When the credits rolled at the end of my first playthrough of Heartfall — A Tale in Three Lives, I knew I had to write something about it. I think that I’ve spent a lot of time in fandom if I do say so myself; I’ve done the time reading fanfiction on my way to middle school, spending my weekends playing video games, and watching seasons of YouTube-based content. All of this to say: I’ve been around the block. Yet, nothing has come close to Heartfall.
I had the honor of being chosen as a beta tester and saying I was overwhelmed with the scope of the game is an understatement. To see the game from its most vulnerable to the fully released project has been nothing short of remarkable. My reaction is an echo of the fandom’s, a constant chorus of “this is so cool” and wanting to do nothing but play to unlock all the routes.
The (free) game, based on the Minecraft YouTube series Third Life, is a labor of love. With 36 endings, more than 12 routes, over 400,000 words of dialogue, nearly 450 pieces of cut-in artwork, and a soundtrack to back it all, Heartfall was created by 70 contributors. Her Campus at Pace was lucky to get an exclusive interview with some of those contributors. Readers, I present to you the team behind Heartfall.
HC: What’s your name? And, tell me a little bit about yourself and the role you played in the production of the game!
Kazehita: “Hello, I am Kazehita (@kazehita_)! With Heartfall’s release, I can call myself a solo developer or publisher with my whole chest! Generally, I am a jack of all trades, but my primary skills are programming in Godot, game design, illustration, and project management. I’ve done behind the scenes work for a handful of other projects in the Hermitcraft fandom before. However, Heartfall is my ‘final hurrah’ for doing things of this nature — I’m planning on moving onto original projects next!”
Sparrow: “I’m Sparrow (@marmaladesparrows) and I ended up doing a lot of things during the project! I was originally brought on as a team manager, then ended up becoming the level design manager once it became clear that that’d be needed. I also did a variety of writing, level design, scenario design, editing and QA as I went along! But for the purposes of this interview, I’m primarily the level design manager which means I was in charge of organizing the implementation of every route.”
“For those who don’t know, “implementation” means converting the route from a set of scripts, flow charts, and artwork into an actually playable set of sessions. Kazehita, as the programmer, built all the underlying systems and the level builder toolset itself, but level designers used those tools to create the experiences and scenarios that are playable in the game.”
Vanyel: “I’m Vanyel (@boonbeenblade), and I was actually brought on as a pinch hitter to support or take over the writing of the Main Route, the most direct adaptation of the original story. They gave me the role of ‘writing cohesion’ for the route in the credits, which has a lot of writers for reasons (which I’ll explain later)!”
Jas: “My name is Jas (@isjaszzz), and I am a digital artist based in Canada with a love for illustration, comics, and game development! I joined the production of Heartfall — A Tale in Three Lives as the lead character concept artist and as part of the organizer team, while also dabbling in early UI design concepting. After all character designs were finalized, I joined the team developing the original story of Third Life, the “main route,” as an artist making splash art for the route and, later, a level designer. I also helped out with quality assurance in the latter part of the project. I wore many hats!”
“To talk specifically about my role as the character designer, my main responsibility during production was to translate every character’s existing Minecraft skins into a character design that fits more in a RPG (Role-Playing Game) setting — in the fantastical, semi-magical world that Heartfall is set in. Notably, one of the YouTubers straight up wore a Captain America skin, and another YouTuber’s skin is just Kakashi. It was really fun to translate some of the more absurd skins, while trying to keep them recognizable as the original character!”
Ami: “I’m Ami (@aamimirs)! My primary role was a team manager for Routes One and Six.”
“While I had the same title in both teams I think they required two completely different methods of managing and communicating. Team One was a much more self-sufficient team, self started their own meetings, and I was decently creatively hands-off and worked more as communication between them and the development/model team. For Team Six, it was more hands-on because of time zone differences and making sure people felt comfortable in their roles. I was managing most of our meetings and gathering a lot more resources for this team. I loved both for different reasons. All my members were lovely.”
“Aside from that, the most notable thing I did was assignment and research for the death flowers. When a character dies in the game, a flower that represents them spawns to serve as a grave, which I drew from my long time experience and love for the language of flowers. A lot of Heartfall is picking up and learning new skills to complete tasks and that was one I adored.”
