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Kamen Rider Revice TV Series Ending Commemoration Toei Producer Team Special Symposium

“Kamen Rider Revice” is the third entry in the Kamen Rider series since the Reiwa era began. This work, with the two thematic pillars of “devils” and “family”, broadcast its fiftieth and final episode on August 28th. The baton will be passed over to a new program, “Kamen Rider Geats”, starting in September.

For the Kamen Riders of the Reiwa era, there are strong enemies that are different from Shocker or Foundation X. As we all know, it’s “coronavirus”. All of us in the filming staff, and thus the people in the cast, are releasing not only all 50 episodes of the TV series but also the movies and the series of many spin-off dramas on TTFC, all while battling this troublesome opponent.

The Kamen Rider series is a “television program” at its core, but even more so, its components are in part influenced by the various societal conditions (not just COVID) of the time as well. In addition, plans and assumptions were changed as those effects progressed in tandem with the broadcast. It can be said that’s a characteristic of a “four-cour (one-year) drama”, which are hard to come by nowadays.

In summary, what kind of journey has “Kamen Rider Revice” taken to reach this single goal of “TV series completion”? And, just after having conducted the interview, a “Toei Producer Team Special Symposium” will be distributed like the years before with super-hot timing!

Attendees

Taku Mochizuki (Chief Producer)

Has been involved with Toei tokusatsu works as an assistant producer since “Kamen Rider W” (2009). Was promoted to producer during the making of “Kamen Rider Gaim” (2013). Later, he worked as chief producer for the first time in “Uchu Sentai Kyuranger” (2017). Other important works he’s been in charge of include “Detective ZERO” (2019), “Mashin Sentai Kiramager” (2020), and “Ten Gokaiger” (2021).

Ryosuke Momose (Assistant Producer)

After being involved in all sorts of event planning and production tasks with Toei’s business promotion department, he was transferred into the TV planning department in June of 2019. Following “Kamen Rider Zero-One” (2019), he also participated in this work as an assistant producer. Other than that, he served as producer for the Amazon original “GAME OF SPY”, which was distributed worldwide starting on August 1st, 2022. A guest character called “Ryunosuke Momose” (played by Akiyoshi Nakao) appears in “Kamen Rider: Beyond Generations” (2021).

Chika Chikamatsu (Assistant Producer) Applied for Toei’s “Tokusatsu Program Producer Recruitment”, and joined the company in 2019. “Kamen Rider Zero-One” (assistant producer) is the first work she was in charge of. She has worked as assistant producer in “Ten Gokaiger”, “Kamen Rider OOO 10th: The Core Medals of Destiny”, and others.

Interviewer

TTFC (Toei Tokusatsu Fan Book Department)

Act 1: It Ended, But It Isn’t Over?!

TTFC: You’ve successfully wrapped up filming of the TV series, and you’re drawing nearer to completion, but you’re still very busy. Thank you very much for sparing your time with all that going on. To put it bluntly, how are you all feeling about it right now…?

Mochizuki: Well… it still doesn’t feel like it’s ended at all (Laughs).

Momose: I feel the same way (Laughs).

Mochizuki: Though, as work on the TV show itself ends, I do feel different… a sense of liberation. Because we were releasing episodes almost every week, we had to make it to the end without causing trouble… “trouble” in this case meaning a delay in the release schedule, but it’s normal to worry about stuff regarding that. Anyway, we have managed to safely release all 50 episodes. It’s difficult to say what exactly qualifies as “safety”, but I’m more or less relieved.

TTFC: By the way, it’s the first to have “50 episodes” as a TV series since “Kamen Rider Ghost” (2015). The normal year is generally 49 episodes. “Kamen Rider Zero-One” (2019) also had a 51-week release schedule (!), but that was when they had to do compilation episodes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, when you say it “doesn’t feel like it’s ended”, you mean that the work and planning is still happening.

Momose: That’s right. To talk about the things that have already been announced, there is the “Final Stage & Program Cast Talk Show”, going on in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka from September until October. We’re preparing for the winter movie as well. After that is the V-Cinext, and then TTFC’s “Farm-fresh Theater” episode 2 is being announced. As for anything else… well, there are still things I can’t say.

TTFC: I see.

Mochizuki: The sequence of plans I just stated are events that have become certain “traditions”. For the other projects, though, I am incredibly thankful that people wanted to do things with “Kamen Rider Revice” even after it ended. We can never stop moving or take a break, but there are things that give us a “scream of joy”.

TTFC: We’ve released three works for “Revice” on TTFC only: “Revice Legacy: Kamen Rider Vail”, “Birth of Chimera”, and “Kamen Rider Jeanne & Aguilera with Girls Remix”. All of them were huge successes thanks to you.

Mochizuki: Thank you very much! “Birth of Chimera” originated as a proposal from Director Sakamoto, and the gap between its beginning and the release was fairly small (Laughs).

TTFC: “Girls Remix” was actually filmed before “Birth of Chimera”. “Birth of Chimera” was a really unexpected project, but the characters who were charming even in the original story of “Movie - Kamen Rider Revice: Battle Familia” were depicted more deeply, and that was very good. The other two works are that way too, but it’s just such an extravagant spin-off work.

Mochizuki: “Kamen Rider Revice” was already an irregularity to begin with in that we had to shoot the winter movie, even if it was a short film, before the show was broadcast (Laughs). From when it was formally decided at the start of spring, we started auditions, geared up for a lot of problems, and moved it forward at a quick pace. We started filming with no time to breathe. Then the winter movie (“Beyond Generations”) immediately came along. “Kamen Rider Revice: The Mystery” for TELASA, “Televi-kun Hyper Battle DVD” with Shogakukan, that was filmed for Toei Video’s Blu-ray Collection, and “DEAR GAGA” where Hiromi Kadota and his mother starred… It was a stafe of affairs where some other work other than the TV series was usually happening. Luckily, each work got a positive reception, and we really felt like the cast and the work was growing in popularity. But even so, we were careful to not bring forth clusters.

Momose: Just last year, from the point “Revice” began filming until the beginning of fall, the so-called “fifth wave” came. The Delta strain appeared, and in Tokyo alone there were close to 6,000 people reporting to hospitals at many times. If we’re just talking about the amount of people, it was much more than when I was doing “Zero-One”. However, their movement won’t stop, even if a state of emergency is declared. It’s obvious, but the risk of infection itself will rise.

Mochizuki: The proportion of the population that is hospitalized is dramatically different from the beginning, so no matter how careful you are to protect yourself, there’s no way to entirely prevent infection. So, in order to prevent impact on filming and the program itself, we prepared many countermeasures for any possible outbreak of infection. As a result, we still made it here somehow even though many things happened… We’ve made it to the finale. We made it through the days where the schedules and scenes were modified, and didn’t stop long filming sessions. That’s thanks to the staff, cast and themselves knowing that they’re irreplaceable and living their lives with pride. Of course, it isn’t completely over yet, so I still can’t relax, but I’m glad just to be free from worrying about having to check every morning for reports that “so-and-so isn’t feeling well” or “this person has a fever” (Laughs).

Momose: Speaking of, the cast has also been saying “it doesn’t feel like it’s over at all”. We had the campaign for “Battle Familia”, and preparations for the “Final Stage & Program Talk Show”… If you also include shooting the winter movie and the stage show after that, there are still “Revice”-related things going on constantly at least within this year. Even though we say it’s “one year long”, Kamen Rider is really a year-and-a-half thing (Laughs). It was probably a very intense year and a half for them too.

Mochizuki: What was a little different of a situation from the previous work, “Kamen Rider Saber”, is the state of emergency being declared while “Saber” was being planned out, and they feared the worst, asking, “Honestly, how do we film this while we can’t film?”. They gathered plans while trying to avoid as many risks as humanly possible, and got through it wonderfully and passed the baton over to Revice. On the other hand, in “Revice’s” situation, we predicted that the situation would be at least somewhat better than during “Saber”, and were moving along thinking that at some point we might return to how things were filmed before COVID. I think it was naïve of us to have that idea.

TTFC: But that’s because you—and the experts, and most of the world—thought that way at the time. Besides, if there were too many restraints anyway, it would be really hard to film…

Mochizuki: That’s true. So we started out with more degrees of freedom than “Saber” did, but then we ran into the so-called “fifth wave”. When that happened, we couldn’t do anything besides adjust what we could in the next few episodes’ scripts. For example, we actually wanted to do more “world-fixing Rider” guest episodes in the second half of the season too, like episode 5 where Kikuo Hayashita was appearing and episode 6 where Kudo (played by Gamon Kaai) made his first appearance. However, with filming efficiency in the COVID-19 pandemic being much worse than usual for a long time, we ended up wasting time and money, and couldn’t get them to come back as a regular no matter what. Nevertheless, we intended to keep writing stories that included guest actors after that as much as we could.

TTFC: The impact of episodes like with Kuuki Kaidan (episodes 22 and 23), or the “voice actor festival” episodes (30 and 31) where Subaru Kimura [ew] and company appeared, was strong, so it kind of feels like there’s an impression that “there aren’t many guest episodes”. Outside of the third cour [set of 3 months/13 eps of the show], of course, there weren’t many guest characters that appeared.

