Cycle of Remorse’s Plot: How Creating Art is an Act of Self-Reflection
Art is a form of self-expression and with that comes vulnerability on the artist’s part to reveal an aspect of themselves that perhaps they have not shown to others before. Cycle of Remorse is the most recent example I have of this and is currently the project I hold most near and dear to my heart because of how much it shows myself as a person both in its original conception and its current state. With that said…
What do you mean it was originally gonna be a drawn-out sex joke?
I first came up with CoR back in 2018-ish. This was around the time I moved back to my hometown after dropping out of college due to mental health reasons and started streaming on YouTube again. And the game I decided to come back with? FE7. I was still very new to Fire Emblem as a whole with FE7 the only game in the series I’ve ever played at the time. I first played it in high school on an emulator on my phone during free periods but stopped my run for whatever reason. (I left off on Battle Before Dawn, but I don’t think that had any bearing on why I stopped. At least I don’t think so??) Then, I proceeded to finish the game for the first time on stream.
During that time, I came across LT-Maker (at least the version that we now know as its legacy version). ROM hacking was way too intimidating for me (and still is) so I figured that LT would be a good way to start making something FE-like. So with the help of my friends and viewers, we brainstormed a possible plot for my fangame.
Now, my sense of humor was (and still is) leaning towards sexual humor. If you’ve played through the first handful of chapters of CoR, you’ll notice that its suggestive humor is still very much present and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon. But you know the tone of those few chapters? Imagine that lasting throughout the entire game. That was what CoR was originally gonna be like.
Like this but more.
Before its title was Cycle of Remorse, it was Ocean Crest and the Piercing Blade. The “Piercing Blade” was gonna be Krista’s late-game regalia weapon and the punchline of the sex joke. Yup, the player was going to play through possibly 20+ chapters just to get to a dick joke. And not even a good dick joke. But how exactly did we get from here to the game’s more serious story?
What a five year timeskip can do to a dude
Legacy LT-Maker was a doozy to work with so I decided to put CoR to the side until LT got more updates and possibly became more user-friendly. Cut to January 2023: I’ve been married for a little over a year and was starting to settle into being a housewife with little to no huge responsibilities other than maintaining the home. With all that free time, I downloaded LT-Maker and picked up work on CoR again.
A lot can happen in five years. Got married, moved out of my parents’ place, picked a new college major, dropped out again… There was a lot going on. Way more than what I’ve described here. I grew out of being the young sex-obsessed gremlin that I was in 2018 (for the most part). Life got serious and I mellowed out, and I think that’s reflected in the game’s plot progression if you compare the tone between pre Chapter 4 (the approximate chapter I initially ceased development) and post Chapter 5. From a silly romp to something that takes itself a bit more seriously.
Is that a Jojo reference?! (No, just me being inspired by music much like the great Hirohiko Araki also Jesus is there-)
I will say that me picking up CoR’s development again wasn’t an “Oh I have a project on the back burner” revelation. What kicked it off was me discovering the song Honey I’m Home by GHOST
I love Vocaloid music a lot and it happened to pop up on my YouTube Recommended page one day. Its religious themes just clicked in my brain and inspired the major conflict in CoR, more specifically the motivations behind a certain character’s actions. (Can’t say which character because spoilers).
As someone who has fallen out of their faith a long time ago and is married to someone who is deeply devoted to theirs, the concept of religion and one’s reasons for practicing it weighed on my mind immensely, leading to these concepts intertwining with the game’s plot, raising it to something beyond just “haha sword equals dick” joke. That also led to me putting more thought into the gods and how their presence affected the culture of the game’s world.
* Listens to CoR OST * Why is Ervan’s theme THAT? (It makes sense, trust me)
The RPG Maker game OMORI is one of the biggest influences on how CoR is now. Its themes of trauma and loss resonated with me and were a huge influence on the plot especially concerning Krista’s personal conflicts in dealing with the loss of her fiance Ervan which definitely wasn’t present in the original conception of the game’s plot as you can imagine.
I will say that Krista losing Ervan was a planned plot point somewhat early on in development as a way to cope/reflect on a falling out with an old friend of mine that happened around the time of the game’s original conception. However, the exact details of that plot point were changed to what it is now (which I can’t discuss because spoilers.)
Haha and then what? 
a.k.a. Where do we go from here?
As of writing this, CoR has not reached that coveted [COMPLETE] status yet. I project that it will sometime in 2026, but I’m no psychic and anything can happen between then and now. Living life and experiencing more things may very well affect how CoR ends up in the future. So, what happens now? Who knows!
And the takeaways?
- If you work on something long enough, you might find that as you’ve matured, the ideas you had mature alongside you. Don’t be afraid of changing things about your project if you feel that they aren’t reflective of what you find fun or interesting anymore.
- Be open to finding inspiration in anything. You’ll never know what could be your next big muse.
- Don’t take this as me saying you can’t have low-brow humor in your game. What you have in your project is ultimately what YOU want out of it. Do whatever the hell you want, I’m not your dad.