Zip-Zap: “Hi! I’m Zip-Zap (@zipzapzooooooom), and my main role was Composer Mod/Overseer! I was responsible for setting the general direction for the game’s music, and managing the composing team. I also contributed music, UI, and non-diegetic SFX, as well as writing some dialogue for the canon route.”
HC: How would you describe Heartfall to someone who has no clue what it’s about?
Kazehita: “I’ve gotten a healthy amount of practice on this question lately… Heartfall is not only inspired by a YouTube series, but reinterprets and adapts it! The original series, Third Life, shocked its original viewers with how compelling it was — much of its audience doesn’t expect that from a last-one-standing challenge in Minecraft! This series has a rich history of fanworks and Heartfall is just one of many fan-dedications to this series. In Heartfall, you play as Grian and explore new ways the story could have played out as if you wondered, ‘What if this happened differently?’ Every route is hand-written by passionate teams, so the possibilities you are able to explore may surprise you!”
Sparrow: “It’s honestly an incredibly unique concept for a project, it’s basically ‘What if a fangame was organised like a fanzine?’ It’s a visual novel with RPG elements where every route is crafted by a different small team of four, and then brought together by a lot of hard work by lots of different people. Each route is a ‘what if?’ exploration of the storyline of the original Third Life YouTube series.”
Vanyel: “Heartfall is the video game equivalent of a choose-your-own-adventure novel, based on the online series Third Life. You play through the story, making choices that can lead you down the original canon story, or branch off into new stories that play out depending on the choices you make.”
Jas: “Heartfall — A Tale in Three Lives is a visual novel RPG inspired by the popular Minecraft YouTube Series Third Life! It is a fully-fledged game made collaboratively with 70+ people on the team to explore different ‘what if?’ stories diverging from the original Third Life storyline. But of course, you can also choose to follow the original story!”
“However, the intention is that no prior knowledge about Third Life is required to play the game! It is possible that you may encounter some confusing parts made more with fans in mind, but we tried our best to make sure the majority of the game is understandable, enjoyable, and playable even if you don’t know Third Life!”
Ami: “On the surface, Heartfall is a RPG choose-your-own-adventure visual novel, but underneath it is 12 routes of pure love and creativity. There weren’t many creative limitations so everything you see is real love from the bottom of all the contributors’ hearts, and nourished by our incredible OST from the composers. I think there is little opportunity like this where you can give creatives in a fandom this advanced of a playground and what you see is a wonderful product that comes from that.”
Zip-Zap: “Heartfall is a fangame, based on a Minecraft SMP that works a little bit like The Hunger Games, but each player has three lives! The original series, Third Life, was full of some genuinely baffling, better-than-fiction coincidences and storylines, making it really compelling to adapt into a game. Heartfall retells this story, as well as imagining what might have happened if the player character, Grian, had made slightly different decisions in the beginning. The game is a visual novel, with some RPG elements as well.
HC: Heartfall is a video game that couldn’t be made without the large group of talented people who all worked together. When did you realize that you wanted to be a part of Heartfall?
Kazehita: “I just finished my itty bitty gamejam-adjacent visual novel and went ‘Hey, you know what would be a terribly ill-advised project…’ I used this idea to force me to learn how to develop my own game architecture and my proof of concepts just kept working until the project was actually viable. I kept working on the gamedev and organization preparation until I opened up the project to collaboration applications!”
Sparrow: “I was working on Hotguy Comics: The Ghost Issues! and the applications to join the Heartfall team got promoted on the server where I was working, and I sort of… impulse-applied? I’ve always wanted to do game development and it seemed like an interesting idea, though I wasn’t certain what the vision for it all coming together was at the time. I didn’t think I’d have the creative bandwidth to apply as a contributor but I liked managing so I applied as team manager. The rest is history.”