Mochizuki: That area is an idea I (?) communicated my intent for after script-making. I intentionally made the number of “supports” (filming locations and situations) spoken of in the script very small. In summary, we aimed to optimize the filming by increasing the scenes that could be shot at the same location. Hanta (Kinoshita) showed understanding of those limitations, and it was very good that he always handled them ahead of time. For the script, every possible request comes from every possible direction, but he was extremely helpful for having the stance of “please say everything you want”. Personally, I just wish I could have changed the circumstances a little more so that he could perfectly demonstrate his style… For the cours other than the third one, from an early stage, we wanted to be able to switch to episodes with just the regular sets from “Happy Spa”, “Fenix”, and “Weekend” if the worst happened. It was really unfortunate for the shoots where a large-scale amount of people is needed, but it could have been necessary. Outside of the third cour, we ended up going in a slightly different direction than what we assumed. That’s why things like Director Akamichi’s speech scene in episode 35 were ones that we’d originally wanted to have more extras appear in, but we told Director (Hidenori) Ishida that it couldn’t be done, and he was able to create a feeling of scale in a different way.

TTFC: For us at TTFC, we’re also very sorry that we haven’t been able to do “extra recruitment” in these last few years. Like “Farm-fresh Theater”, we try to do different approaches (extras being involved virtually), but still… The many chances for our members to gather are precious times for us as well, so I think we would like to resume that whenever we can.

Mochizuki: Chikamatsu, remind me, at what point did you start helping with this work?

Chikamatsu: I was doing “The Core Medals of Destiny”, and started when that had finished filming. I was just a viewer until maybe episode 5 (Laughs). It was October fourth when I first came to a filming site.

Mochizuki: I remember that well (Laughs).

Chikamatsu: I think it felt to the cast members like I had come to the sets for “BeyoGene” [Beyond Generations] as much as possible (Laughs). What was impactful at the start was that at the “viewer” stage, when I talked with the storyboard artist Soa (Ito), I asked for all the spoilers that hadn’t been revealed yet (Laughs). It started with “This Daiji isn’t Daiji, he’s actually a demon called Kagero”, then “Commander Wakabayashi is already dead”, then “All of the Happy Spa’s regulars are spies”… There were also other plans that got changed afterwards, but I knew hidden secrets in many ways, and that was shocking. I was like, “What I’m seeing right now is all a lie!” (Laughs). I started there, and then began attending hon-uchi (preparatory meetings for scriptwriting) with the one for episodes 17 and 18, which were broadcast at the beginning of the year. I was first credited as an assistant producer in episode 13.

Act 2: Each Way of Living and Way of Conveying Emotions

TTFC: In this round-table discussion, you’re trying to talk about “things that changed from the original plan as the show progressed” as much as you can, but how did that turn out in “Revice”?

Mochizuki: I’m continuing what we talked about before, but as the outline of Weekend after their original participation, we wanted to progress it as “a three-party war” a little more. There’s Fenix which aims to realize peace against the threat called Giff, Weekend which seeks freedom, and Ikki, who lies somewhere between. That’s what is supposed to be shown, but there were parts of the depiction that we were forced to give up on because of limitations with the budget and schedule. Furthermore, we should have made it more apparent that Weekend was a resistance organization, but… that would be poor timing because of the war happening in the real world. [likely the Ukraine-Russia war, but it’s not specified] The action also needed to have more consideration put into it about how much we should depict themes of war in a TV show. It was really hard to decide whether the characters will choose peace, or gain freedom after they’ve won. Of course, we always wanted to do the best we could, but that was a tough decision to make.

Momose: On Kinoshita’s part, making interesting “plot twists” is something he’s especially good at, and he was trying to make use of that to the best of his ability. Like (Mako) Komaki’s character in the Kuuki Kaidan episodes we were just talking about, and Subaru in the voice actor episode.

Mochizuki: Kinoshita’s style fits very well with two-episode arcs— to speak of the old days, a “Kamen Rider W”-like format with basically a detective-drama-esque “case” style. On the other hand, episodes with a hero’s first transformation or a power-up are difficult to fit into that. And there are also situations where it’s good to depict a hero’s coolness in a straightforward way. Still, in Revice, we intentionally did things in ways that reversed the audience’s expectations, or disturbed the traditions that “If it’s going this way, it’ll always end up that way”. The moments where we make you think that Tamaki will transform and then Hana Natsuki transforms, or where Ikki takes Giffard Rex away while it’s being developed, are obvious ones.

TTFC: It was also surprising when Giff was defeated in episode 46.

Mochizuki: This was also the plan from the start; we adjusted many episodes after the final episode count was decided, but at least we didn’t make any big changes. Giff is more of a direct threat than indirect… like a nuclear weapon in the real world, it’s a being with a certain deterrence. Towards that, I wanted to show the parts of how humanity and the Igarashi family handles that. Since they ultimately decided to “defeat” him, after that it’s the question of how humanity’s future will progress. I was thinking that it’s important as a hero to decide “how” you’ll defeat Giff, but that itself is also a different story, and that is not the peak of “Revice’s” story. That’s why the last four episodes… episodes 47 to 50 were actually one thing we “wanted to do”.

Momose: I like “The Boys” (2019-ongoing), which is distributed on Amazon Prime. Heroes with a lot of different views appear there, and I thought it was good that each character’s turmoil and anguish was depicted. I also felt that interest in “Revice”, especially its last four episodes.

Mochizuki: What was established at the foundation of “Revice” was a “conversation with oneself” in the form of a devil, so naturally it became a drama which shows each character’s “way of life”. For example, Hiromi is consistently “an average man who fights fiercely”, and for Aguilera/Hana Natsuki, her theme goes from from “finding where you belong and yourself” to “atonement”. It’s a child-oriented show at its core, so we obviously pour energy into the parts where the heroes fight in cool ways and defeat enemies, but on the other hand, we want to convey something that isn’t just that.

Chikamatsu: I think that was truly stuck with until the end. Mochizuki, you made sure to properly communicate with the cast at all times. The cast members also took the messages in the script in their own ways, and always strived to express them. I felt how good that openness was, even from my own standpoint.

Mochizuki: They knew about everything in the general outline, including the idea of having a story between Ikki and Vice at the very end. As for things that got changed… one of those is the number of Kamen Riders in the show. Kamen Riders Aguilera, Destream, and Juuga weren’t in the plan at the beginning (Laughs).

TTFC: Were those additions due to the popularity of the characters?

Mochizuki: That’s a factor. Unpredictability is part of the appeal of a long-running work that is broadcast over the course of a year, and it’s good that they became developments that properly “support” the main characters. We also thoroughly discussed whether each character would live or die, but ultimately none of them died besides Orteca. I think that this point is different from where you just decide “they’ll keep appearing if they’re popular”, and also reversely, we’re not just “prioritizing the circumstances of the play and making them leave”… It’s the result of us looking at the whole story one time, and having the story go in the way that it’s organically moving. I wonder even now how it would develop if we decided to disrupt that path and have someone die. We didn’t want to make it feel like “anything goes”, though, so Hiromi’s transformation after returning to the war front was squeezed into episode 44, the same one where Daiji is stopped. Hiromi fights in the movie “Battle Familia” and the spin-off “Birth of Chimera” as well, but he doesn’t transform. Now, there are opinions that we’re doing Sakura and Hana, the girls team, because people want that. But we’d always aimed to properly make a drama that depicts a relationship between a good and an evil heroine from the start, so I don’t believe it was changed very much.

TTFC: I feel it depends on the impact and timing, or maybe the impressions of the cast’s acting, for the episodes where a given character is focused on.

Mochizuki: The way we write the screenplays is naturally to first polish the themes and structure of each cour, but in the Kamen Rider series, the normal way of doing it is to have “two-episode arcs” and have one director shoot two episodes at the same time. That itself is a system that hasn’t changed in the past, but of course during the COVID pandemic we had to increase the efficiency of filming due to schedule and budget constraints. So we properly decided the themes and central characters of the two-episode arcs more precisely than usual, and tried to make it in a way where each arc finishes production before the next one starts. I personally prefer this approach and I’m good at it, but this way of doing it has a high affinity for “guest episodes” that are two-episode arcs, and inversely, it’s difficult to balance while you’re also progressing the plot. Perhaps some viewers may have had an impression that the continuity was broken in some episodes because we made it this way. At any rate, this method also has dilemmas where it couldn’t be controlled to one’s own liking if we weren’t moving along the shoot smoothly. I would like to learn from this experience and grow from it in the future.

Act 3: The Cast’s Overflowing Zeal, and the Meaning Hidden Between the Lines

TTFC: Speaking of characters’ stories, I think you should talk about the charm of all of the people in the “acting department” of “Revice”. Speaking frankly, there was a balanced range of ages, and each person’s characteristics were different. It’s a happy blend of people, and it felt like an incredible team.

