limited in such a way. One example would be to have a bun be their primary hairstyle, but players won’t know how long it is, and it will be very rare for the player to see their hair down.

The second Mythos of Phantasmagoria game clearly explains this with Miho Fujiwara. In the game’s lore, her hair had grown so long that she had to tie it up in the Shimada style. Only does the player see it let down once in the game, but it’s at a critical point that if we disclosed it, it would spoil the millions of players who haven’t reached that point.

Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality will feature fewer human characters than previous Drillimation games. In fact, the first entire dream in the game will only have five of them, plus one being a half-human hybrid. Out of the entire cast, only half of them are female, and none of them have hair that long.

Making Localizations Deeper

Shining Shattering Sky ~ Reverie of Breaking Unreality will also be the first Drillimation game to have better localization quality than its predecessors. This change was made after the completion of Burgeoning Tresses of Longevity to address some of the issues that plagued Japanese-language localizations of games, especially during Phase One. Drillimation often localizes games into the language as they are being developed, and also strives to limit the use of culture-specific idioms or jargon that could alienate Japanese players.

According to sources, translations outputted by DeepL are much more accurate than what Google Translate does. Drillimation still uses the latter to check the quality of sentences translated into Japanese via the Prophet’s own knowledge. While not perfect, it can excel at pulling up equivalents for idioms and jargon that may be present in one language but not in another. This was first tested in some YouTube videos before being carried over into their game projects.

It can get expensive for large-scale projects like an RPG, and the free plan only allows up to 1,500 characters per translation and up to 50,000 characters a month. To cut down on costs, Drillimation only translates one sentence at a time, and the translation is subsequently edited by the Prophet using his own knowledge. It has also helped expand his knowledge of the language, picking up terms and grammar that he would not have otherwise known. Given how diverse the Japanese language is, it can get really handy when a character has to convey a certain emotion or level of politeness. Separate translators are used for certain dialogue, such as bringing dialogue to the Kansai region which most major ones do not have.

Conclusion

Long hair can help express femininity, but having it too long could tangle things in knots. Many games’ localizations need to be high in quality, particularly in most major languages, whether it be European or Asian. If a studio has a smaller budget and is unable to afford a professional localization service, DeepL is the way to go.