Vanyel: “I’d known Kaze(hita) was working on Heartfall since the idea originally came to them years ago, since we’ve been friends for a while, and I kept an eye on it. When it came time for applications, though, I realized that another event I was in had a chance of overlapping with the start time — and since it was such a sprint, I didn’t want to commit unless I was sure I would have time, so I actually didn’t apply normally. I did tell Kaze about the situation, though, and they noted my interest. We’d worked together on previous projects, so even though pinch hitter wasn’t a normal ‘goal’ of an application, Kaze knew they could trust me if it came to it.”
“Two months ago, Kaze came back to me and asked if I still wanted to work on it — Route 0 had originally been a side project of the moderators and organizers, but in trying to make it into a full route equal to the others, they simply didn’t have the time. I was, in Kaze’s words, the ‘ace up the sleeve.’ “
“(It was genuinely perfect timing — I’d just completed another long writing project, and even just returned from a weeklong trip to my parents earlier that day, so I had just become available.) Of course I said yes!”
Jas: “I realized I wanted to be a part of Heartfall the instant Kazehita shared their prototype with us! It was such a special project that also touches on my game development interest. It immediately captured my heart!”
Ami: “The second I saw it advertised on X, I knew I needed to be in it. This type of project is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I had hosted a few of my own fandom projects at this point but never anything to this extent and catering this much to my passions (Third Life and video games). I submitted my application pretty much as soon as I saw it.”
Zip-Zap: “Honestly, the second Kaze asked me! I was already vaguely aware that Kaze was working on a Third Life fangame, but I had no idea how far through development they were, so the message was a complete surprise. I sort of knew them from other Discord servers, and I knew they were very beloved friends of mine, so I’m pretty sure I told them I was in instantly, despite not knowing the details!”
HC: A follow-up to my previous question for the contributors: What was the moment when you started to realize that you were a part of this experience? To put it simply, what was your lightbulb moment?
Vanyel: “I think coming in later meant that I took a bit of time to feel integrated into the experience and the ‘team,’ but I also kind of had to hit the ground running. It helped that a lot of people on the staff-space where I was working were people I knew and had worked with before, or were friends with; getting to work with Jas directly after always being ‘adjacent’ on projects was fun, even if we kept egging each other into scope creep. Honestly, I’m not sure there was a lightbulb moment for me — there was work to do, and I was doing it, and people would see it.”
“That, or finding out while watching someone stream the ending and reach scenes I wrote that Kaze hadn’t seen yet and reacting live to them. That felt pretty good.”
Jas: “I probably became a part of the experience a bit more unconventionally. After seeing some prototypes, I started sketching some character design and art direction ideas for fun and ended up sharing them with Kaze. Then, it became a whole back-and-forth brainstorming chain. That was my lightbulb moment!”
Ami: “In one of the first meetings for the game, it was pretty much all the staff, and we were discussing the amount of routes we could reasonably do with the amount of talent we had accepted. I remember meeting everyone on the team, making jokes, what ifs about possible routes, and the main characters of those routes. From those conversations alone, I was already feeling that love and magic for the project.”
Zip-Zap: “Ooooh, I think when I shared the draft for the first bit of music I wrote for the game, “Beach (Day).” Getting positive feedback from the others and knowing I hit the mark was huge!”
HC: With inspiration comes challenges. What were some challenges you faced during the process of creating Heartfall and how did you overcome them?
Kazehita: “There were two hurdles that almost stopped the project; the rest of the bumps were more or less already planned for and had backups.”
“One was long before I opened the contributor period, where I discovered the level design tools I made were truly just… bad. In their final stress test, I found them absolutely intolerable to use — it was just a poorly thought out design. Unfortunately, these issues didn’t reveal themselves until they had to be used within the whole scope of the project. This meant that I had to discard about 50% of all the work I had done up until that point — this was maybe eight months in. As you could imagine, it was a bit rough!”
“The second was mid-production (the contributor period has opened by now) when we had to re-strategize implementing 60+ segments into the game. This was handled by making and training the brand new implementation team, brave volunteers who now would have to handle two roles within the project. Needing to organize this initiative caused a bit of a slowdown in the middle of the project! We truly would not have been able to finish without the implementation team’s hard work and the coordination of its lead, Sparrow.”