Mochizuki: That’s right. One theme of “Revice” was “family”, so firstly, we’ll start with the lovely duo of Shigeyuki Totsugi [Genta Igarashi] and Kurara Emi [Yukimi Igarashi] for the Igarashi family, and (Kazuya) Tanabe [Commander Wakabayashi] for Fenix, and Jun Hashimoto [Akaishi] and Sayaka Fujioka [Akemi Mikoshiba] after that. Along with (Toshihiro) Yashiba [Hikaru’s “dad”] in Weekend, it was important that the big places were all tied together by experienced actors. I regret that we couldn’t do an episode where Buusan (Shozo Irabu) got a lot of things to do… It might have been sudden for the viewers who don’t watch “Kamen Rider Vail”, so I tearfully gave up on it (Laughs).

Momose: But Buusan’s actor (Yutaka) Saigou was also good. He got cooler with each episode.

Mochizuki: I think that for the young cast members, throughout the year, it wasn’t a simple script to follow whatsoever. Because it’s unpleasant for the characters to explain their essential feelings and changes in all sorts of lines. Naturally, the minimum amount of exposition is essential, but at the start, many of them thought that this was a work with excessive amounts of explanation. So, Kinoshita intentionally left more blank space in his writing style for Revice. For the cast, they were thinking about how they in their own way could fill in the “between-the-lines” parts which weren’t written in the script. The people who excellently personified that were all of the veteran actors. I think that the young people were encouraged by closely watching the lines they created. It became a good experience for (Wataru) Hyuga [Daiji/Kagero], who had many chances to work with Jun Hashimoto in the middle part of the series, and others.

Momose: Even just playing Daiji and Kagero who are so different was challenging, but I think it was great that Hyuga seemed to enjoy taking up that challenge. Maeda [Kentaro Maeda, Ikki’s actor] became gradually more dependable, and more of a “leader”, without even knowing it. I think a characteristic of all the male members is actively working on communication—not only with Mochizuki, but also myself and all the directors. The female members are a little different. It seems like the female cast members often consulted with each other. But for Imoto [Ayaka Imoto, played Sakura] and Asakura [Yui Asakura, played Hana/Aguilera, new stage name is Hikari Kabashima], they delved into their own characters with their own individual approaches. People like Asakura aren’t the type to be very open about things like that, but when I listened to her answers in an interview, I understood that she’s deeply thinking about her acting more than I can imagine. It was interesting that she showed the differences between her personality and her role.

TTFC: I definitely felt that in interviews too. That everyone was very sincerely tackling their roles with their own stances.

Mochizuki: Personally, even looking back on the works that I participated in as an assistant producer, I’m the type to actively communicate with cast members. I guess being close in age at the time factored into that, but I tried to be someone who’s simply “easy to talk to”. Even after becoming a chief producer, I’m trying to not let that part of me change. I think that has good results and that the filming sets of “Revice” were comfortable, but of course that alone isn’t enough, so it’s natural to also have to be strict. I also say it when I say it, but normally, all of the directors are firm about the places where they should clean up. And, like I said just now, the adult cast members were always serious. If you see the attitude they use with their acting work, their feelings should immediately become clear. So I always thought that I shouldn’t prepare scripts that everyone’s feelings are involved in. In that sense, I think they were useful.

TTFC: Things like the end of episode 40 were one conclusion. I wondered how this could be shown on a Sunday morning… (Laughs).

Mochizuki: Jun Hashimoto wrote about it in his personal blog, so eager fans already know what happened at the filming set, but… (Laughs). I was also there that day too, but at the start, Ushijima’s actor Yashiba [Toshihiro Yashiba, Hikaru’s “dad”] kept his distance from Hashimoto and only thought about the parts closely relevant to himself. Furthermore, as said earlier, Yashiba already wanted to co-star with Hashimoto, so this was the day where his deepest wish came true. So, Yashiba was already very enthusiastic, and although he made different movements in that scene’s performance than in the tests, it was more like his body decided to “move on its own”. In short, he got in the zone. But because Hashimoto’s suit was covered in sticky blood, we already couldn’t turn back… from there, it’s what you all saw, a duel between Hashimoto and Yashiba as fellow actors. While we couldn’t redo the take, the two of them gave a great performance, and it became that scene. Akaishi plopping himself down at the end was also an ad-lib… and then his foot fell asleep.

Momose: No one else could’ve acted the scene that way but Hashimoto and Yashiba. They made it an incredible moment.

TTFC: By the way, it’s weird for me to ask this right now, but how did the name “Weekend” originate?

Mochizuki: It was Hanta’s idea for a name, which we then adopted. I believe it’s from the mental image of people who were normally working adults or students on weekdays, but gather and operate mainly on weekends, since it’s an organization mostly made up of regular citizens. Something like “weekend spies”, I guess. The Ushijima household isn’t a real family, but he wanted to have a little more time to focus on them. It was already talked about, but we wanted to make the scale and strength of Weekend as a large organization more apparent, and there was a blueprint related to that which the Ushijima family depicted. However, as much as we should’ve depicted that, the war in the last part of the story becomes a gruesome drama. No matter how it turned out, the organization would always be mentally associated with “war”, so it became a bit more difficult given the world events happening at the beginning of the year.

TTFC: The regular characters of George Karizaki and Hiromi Kadota are also ones that draw attention to themselves.

Mochizuki: (Noritaka) Hamao [George’s actor] became a facilitator within the young cast members. I think he himself had a great power to understand and imagine his role, but he also paid attention to the people around him and could take care of them. That also meant that he gets very frustrated if one mistake is made, but the great thing is that he can change how he interacts with the others in a positive way. He can also play the leading role with Maeda, and he subtly changes his attitude when he talks with him, or the female actors like Imoto or Asakura. So the two of them trusted him too. When Hamao went to his absolute limits, (Junya) Komatsu [Hiromi’s actor] would quickly follow up. Their exquisite relationship was also hood for the team. Komatsu plays the role of the “ura-mawashi” [guy who makes sure everyone has a chance to speak], as they call it in talk shows (Laughs).

Act 4: Many Devils, Everyone’s Good Points

TTFC: I’d like to ask about “Revice’s” themes of “devils” and “family”. I had the impression that you had a fair amount of freedom when coming up with the “devils” in “Revice”, and weren’t held back by any preexisting conceptions. I also found incredibly interesting representations in the script for the V-Cinext, which I’ve read ahead of time, but when I see the “devils” in the TV series it’s based on, I really feel like I get it.

Mochizuki: The devils depicted in “Revice” aren’t beings who possess humans externally; they’re beings who originally exist within someone and then materialize externally. In short, a projection of oneself. So the humans’ personalities and development are clearly reflected in their devils. The ways their own devils developed, their motives, and their visual styles should be linked to the characters themselves. The Igarashi siblings Ikki, Daiji and Sakura are very different from each other, and this is what makes them unique in their own ways. Daiji’s devil Kagero is probably the easiest concept to understand. Kagero formed inside Daiji from the trauma he was repressing. For Sakura, it’s even more so related to trauma. Lovekov is a weak little creature symbolic of her “real self” that she was unconsciously concealing. So with Sakura, letting Lovekov be visible is also a moment of growth in itself. She was able to face her weakness and overcome it. But what was different in Sakura and Lovekov’s relationship compared to Ikki and Vice, or Daiji and Kagero, is that you couldn’t say they were equals. Ikki and Daiji depicted growth by communicating with their devils, but in Lovekov’s case, she couldn’t have that “conversation”, and that’s connected to how the Invincible Jeanne arc near the end was depicted. In this, Lovekov, as something that only exists for Sakura to protect, disappeared. Daiji and Kagero seem to have a “lifelong contract”, according to their lines in the finale, (Laughs) but Lovekov is, frankly speaking, a being close to an imaginary friend, so there might be a future where she disappears one day as Sakura grows up. It’s only a matter of time before she naturally separates from Lovekov as she gradually becomes a more normal person… That’ll probably be depicted in a later spin-off (Laughs).

TTFC: So maybe there’ll be a day where she’s become an adult and a mother, and they reunite at an unexpected moment…

Mochizuki: Protecting someone important to you… I want her to appear in a cool way like Yukimi’s devil. Well, in Yukimi’s case, it was less like a devil and more like an angel (Laughs).

TTFC: But the preconceived notion of the word “devil” will follow it around regardless… It’s cliché, but I think I had to unlearn my previous idea of a devil when I tried to understand the “devils” in the world of “Revice”.

Mochizuki: That’s right. Of course there are alternatives to the word “devil”, and I think that’s supported by what seems like coinage of “Giff-(blanks)” in the world of “Revice”. However, part of the premise was that the protagonist signs a contract with a devil and the two of them become Kamen Riders together. That in itself was “Revice’s” unique trait which hadn’t been in the Kamen Rider series up to now, so for Ikki and Vice’s relationship, it’s made clear at an early stage… specifically episode 2. We wanted kids to think these two were “interesting” or “I like them”, so we had Ikki reject Vice as a partner ahead of time as to not contort their relationship. Of course, there were also things that pushed it along as a thrilling relationship where they’re always vigilant, like Eiji Hino and Ankh in “Kamen Rider OOO” (2010). Because no matter what you say, Vice is a “devil”. Not knowing when they could get hung in their sleep… that’s interesting in its own way. But we can’t portray Vice as trying to eat humans or always betray them after he’s become a Kamen Rider, and in the end we can’t distort his “motive”. That’s a big difference between Ankh, who isn’t a Kamen Rider, and him. There weren’t intentions to try and make him very similar to his great senior.

TTFC: Which is precisely why parts of Daiji and Kagero resemble them so strongly.

Mochizuki: In the Kamen Rider series, the age range of our audience is actually very spread out. With Ikki and Vice, and afterwards Jeanne, we tried to have it appeal to kids first and foremost. On the other hand, we had the goal to make it enjoyable to adults as well, with the drama of Fenix members like Daiji and Kagero, and also Karizaki and Hiromi. Ikki and Vice don’t usually have serious fights with each other, but Ikki and Daiji having a serious “brotherly conflict” is also something that chased a certain reality. We decided at a fairly early stage that Ikki and Daiji would talk in episodes 3 and 4 after Ikki and Vice’s relationship was created in episodes 1 and 2, but for Daiji and Kagero, we expected the span between Evil’s emergence and Live’s creation to take about five or six episodes. Because of various circumstances, it was stretched out for ten episodes.

TTFC: Speaking of Daiji and Kagero, the Live vs. Evil fight in episode 26 directed by Hidenori Ishida, and the birth of Holy Live afterwards, was just too fiery. I thought that was the last time Kagero would be seen…

Mochizuki: Schedule-wise for toy sales too, that was set as the goal for Daiji and Kagero’s relationship. I had that belief as well, until we wrote the script. As we thought about “Revice’s” foundation of “having a dialogue with the devil inside yourself” while re-examining the developments that would happen in the endgame, we began thinking about if it was good for Daiji’s goal to be without a companion. We discussed it with Bandai, and created another arc for him in the final part of the show. I also conveyed that to Director Ishida, and he understood my reasoning. Holy Live’s debut became a very amazing portrayal, and I’m extremely grateful to the director for that.

Chikamatsu: I cried during episode 26. However, when doing script meetings for planning episodes far ahead of time, we agreed that the goal for Daiji certainly wasn’t that.

Mochizuki: A part that we thought pretty hard about was when Daiji would return to the Igarashi family after joining Director Akaishi’s side.

Chikamatsu: Kagero’s return and EviltyLive’s creation is the true end goal of Daiji’s story. The road to that point was long, but it was a necessary stroke to make.

Mochizuki: Speaking of catharsis in the story, I think it would have been beautiful for Daiji to return when Genta became Destream in episode 42. But when I thought about it realistically, I realized that this would be not quite right. It’s not easy for Daiji to make that decision to simply return because the actions that his father takes in only 30 seconds. Not even Ikki or Genta can save him, but it damaged Daiji’s heart, and it steadily grows more unstable… Hiromi has good parts (Laughs). [???] It’s a three-part arc in pretty long strokes.

Chikamatsu: I think it should’ve been Hiromi. It’s a drama, so you can just say “this is what’ll happen here”, but we all try to think about “is this really good as it is?”, and that’s why episode 44 turned out that way. Hyuga kept getting a heavy amount of lines at that time, and that was always difficult for him, but he did his best to meet our expectations.

Mochizuki: Even in the middle section of the show, he was burdened with especially important parts, but he did persevere, and Daiji became yet another unique character in a long line of so-called “secondary Riders”.

TTFC: How did Karizaki’s arc in episodes 47 and 48 come about?Although it does connect to Ikki and Vice’s final fight (episodes 49 and 50; the final episode).

Chikamatsu: That’s the episode where everyone saved Kari-chan instead of the other way around.

Mochizuki: For Karizaki, even Hiromi, who cared for him the most and was closest to him, couldn’t get through to him. So even though Ikki’s about to lose his memories, he meddles and helps Karizaki. Karizaki holds the moral duty of completely erasing the threat of Giff’s genes, and defies the Igarashi Family, but his true motive was to get revenge against his father. Against that, Ikki gives him the information that “Masumi Karizaki loved his son”, questions Karizaki’s thoughts once again, and brings out his true feelings in an all-out battle. This stance of “questioning” is valuable. Ikki, without forcing him to come to a conclusion, simply meddled to the bitter end. In the end, through the help of the “nosiest guy in Japan”, Karizaki “guided” himself to the conclusion of confronting his father’s feelings. Please appreciate the performance that Maeda and Hamao put on for this episode. I think that Hamao especially showed his love for George Karizaki and “Revice” in a wonderful form.

Act 5: Grief of Separation, An Honorable End to a Nosy Hero

TTFC: And now for the finale, episodes 49 and 50. In this, for Ikki to take back his important memories, Vice does something very profound. Could you talk about how you decided that Ikki would gradually lose his memories due to the contract?

Mochizuki: I actually wasn’t that interested in the idea at first. Previously, I was in charge of the work “Detective ZERO”, which Ikki Sawamura starred in. The premise of his character Detective Tokiya is that he remembers the necessary things for his daily life outside of work, but he ends up losing all of his memories related to being a detective. This is actually called “selective amnesia” in real life, but if it’s depicted in a drama, it’s extremely difficult to draw the line. As the story goes on, you can’t fully decide if they’ll forget or remember this in a specific situation. And for someone who makes the show and decides on that, it’s really difficult to figure out whether you’ll make it apparent to the viewers each time. It’s an interesting idea, at least in movies and one-shot dramas, but in my personal experience, it hasn’t been a very good fit for a serial drama. Of course it’s fiction, so it’s good in itself if we make plot points that fit the story, but I thought it would be difficult to continually use that concept throughout a show, and had concerns about using it. However, after we talked about the climax of Ikki and Vice’s story, I had the opinion that I want the characters to be “tied down” as a reason for conflict, and decided that I wanted to keep it in.

TTFC: Previously, there was a puzzling depiction at the end of the first movie that was made to feel like a dark omen. The meaning of that moment was revealed much later on.

Mochizuki: I guess we could have given frequent hints from the start, but that would have been too in-your-face (Laughs). We discussed together when and how we’d start hinting at it. As a result, the terms of the contract between Ikki and Vice were first discussed in episode 25, and the phenomenon of the disappearing memories is concretely depicted in Jiko’s (Koji Ikeyama’s) arc in episodes 30 and 31. However, Karizaki seeing Ikki disappear from a photo in the compilation episode just before then (episode 29)— that was put there to get viewers to remember the plot point, but I regret that it was more confusing instead…

TTFC: Ikki isn’t “forgotten”; it feels close to actual amnesia for he himself to “forget”.

Mochizuki: It’s certainly sad for Ikki to forget because everyone else forgets about him, and it’s a useful plot point specifically because it’s this kind of work of art, but when you go that way, it’s very reminiscent of a previous character in “Kamen Rider Den-O” (2007) named Yuto Sakurai. I knew about Rider when that was airing, even though I hadn’t joined Toei yet, so I assumed there would be a lot of other people who would remember that too.

(Footnote: Yuto Sakurai (Kamen Rider Zeronos) was a character who has memories disappear every time he uses cards to transform. Yuto’s memories and the memories of people who know him were both erased with every transformation, but in the story, the sadness of “being forgotten” was more prominent.)

TTFC: Kentaro Maeda’s acting of Ikki forgetting his family was impressive.

Mochizuki: The way Ikki himself forgets about everyone felt very much like Ikki and “Revice”. Although Japan’s biggest meddler had elevated his nosiness, saved a lot of people, and is close to saving the world, the price he pays for that is to forget everything about his family, the most precious thing in his life. However, everyone remembers everything about Ikki and the things he’s done for them, so they try to return the favor somehow for the “meddler” who’s given so much to them. At the end of the end, he is helped because of his companions’ “nosiness”. When that conclusion was seen, I felt Ikki being established as another protagonist in the Kamen Rider series with a wonderful identity. Looking back on all of it, we didn’t explain everything well, and could have done some things better. For us, we weren’t following the past successes and templates, and we chose to challenge ourselves by making something new rather than having a solid basis, so we chose this path ourselves. I’m full of thanks for the staff and cast members who carried the same feelings as I did.

TTFC: And in the final episode, there’s a super-big surprise guest…

Mochizuki: The unexpected arrival of King Kazu… We got the athlete Kazuyoshi Miura to make an appearance.

TTFC: It’s established as Ikki’s yearning to be a pro soccer player. You can validate the posters, signatures, and various merchandise on the set of the “Happy Spa”, and him coming here in person was the implementation of that so-called “foreshadowing”… (Laughs). [they used a slang term for “foreshadowing being followed up on” but there’s not really an equivalent in English]

Momose: When we established Ikki as a former soccer player at the first stage, we began talking about who would be a good target for his admiration, and wanted to have it be a legend among legends if possible. So Toei’s offices had a good connection with Yokohama FC, which the player Kazuyoshi Miura belonged to at the time. We presented it to them, and asked them to help with the design for the posters and such. I’m happy that Kazuyoshi Miura excitedly agreed to make this appearance as well.

Mochizuki: Momose is someone who can keep trying at something over and over again without hesitation (Laughs). We’re in our mid-thirties, so in our experience and intuition. we felt like giving up before starting the negotiations, because we thought, “it’ll probably be to difficult”. But Momose isn’t like that. He says, “We can do it!”, and dives right into it. And then if I do anything, he says, “It’s been approved!” (Laughs).