Sparrow: “I’d say one of the hardest bits was creating the first polished build of Session One. It’s the first bit of the game anyone is introduced to, so it needs to be a good first impression. At the same time, Session One also branches off into multiple different routes that all need to feel somewhat balanced, but not too overwhelming to a first time player. Kaze(hita) had made a rough demo version of Session One back towards the start of the project before any of the route teams had written anything. It was the first time it had been touched since they’d been fully written. Ultimately that meant, despite all our best efforts, there were a fair number of contradictions, or things that just didn’t feel quite right on a game-feel level.”
“This build was going to be the first time that the teams of contributors were actually going to see how their route would play out from the beginning. Contradictory information could throw off the whole process: it was a lot of pressure! I ended up leading the level design for Session One, as I had a pretty good mental model of the routes and their interactions. However, it still required a lot of problem solving (and a lot of negotiations) to get it into the state it’s in now.”
“One of the biggest game changers was deciding to add in the opening quest. It was decently last minute, but without it, the game felt like it dropped you in with no fanfare, and Route 0 (the route that follows canon) felt particularly hard to find. After adding the quest in, the feel of the opening changed entirely, and the game as a whole really started coming together and feeling more realised.”
Vanyel: “The nature of being a pinch hitter is time crunches, on an already crunched project, so I definitely felt the pressure to keep up. I was originally assigned just one session, but slowly took over more and more of the work that needed to be done, to free up the moderators to do their actual roles or get something like a break for the first time in months.”
“And the nature of Heartfall, especially the canon route, is figuring out how to adapt things from the canon into an entirely new setting. There’s an incredible amount of logistics that have to be worked out — what stays? What gets cut? Did everyone die the number of times they needed to, in manners that make sense, even if we can’t actually replicate the canon moment for some reason? It was a lot of making new trackers and running back over situations in our heads and chats, especially as we got just enough runway for more scope creep.”
“There was one day I woke up at 4 a.m. on a Friday and went ‘Oh god. We have to cover what happens with the cows depending on if you have one or two,’ and then spent the entire day at my normal job and the following Saturday going back-and-forth with Sparrow on it all. Cow math will haunt me forever, but I’m so happy we did them.”
Jas: “The main challenge I faced was for sure the time constraint. The project operated under a very structured timeline that allowed for no procrastination, so I didn’t procrastinate! I made sure to plan for every to-do item I had to be finished by a specific date, and I was mostly successful in meeting my deadlines if I do say so myself!”
Ami: “The biggest challenge during Heartfall for me was balancing the amount of time it needed with my other commitments. For the majority of the time I spent working on Heartfall, I worked full time while being in school. Heartfall was not a passive project at all and it needed a minimum of an hour of daily attention. Even being disconnected from the project for a weekend can leave you confused about the new changes and challenges that your teams are currently facing. It was overcome by relying on other team members when I absolutely needed it and communication.”
Zip-Zap: “The biggest challenge from a music standpoint was always going to be having the final product sound like it belonged to one game, despite having seven different composers with really different backgrounds. The main strategy that I suggested at the start of the project was having a few free virtual instruments that all of us would use. We would all use the same piano, same acoustic guitar, etcetera, and then we could build out from there with any instruments we liked or already owned. The others also went to town peppering in the main theme (which I wrote before applications opened) in their own work, which was both very smart and very flattering!”
“The unserious answer is that the biggest challenge for me personally was mastering, and that I overcame it by asking another composer, Thriplerex, to do it. He’s a legend who couldn’t have been more generous with his time and expertise. But you know what, maybe this is a serious answer after all! Delegation and playing to people’s strengths is important!”
“More recently, the answer has been uploading the soundtrack to DistroKid, our music distributor, for sending the soundtrack to streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music. Their interface is terrible. The page can go inactive and die while the files upload if you leave it alone for two minutes. If you accidentally upload the same file twice, they take a full week to not tell you. I wish them a very ‘let people import data from a CSV.’”
HC: How does it feel for Heartfall to be out in the world and into the hands of the community? How fun has it been seeing fan reactions?
Kazehita: “I am so glad everyone is enjoying it! As a passion-led project, receiving joy in turn is all I would ask for. For it to inspire other people creatively as well is my greatest joy.”