Momose: (Laughs). But in hindsight, we began working on the movie rather suddenly, and there were a lot of difficulties when that was started up.

Mochizuki: It can be said for any TV series at that time, but you were heroic. From a producer’s standpoint, there’s no point where there’s not a work being produced and you can flip your switch to “off”. The day that our work will broadcast approaches every week. Of course all the staff is working on it, and they’re still people and can’t work all the time, so they make sure to rest, but if something happens even on a break day, we have to deal with it as soon as we can. Even as an AP, you’re still looking at it as someone who has say over your range of work, so if we don’t keep contact, filming will completely stop. If we continue that, the filming staff will lose trust in us. The period of “starting up” something we’re trying out for the staff. Like, should we follow these guys for the whole year? However, this is a period where we can’t work more on “improving work practices”. Making a tokusatsu series has always been rigorous, so even though we were already working gradually on improvements before COVID, but due to the pandemic, things started changing more quickly as a whole. I think you can say this about the industry as a whole. The optimization and shortening of filming as a way to prevent disease spread are components of that, and that has improved work practices just as much as it’s prevented infection.

TTFC: But still, it’s the same up to the filming. In a weekly-airing series, you can’t change the fact that goods are delivered throughout the year…

Mochizuki: That’s true. And if anything, that increased this year (Laughs), but for this, I thought that people especially needed it in the unique circumstances of the Coronavirus pandemic. We had a sense of purpose from this, and we didn’t slow down. It’s evidence that people are dependent on the potential of the Kamen Rider series in the midst of the trouble everywhere. Moreover, we’ve seen many individuals leave the industry in these last few years. Not to mention the entry-level and middle-ranking staff members who came in here pursuing their dreams, and even the veterans who have continuously made a living here— all kinds of people have tearfully resigned because the work wasn’t making enough to live off of anymore. That’s frustrating. There isn’t much I can do, but I create things as a producer, and in short create jobs, so I felt like I could give them at least a little bit of hope. However, with that situation at hand, we can’t get many people to join the company, and if that’s the case, we’ll inevitably need to pick up the pace. Each individual can’t so anything besides increase the density of what they get done every day and hour. It became an era where we can’t choose either quality or quantity anymore, and both are needed at the same time. That’s difficult, but at the present moment, we’re just continuing to work hard. In the midst of thar, the staff members, directors, and cast showed their fullest capabilities and continued to give their best performance, and I am full of gratitude for them. I think there were a lot of difficulties, but when it was time to wrap up filming and everyone could unanimously say, “It was a fun year”, that made me truly happy.

Chikamatsu: I’m different from Mochizuki and Momose, and I’m now almost a step ahead of you in my work on “Revice”. I joined after it had already started production, and I hadn’t figured out how much I could contribute to, but when everyone greeted and thanked me, especially the offices of cast members, I felt like I had been of some use to them, and I was filled with happiness and sadness at the same time. It’s the second work I’ve been very involved with since “Zero-One”, and I feel like my attachment to it grew with each episode. There are things about the end result of the show that I can’t say anything objective about, but I’m happy I could be a part of this.

Mochizuki: Could you talk about “Farm-fresh Theater”?

Chikamatsu: Oh, right (Laughs). I previously wrote the original story book “From 2017 / Record of Seven Days” which is a pack-in extra with “Kamen Rider: Beyond Generations”, and this time I’m in charge of the script for episode 2 of “Farm-fresh Theater”. Up to now, the original cast members in “Farm-fresh Theater” only gave voice performances, but this is the first time that (Claud) Hachijoin appeared as Tsuyoshi Tamaki, so definitely please watch it on TTFC.

TTFC: It’s been eagerly planned to broadcast for the last 11 months of production.

Mochizuki: I touched on it at the start, but one-shot spin-offs are wonderfully different in nature from the rest of the work, and that was fun. “Kamen Rider Revice: The Mystery”, being distributed with TelAsa, is a work that dared to be a mystery in “Revice”, as the name implies. It will be released on Blu-ray and DVD in November from Toei Video, so please watch that too.

TTFC: “Dear Gaga”, the Blu-ray Collection pack-in drama directed by Director Satoshi Morota, was also amazing. The Igarashi family is depicted in the TV series, but this is about the Kadota family that Hiromi grew up in. There isn’t any “transformation” or “action”, but it was unmistakably a “hero story”.

Mochizuki: I think, at the point that this symposium will be released, episode 3 of “Kamen Rider Jeanne & Aguilera with Girls Remix” still won’t be out (it will be available on September 11th, 2022), so please look forward to that too. This work is Director (Koichi) Sakamoto’s greatest desire (Laughs).

TTFC: I think that getting ten heroines from different generations (including the active duty ones) to appear, eleven if you count Hiroe Igeta appearing in voice only, was truly an amazing feat that will go down in Kamen Rider history. I was present for the filming of episode 3’s final scene, and an incredible miracle was occurring. It’s deeply moving to think that episode 3 will be released before long. Speaking of lineages of Toei works, Ayane as Electro-Wave Human Black Tackle became “mother-daughter two-generation Ishinomori heroines” with Etsuko Shihomi/Bijinder [Kikaider 01 (1973) character], and I want that point to also strongly appeal to people.

the tale of spire script begins on september 14th, 2023, when the first gameplay trailer for side order dropped.

in rassicas’ private discord server, within an hour or two of the trailer’s release, artzinil noticed something that seemed like a new script on side order’s newly added official webpage.

several other graphics using the script were quickly found on the webpage, but not much could be determined from these small bits of text with little or no context.

five days later, on september 19th, 2023, graphics were released on the official splatoon twitter containing more spire script.

cackle noticed that both graphics in this tweet showed the color chip palette, and that there was script text on it—but the render of the palette had square script, while the 2D art had spire script in the same place. they checked to see if these strings matched up, and they did!

this would later be called the “palette lead”. it was the first of many potential leads that were found, and in fact the only one from the entire actual game which turned out to be correct.

cackle then tried to apply this lead to the color chips seen in the same graphic, but not too much effort was made and they moved onto deciphering things that used other, already deciphered, scripts, because this one was obviously not going to be solved using just the color chips and the text on the chips were probably gibberish.

meanwhile i try to solve the script with just the color chips

on the same day as cackle’s discovery of the palette lead, and with the exact same render from twitter, my journey with spire script began.

someone in a large discord server which i was active in at the time noticed that there seemed to be a new font in a graphic that had been posted today. i immediately took it upon myself to decipher this script with literally nothing besides the color chips (i didn’t know about any of the other places it was)

this seems like an incredibly stupid and irrational thing for me to do, and it objectively was, but it is somewhat less so when put into context. basically, i wasn’t really expecting to solve the cipher all by myself, more so just looking for something to kill time and hyperfocus on during my extremely boring classes.

my then-teammate oxii came up with the name “spire script” during practice that night, which i adopted from that point onward.

i spent hours each day for the next week or so attempting to brute-force the script using a spreadsheet text slotter (the current version has more examples than it did at the time), assuming that the text on each chip was meaningful. i also documented most potential combinations that i thought of, at first in my notes app, and then a bit later in a google doc which i would then use as a journal of sorts for all my endeavors with spire script.

on october 18th, 2023, i shared my findings about the script by adding “spire script” onto inkipedia’s page for inkling scripts and languages.

i still somehow had no idea that there was anyone else working on this script

…

and then nothing happened!

pre-release

the next pieces of spire script came five months later, with the second gameplay trailer for side order on february 13th, 2024.

i’d been sharing my findings on the script in many splatoon discord servers since september, including a modding and datamining server, and the next day, on february 14th (the 15th in their time zone), plink shared a finding in that server.

this was the 8-ball lead, based on the fact that the spire on the infinity ball seemed to match the deepsea script on octo expansion’s 8 ball (when the former was flipped around). if this lead were true, it would mean that some of spire script’s characters map to both letters and numbers.

on february 16th i finally connected with cackle on the modding server, and on february 17th i reached out to rassicas for help on tumblr and got invited to their discord server. plink joined the next day.

this is where things really started happening, now that we had the full team together and talking to each other.

the mixture of our different methods and ideas brought a lot of things about. having a text slotter spreadsheet and shorthand for all the script characters, which i’d developed back in september, were new to the members of rassicas’ server. both were very imperfect when i introduced them—the shorthand was slow to write with and i finally changed it only in december 2024, and cackle developed the text slotter into something much more organized.

the nature of spire script meant that we had to be much more thorough and resort to unconventional methods— cackle even spent hours analyzing our examples for letter frequency and comparing it to other scripts— and everyone added something to that and made it better.

the new promo material gave us several examples but only one lead besides plink’s 8-ball deduction, that being the spire script on the 8-ball goal.

it’s not a long string of characters! it’s only 4! and the words “goal” and “sink” are both 4 letters long so maybe it says one of those!

that was it that was the lead

release

the side order DLC finally came out on february 21st, 2023, introducing us to many false leads.

the most prominent of these was the pixel pearl lead, discovered by plink. there’s a pixelated pearl icon in a cutscene and when viewing dev logs— she has speech bubbles with runic script text in the cutscene, and spire script in the dev logs.

this text matched up perfectly with each other, and this method has historically been the most reliable when solving splatoon scripts. it didn’t conflict with the palette lead, either! so logically that means it’s trustworthy right??

somehow the answer is no.

this spire script text was mimicking how the runic text appeared. it’s actually evil.

pixel pearl was also used to find a few strings that seemed to be alphabet fragments, and some people used those.

there were other fake leads like this as well— the aforementioned 8-ball lead is an example, as well as text on bounce pads that lined up with the square script saying “TAKOSPO” on variants from the other story modes (found by cackle).

gas lead. i’m not sure what else to say

two leads did turn out to be correct, though, and they were found with the help of the text slotter!

two lines on the website seemed to make up words. i guessed that one of them said “name” based on what my text slotter gave me, and cackle guessed that another said “image area” from their own slotter.

these were somewhat random guesses and somehow they ended up being correct

lastly…

that’s not spire script. that’s the runic script letter for Q.

for some goddamn reason, runic Q is in spire script. our current running theory is that runic script was used as a template for spire—pixel pearl could be evidence for that—and the Q was accidentally left in and not changed.

the letter Q is one of the rarest in the english language and difficult to hit while keysmashing. so even though this is the only time runic Q appears like this with spire script, it could still be the letter Q.

does this mean we’ll have to put it on the graphic?? idk

janen ??

there were plenty other places with spire script found in side order, but none that seemed to mean anything or provide any clues. however, on july 24th, 2024, the script made a surprise reappearance in a place completely unrelated to the spire for some reason.

lemuria hub.

a 5-letter word is visible on a sign for a noodle shop in lemuria hub for some reason

this currently deciphers to “JANEN”, though any of those characters could map to a second letter. it’s probably a misspelling of “ramen”, as we already have different cipher characters for R and M. i personally think the first character could also map to D or T, since those are next to R on a keyboard, but i don’t know for sure as of writing this.

hey look it’s like blender

for some reason cackle came back to spire on august 8th, 2024, and noticed something that hadn’t been seen before.

an in-game x-y-z chart (for some 3d modeling program) has each axis labeled with a spire script character. these might actually be x, y, and z! though we don’t know which characters are which letters yet.

bancala walker

”bancala walker”, the japanese artbook for splatoon 3’s DLCs, was announced during the grand festival, on september 9th, 2024.

while the promo pages didn’t provide much in terms of a lead*, just random keymashing as usual, it did give us a preview at what would help us to begin deciphering the script.

*i did think that maybe the spire text below “drone megahorn laser” could be some corruption of those words, but i didn’t try too hard on that thankfully

the full bancala walker book released on december 13th, providing a plethora of spire strings. it didn’t go great at first…

at least i finally decided to fix my crappy shorthand.

not much happened, though

then, on january 8th, 2025, cackle’s copy of bancala walker arrived, and he found something.

he found a line of spire script that had evidently been copy-pasted from a longer string of square on the same page. this is a strategy that rassicas and company used when deciphering using examples from haikara walker, and it works just as well here, too.

it turns out that plink noting the page of every script example in the artbook on our text slotter spreadsheet, and the twitter user calmeremerald’s scan of page 19 specifically being lower quality, were what caused cackle to notice this. plink was looking at that scan for script samples and wrote down if any were too hard to make out. so when cackle got his copy, he made sure to take better pictures of the smaller script on those pages. this is what made him notice that the word lengths lined up here.

as it turns out, this text lineup from bancala walker supports, and is supported by, the palette lead (the very first lead)! it also proves the “name” and “image area” guesses to be correct.

a random cube scanner screen from the background of a stage also seems to have meaningful text. we haven’t fully figured that one out yet, though.

the next day i found another piece of matching text. this one only added one new piece of information, but it’s something!

with this, we are the most confident about spire script that we ever have been. there are, unfortunately, basically no meaningful bits of text with this script, but it was really fun to work with this team and i’m glad it’s amounted to something.

the tale of spire script begins on september 14th, 2023, when the first gameplay trailer for side order dropped.

in rassicas’ private discord server, within an hour or two of the trailer’s release, artzinil noticed something that seemed like a new script on side order’s newly added official webpage.

several other graphics using the script were quickly found on the webpage, but not much could be determined from these small bits of text with little or no context.

five days later, on september 19th, 2023, graphics were released on the official splatoon twitter containing more spire script.

cackle noticed that both graphics in this tweet showed the color chip palette, and that there was script text on it—but the render of the palette had square script, while the 2D art had spire script in the same place. they checked to see if these strings matched up, and they did!

this would later be called the “palette lead”. it was the first of many potential leads that were found, and in fact the only one from the entire actual game which turned out to be correct.

cackle then tried to apply this lead to the color chips seen in the same graphic, but not too much effort was made and they moved onto deciphering things that used other, already deciphered, scripts, because this one was obviously not going to be solved using just the color chips and the text on the chips were probably gibberish.

meanwhile i try to solve the script with just the color chips

on the same day as cackle’s discovery of the palette lead, and with the exact same render from twitter, my journey with spire script began.

someone in a large discord server which i was active in at the time noticed that there seemed to be a new font in a graphic that had been posted today. i immediately took it upon myself to decipher this script with literally nothing besides the color chips (i didn’t know about any of the other places it was)

this seems like an incredibly stupid and irrational thing for me to do, and it objectively was, but it is somewhat less so when put into context. basically, i wasn’t really expecting to solve the cipher all by myself, more so just looking for something to kill time and hyperfocus on during my extremely boring classes.

my then-teammate oxii came up with the name “spire script” during practice that night, which i adopted from that point onward.

i spent hours each day for the next week or so attempting to brute-force the script using a spreadsheet text slotter (the current version has more examples than it did at the time), assuming that the text on each chip was meaningful. i also documented most potential combinations that i thought of, at first in my notes app, and then a bit later in a google doc which i would then use as a journal of sorts for all my endeavors with spire script.

on october 18th, 2023, i shared my findings about the script by adding “spire script” onto inkipedia’s page for inkling scripts and languages.

i still somehow had no idea that there was anyone else working on this script

…

and then nothing happened!

pre-release

the next pieces of spire script came five months later, with the second gameplay trailer for side order on february 13th, 2024.

i’d been sharing my findings on the script in many splatoon discord servers since september, including a modding and datamining server, and the next day, on february 14th (the 15th in their time zone), plink shared a finding in that server.

this was the 8-ball lead, based on the fact that the spire on the infinity ball seemed to match the deepsea script on octo expansion’s 8 ball (when the former was flipped around). if this lead were true, it would mean that some of spire script’s characters map to both letters and numbers.

on february 16th i finally connected with cackle on the modding server, and on february 17th i reached out to rassicas for help on tumblr and got invited to their discord server. plink joined the next day.

this is where things really started happening, now that we had the full team together and talking to each other.

the mixture of our different methods and ideas brought a lot of things about. having a text slotter spreadsheet and shorthand for all the script characters, which i’d developed back in september, were new to the members of rassicas’ server. both were very imperfect when i introduced them—the shorthand was slow to write with and i finally changed it only in december 2024, and cackle developed the text slotter into something much more organized.

the nature of spire script meant that we had to be much more thorough and resort to unconventional methods— cackle even spent hours analyzing our examples for letter frequency and comparing it to other scripts— and everyone added something to that and made it better.

the new promo material gave us several examples but only one lead besides plink’s 8-ball deduction, that being the spire script on the 8-ball goal.

it’s not a long string of characters! it’s only 4! and the words “goal” and “sink” are both 4 letters long so maybe it says one of those!

that was it that was the lead

release

the side order DLC finally came out on february 21st, 2023, introducing us to many false leads.

the most prominent of these was the pixel pearl lead, discovered by plink. there’s a pixelated pearl icon in a cutscene and when viewing dev logs— she has speech bubbles with runic script text in the cutscene, and spire script in the dev logs.

this text matched up perfectly with each other, and this method has historically been the most reliable when solving splatoon scripts. it didn’t conflict with the palette lead, either! so logically that means it’s trustworthy right??

somehow the answer is no.

this spire script text was mimicking how the runic text appeared. it’s actually evil.

pixel pearl was also used to find a few strings that seemed to be alphabet fragments, and some people used those.

there were other fake leads like this as well— the aforementioned 8-ball lead is an example, as well as text on bounce pads that lined up with the square script saying “TAKOSPO” on variants from the other story modes (found by cackle).

gas lead. i’m not sure what else to say

two leads did turn out to be correct, though, and they were found with the help of the text slotter!

two lines on the website seemed to make up words. i guessed that one of them said “name” based on what my text slotter gave me, and cackle guessed that another said “image area” from their own slotter.

these were somewhat random guesses and somehow they ended up being correct

lastly…

that’s not spire script. that’s the runic script letter for Q.

for some goddamn reason, runic Q is in spire script. our current running theory is that runic script was used as a template for spire—pixel pearl could be evidence for that—and the Q was accidentally left in and not changed.

the letter Q is one of the rarest in the english language and difficult to hit while keysmashing. so even though this is the only time runic Q appears like this with spire script, it could still be the letter Q.

does this mean we’ll have to put it on the graphic?? idk

janen ??

there were plenty other places with spire script found in side order, but none that seemed to mean anything or provide any clues. however, on july 24th, 2024, the script made a surprise reappearance in a place completely unrelated to the spire for some reason.

lemuria hub.

a 5-letter word is visible on a sign for a noodle shop in lemuria hub for some reason

this currently deciphers to “JANEN”, though any of those characters could map to a second letter. it’s probably a misspelling of “ramen”, as we already have different cipher characters for R and M. i personally think the first character could also map to D or T, since those are next to R on a keyboard, but i don’t know for sure as of writing this.

hey look it’s like blender

for some reason cackle came back to spire on august 8th, 2024, and noticed something that hadn’t been seen before.

an in-game x-y-z chart (for some 3d modeling program) has each axis labeled with a spire script character. these might actually be x, y, and z! though we don’t know which characters are which letters yet.

bancala walker

”bancala walker”, the japanese artbook for splatoon 3’s DLCs, was announced during the grand festival, on september 9th, 2024.

while the promo pages didn’t provide much in terms of a lead*, just random keymashing as usual, it did give us a preview at what would help us to begin deciphering the script.

*i did think that maybe the spire text below “drone megahorn laser” could be some corruption of those words, but i didn’t try too hard on that thankfully

the full bancala walker book released on december 13th, providing a plethora of spire strings. it didn’t go great at first…

at least i finally decided to fix my crappy shorthand.

not much happened, though

then, on january 8th, 2025, cackle’s copy of bancala walker arrived, and he found something.

he found a line of spire script that had evidently been copy-pasted from a longer string of square on the same page. this is a strategy that rassicas and company used when deciphering using examples from haikara walker, and it works just as well here, too.

it turns out that plink noting the page of every script example in the artbook on our text slotter spreadsheet, and the twitter user calmeremerald’s scan of page 19 specifically being lower quality, were what caused cackle to notice this. plink was looking at that scan for script samples and wrote down if any were too hard to make out. so when cackle got his copy, he made sure to take better pictures of the smaller script on those pages. this is what made him notice that the word lengths lined up here.

as it turns out, this text lineup from bancala walker supports, and is supported by, the palette lead (the very first lead)! it also proves the “name” and “image area” guesses to be correct.

a random cube scanner screen from the background of a stage also seems to have meaningful text. we haven’t fully figured that one out yet, though.

the next day i found another piece of matching text. this one only added one new piece of information, but it’s something!

with this, we are the most confident about spire script that we ever have been. there are, unfortunately, basically no meaningful bits of text with this script, but it was really fun to work with this team and i’m glad it’s amounted to something.

the tale of spire script begins on september 14th, 2023, when the first gameplay trailer for side order dropped.

in rassicas’ private discord server, within an hour or two of the trailer’s release, artzinil noticed something that seemed like a new script on side order’s newly added official webpage.

several other graphics using the script were quickly found on the webpage, but not much could be determined from these small bits of text with little or no context.

five days later, on september 19th, 2023, graphics were released on the official splatoon twitter containing more spire script.

cackle noticed that both graphics in this tweet showed the color chip palette, and that there was script text on it—but the render of the palette had square script, while the 2D art had spire script in the same place. they checked to see if these strings matched up, and they did!

this would later be called the “palette lead”. it was the first of many potential leads that were found, and in fact the only one from the entire actual game which turned out to be correct.

cackle then tried to apply this lead to the color chips seen in the same graphic, but not too much effort was made and they moved onto deciphering things that used other, already deciphered, scripts, because this one was obviously not going to be solved using just the color chips and the text on the chips were probably gibberish.

meanwhile i try to solve the script with just the color chips

on the same day as cackle’s discovery of the palette lead, and with the exact same render from twitter, my journey with spire script began.

someone in a large discord server which i was active in at the time noticed that there seemed to be a new font in a graphic that had been posted today. i immediately took it upon myself to decipher this script with literally nothing besides the color chips (i didn’t know about any of the other places it was)

this seems like an incredibly stupid and irrational thing for me to do, and it objectively was, but it is somewhat less so when put into context. basically, i wasn’t really expecting to solve the cipher all by myself, more so just looking for something to kill time and hyperfocus on during my extremely boring classes.

my then-teammate oxii came up with the name “spire script” during practice that night, which i adopted from that point onward.

i spent hours each day for the next week or so attempting to brute-force the script using a spreadsheet text slotter (the current version has more examples than it did at the time), assuming that the text on each chip was meaningful. i also documented most potential combinations that i thought of, at first in my notes app, and then a bit later in a google doc which i would then use as a journal of sorts for all my endeavors with spire script.

on october 18th, 2023, i shared my findings about the script by adding “spire script” onto inkipedia’s page for inkling scripts and languages.

i still somehow had no idea that there was anyone else working on this script

…

and then nothing happened!

pre-release

the next pieces of spire script came five months later, with the second gameplay trailer for side order on february 13th, 2024.

i’d been sharing my findings on the script in many splatoon discord servers since september, including a modding and datamining server, and the next day, on february 14th (the 15th in their time zone), plink shared a finding in that server.

this was the 8-ball lead, based on the fact that the spire on the infinity ball seemed to match the deepsea script on octo expansion’s 8 ball (when the former was flipped around). if this lead were true, it would mean that some of spire script’s characters map to both letters and numbers.

on february 16th i finally connected with cackle on the modding server, and on february 17th i reached out to rassicas for help on tumblr and got invited to their discord server. plink joined the next day.

this is where things really started happening, now that we had the full team together and talking to each other.

the mixture of our different methods and ideas brought a lot of things about. having a text slotter spreadsheet and shorthand for all the script characters, which i’d developed back in september, were new to the members of rassicas’ server. both were very imperfect when i introduced them—the shorthand was slow to write with and i finally changed it only in december 2024, and cackle developed the text slotter into something much more organized.

the nature of spire script meant that we had to be much more thorough and resort to unconventional methods— cackle even spent hours analyzing our examples for letter frequency and comparing it to other scripts— and everyone added something to that and made it better.

the new promo material gave us several examples but only one lead besides plink’s 8-ball deduction, that being the spire script on the 8-ball goal.

it’s not a long string of characters! it’s only 4! and the words “goal” and “sink” are both 4 letters long so maybe it says one of those!

that was it that was the lead

release

the side order DLC finally came out on february 21st, 2023, introducing us to many false leads.

the most prominent of these was the pixel pearl lead, discovered by plink. there’s a pixelated pearl icon in a cutscene and when viewing dev logs— she has speech bubbles with runic script text in the cutscene, and spire script in the dev logs.

this text matched up perfectly with each other, and this method has historically been the most reliable when solving splatoon scripts. it didn’t conflict with the palette lead, either! so logically that means it’s trustworthy right??

somehow the answer is no.

this spire script text was mimicking how the runic text appeared. it’s actually evil.

pixel pearl was also used to find a few strings that seemed to be alphabet fragments, and some people used those.

there were other fake leads like this as well— the aforementioned 8-ball lead is an example, as well as text on bounce pads that lined up with the square script saying “TAKOSPO” on variants from the other story modes (found by cackle).

gas lead. i’m not sure what else to say

two leads did turn out to be correct, though, and they were found with the help of the text slotter!

two lines on the website seemed to make up words. i guessed that one of them said “name” based on what my text slotter gave me, and cackle guessed that another said “image area” from their own slotter.

these were somewhat random guesses and somehow they ended up being correct

lastly…

that’s not spire script. that’s the runic script letter for Q.

for some goddamn reason, runic Q is in spire script. our current running theory is that runic script was used as a template for spire—pixel pearl could be evidence for that—and the Q was accidentally left in and not changed.

the letter Q is one of the rarest in the english language and difficult to hit while keysmashing. so even though this is the only time runic Q appears like this with spire script, it could still be the letter Q.

does this mean we’ll have to put it on the graphic?? idk

janen ??

there were plenty other places with spire script found in side order, but none that seemed to mean anything or provide any clues. however, on july 24th, 2024, the script made a surprise reappearance in a place completely unrelated to the spire for some reason.

lemuria hub.

a 5-letter word is visible on a sign for a noodle shop in lemuria hub for some reason

this currently deciphers to “JANEN”, though any of those characters could map to a second letter. it’s probably a misspelling of “ramen”, as we already have different cipher characters for R and M. i personally think the first character could also map to D or T, since those are next to R on a keyboard, but i don’t know for sure as of writing this.

hey look it’s like blender

for some reason cackle came back to spire on august 8th, 2024, and noticed something that hadn’t been seen before.

an in-game x-y-z chart (for some 3d modeling program) has each axis labeled with a spire script character. these might actually be x, y, and z! though we don’t know which characters are which letters yet.

bancala walker

”bancala walker”, the japanese artbook for splatoon 3’s DLCs, was announced during the grand festival, on september 9th, 2024.

while the promo pages didn’t provide much in terms of a lead*, just random keymashing as usual, it did give us a preview at what would help us to begin deciphering the script.

*i did think that maybe the spire text below “drone megahorn laser” could be some corruption of those words, but i didn’t try too hard on that thankfully

the full bancala walker book released on december 13th, providing a plethora of spire strings. it didn’t go great at first…

at least i finally decided to fix my crappy shorthand.

not much happened, though

then, on january 8th, 2025, cackle’s copy of bancala walker arrived, and he found something.

he found a line of spire script that had evidently been copy-pasted from a longer string of square on the same page. this is a strategy that rassicas and company used when deciphering using examples from haikara walker, and it works just as well here, too.

it turns out that plink noting the page of every script example in the artbook on our text slotter spreadsheet, and the twitter user calmeremerald’s scan of page 19 specifically being lower quality, were what caused cackle to notice this. plink was looking at that scan for script samples and wrote down if any were too hard to make out. so when cackle got his copy, he made sure to take better pictures of the smaller script on those pages. this is what made him notice that the word lengths lined up here.

as it turns out, this text lineup from bancala walker supports, and is supported by, the palette lead (the very first lead)! it also proves the “name” and “image area” guesses to be correct.

a random cube scanner screen from the background of a stage also seems to have meaningful text. we haven’t fully figured that one out yet, though.

the next day i found another piece of matching text. this one only added one new piece of information, but it’s something!

with this, we are the most confident about spire script that we ever have been. there are, unfortunately, basically no meaningful bits of text with this script, but it was really fun to work with this team and i’m glad it’s amounted to something.

the tale of spire script begins on september 14th, 2023, when the first gameplay trailer for side order dropped.

in rassicas’ private discord server, within an hour or two of the trailer’s release, artzinil noticed something that seemed like a new script on side order’s newly added official webpage.

several other graphics using the script were quickly found on the webpage, but not much could be determined from these small bits of text with little or no context.

five days later, on september 19th, 2023, graphics were released on the official splatoon twitter containing more spire script.

cackle noticed that both graphics in this tweet showed the color chip palette, and that there was script text on it—but the render of the palette had square script, while the 2D art had spire script in the same place. they checked to see if these strings matched up, and they did!

this would later be called the “palette lead”. it was the first of many potential leads that were found, and in fact the only one from the entire actual game which turned out to be correct.

cackle then tried to apply this lead to the color chips seen in the same graphic, but not too much effort was made and they moved onto deciphering things that used other, already deciphered, scripts, because this one was obviously not going to be solved using just the color chips and the text on the chips were probably gibberish.

meanwhile i try to solve the script with just the color chips

on the same day as cackle’s discovery of the palette lead, and with the exact same render from twitter, my journey with spire script began.

someone in a large discord server which i was active in at the time noticed that there seemed to be a new font in a graphic that had been posted today. i immediately took it upon myself to decipher this script with literally nothing besides the color chips (i didn’t know about any of the other places it was)

this seems like an incredibly stupid and irrational thing for me to do, and it objectively was, but it is somewhat less so when put into context. basically, i wasn’t really expecting to solve the cipher all by myself, more so just looking for something to kill time and hyperfocus on during my extremely boring classes.

my then-teammate oxii came up with the name “spire script” during practice that night, which i adopted from that point onward.

i spent hours each day for the next week or so attempting to brute-force the script using a spreadsheet text slotter (the current version has more examples than it did at the time), assuming that the text on each chip was meaningful. i also documented most potential combinations that i thought of, at first in my notes app, and then a bit later in a google doc which i would then use as a journal of sorts for all my endeavors with spire script.

on october 18th, 2023, i shared my findings about the script by adding “spire script” onto inkipedia’s page for inkling scripts and languages.

i still somehow had no idea that there was anyone else working on this script

…

and then nothing happened!

pre-release

the next pieces of spire script came five months later, with the second gameplay trailer for side order on february 13th, 2024.

i’d been sharing my findings on the script in many splatoon discord servers since september, including a modding and datamining server, and the next day, on february 14th (the 15th in their time zone), plink shared a finding in that server.

this was the 8-ball lead, based on the fact that the spire on the infinity ball seemed to match the deepsea script on octo expansion’s 8 ball (when the former was flipped around). if this lead were true, it would mean that some of spire script’s characters map to both letters and numbers.

on february 16th i finally connected with cackle on the modding server, and on february 17th i reached out to rassicas for help on tumblr and got invited to their discord server. plink joined the next day.

this is where things really started happening, now that we had the full team together and talking to each other.

the mixture of our different methods and ideas brought a lot of things about. having a text slotter spreadsheet and shorthand for all the script characters, which i’d developed back in september, were new to the members of rassicas’ server. both were very imperfect when i introduced them—the shorthand was slow to write with and i finally changed it only in december 2024, and cackle developed the text slotter into something much more organized.

the nature of spire script meant that we had to be much more thorough and resort to unconventional methods— cackle even spent hours analyzing our examples for letter frequency and comparing it to other scripts— and everyone added something to that and made it better.

the new promo material gave us several examples but only one lead besides plink’s 8-ball deduction, that being the spire script on the 8-ball goal.

it’s not a long string of characters! it’s only 4! and the words “goal” and “sink” are both 4 letters long so maybe it says one of those!

that was it that was the lead

release

the side order DLC finally came out on february 21st, 2023, introducing us to many false leads.

the most prominent of these was the pixel pearl lead, discovered by plink. there’s a pixelated pearl icon in a cutscene and when viewing dev logs— she has speech bubbles with runic script text in the cutscene, and spire script in the dev logs.

this text matched up perfectly with each other, and this method has historically been the most reliable when solving splatoon scripts. it didn’t conflict with the palette lead, either! so logically that means it’s trustworthy right??

somehow the answer is no.

this spire script text was mimicking how the runic text appeared. it’s actually evil.

pixel pearl was also used to find a few strings that seemed to be alphabet fragments, and some people used those.

there were other fake leads like this as well— the aforementioned 8-ball lead is an example, as well as text on bounce pads that lined up with the square script saying “TAKOSPO” on variants from the other story modes (found by cackle).

gas lead. i’m not sure what else to say

two leads did turn out to be correct, though, and they were found with the help of the text slotter!

two lines on the website seemed to make up words. i guessed that one of them said “name” based on what my text slotter gave me, and cackle guessed that another said “image area” from their own slotter.

these were somewhat random guesses and somehow they ended up being correct

lastly…

that’s not spire script. that’s the runic script letter for Q.

for some goddamn reason, runic Q is in spire script. our current running theory is that runic script was used as a template for spire—pixel pearl could be evidence for that—and the Q was accidentally left in and not changed.

the letter Q is one of the rarest in the english language and difficult to hit while keysmashing. so even though this is the only time runic Q appears like this with spire script, it could still be the letter Q.

does this mean we’ll have to put it on the graphic?? idk

janen ??

there were plenty other places with spire script found in side order, but none that seemed to mean anything or provide any clues. however, on july 24th, 2024, the script made a surprise reappearance in a place completely unrelated to the spire for some reason.

lemuria hub.

a 5-letter word is visible on a sign for a noodle shop in lemuria hub for some reason

this currently deciphers to “JANEN”, though any of those characters could map to a second letter. it’s probably a misspelling of “ramen”, as we already have different cipher characters for R and M. i personally think the first character could also map to D or T, since those are next to R on a keyboard, but i don’t know for sure as of writing this.

hey look it’s like blender

for some reason cackle came back to spire on august 8th, 2024, and noticed something that hadn’t been seen before.

an in-game x-y-z chart (for some 3d modeling program) has each axis labeled with a spire script character. these might actually be x, y, and z! though we don’t know which characters are which letters yet.

bancala walker

”bancala walker”, the japanese artbook for splatoon 3’s DLCs, was announced during the grand festival, on september 9th, 2024.

while the promo pages didn’t provide much in terms of a lead*, just random keymashing as usual, it did give us a preview at what would help us to begin deciphering the script.

*i did think that maybe the spire text below “drone megahorn laser” could be some corruption of those words, but i didn’t try too hard on that thankfully

the full bancala walker book released on december 13th, providing a plethora of spire strings. it didn’t go great at first…

at least i finally decided to fix my crappy shorthand.

not much happened, though

then, on january 8th, 2025, cackle’s copy of bancala walker arrived, and he found something.

he found a line of spire script that had evidently been copy-pasted from a longer string of square on the same page. this is a strategy that rassicas and company used when deciphering using examples from haikara walker, and it works just as well here, too.

it turns out that plink noting the page of every script example in the artbook on our text slotter spreadsheet, and the twitter user calmeremerald’s scan of page 19 specifically being lower quality, were what caused cackle to notice this. plink was looking at that scan for script samples and wrote down if any were too hard to make out. so when cackle got his copy, he made sure to take better pictures of the smaller script on those pages. this is what made him notice that the word lengths lined up here.

as it turns out, this text lineup from bancala walker supports, and is supported by, the palette lead (the very first lead)! it also proves the “name” and “image area” guesses to be correct.

a random cube scanner screen from the background of a stage also seems to have meaningful text. we haven’t fully figured that one out yet, though.

the next day i found another piece of matching text. this one only added one new piece of information, but it’s something!

with this, we are the most confident about spire script that we ever have been. there are, unfortunately, basically no meaningful bits of text with this script, but it was really fun to work with this team and i’m glad it’s amounted to something.