Sparrow: “It’s been really overwhelming honestly! I don’t think I really comprehended at all how big the game was going to be when it was released. It’s been very fun to read through people’s blind reactions.”
Vanyel: “Heartfall isn’t the first time I’ve been involved with a major project, or one that ended up getting noticed by one of the content creators it was made for, but it’s still just setting in that it’s real. I know I only worked on a fairly small portion of the overall massive wordcount and project, but like… I wrote the non-tutorial parts of the tutorial! The first words you see when you start the game for the first time are mine!”
“Needless to say, I’m still hungrily searching out fan reactions and gobbling them up, especially to Route 0 (since I still want to let myself play the other routes and discover the secrets myself, even if I’m already spoiled). There’s been just so much love, and so much excitement — and yes, so many tears I’ve shed and seen shed over this. Even though I wrote it, the story still gets me. Third Life has a staying power for a reason, and I got to bring out a lot of what was important about it to me, and share it with everyone.”
Jas: “It’s been crazy! It’s been insane! Sometimes, I feel like I can’t believe my eyes! It’s been so so so fun and I’m so happy fans are enjoying the project as much as we all enjoyed making it!”
Ami: “I have heard others have intense emotions about launch but more than anything, I’m proud of my teams. I was their manager but seeing them shine and get some (much needed) love from beta testers before release and now the general public after release has been my favorite part. My teams truly deserve all the love for the art they created together.”
Zip-Zap: “Amazing and kind of nuts! I’ve especially loved watching people stream the game — it was something we planned for from a music perspective with making sure nothing would cause streamers to get a copyright strike. For whatever reason I thought, ‘Oh, one of the mods is also a streamer, I bet they want to play it live and that’s why we’re worrying about this.’ I didn’t expect to be able to watch people going in blind!”
“Seeing reactions from the Minecraft content creators that the game features has been absolutely incredible too! It’s very surreal! Although, now that it’s happened a few times, I’m slightly concerned about how quickly my brain has adjusted to it. One of my IRL friends asked me how everything with Heartfall had gone today, and I was like, ‘Oh, pretty normal.’ And then I had to clarify, ‘Wait, actually, one of the people we made the game about livestreamed it and said he wanted to commission the composing team in the future.’ I think I need to make a normal indie game or two after this, to reset my expectations and bring myself down a peg.”
HC: Are there any moments that you wanted to capture that didn’t quite make it on the page/into the final cut?
Kazehita: “Ren was almost a werewolf.”
Sparrow: “I had so much stuff I wanted to do that I didn’t get around to! The project was such a sprint that it was kind of inevitable. Right before the beta test, I did QA playthroughs for eight out of 12 of the routes and made a lot of notes for level design things I wanted to change. I got through… a lot of them? Most of them? But the scale of the game is bonkers, there was inevitably going to be a point where you had to stop fiddling and accept excellent over perfect.”
Vanyel: “There’s a lot of canon that we just couldn’t fit into Heartfall, especially under the time limit we had (we had insider information about the upcoming Life Series, and so the release date could not be any later), so things got cut either for cohesion or for scope. The trench around the desert is normally filled with lava, but by the time we were there, re-asseting the entire desert at that point would’ve been impossible, so that got written around. A lot of my job after the tentpole story was done was ‘figure out how to write around plot holes from things we don’t have time for,’ though I think we found ways to remain true to the important parts of the story and keep narrative cohesion.”
“Honestly, one of the things I wished we had more of? Sound effects. There was a point where we had to do a final round of requests for them, and I did a crunch-time sweep of the Main Route for any sound effects we could need, but there’s a few I missed that would’ve been nice. I feel like my combat sounds got repetitive — but I did the best with what I had!
Jas: “Honestly, nothing comes to mind. I am very happy with the final version of the main route and my character designs! Perhaps the one lament I have is not having the capacity to illustrate a very important moment in Session Three of the main route during production. The artist Worm who illustrated that scene in my stead also did an absolutely incredible job though so I don’t have much to regret and complain about!”
Ami: “There were plenty of ideas that were cut or morphed outside of the initial vision! I’m not sure how much I can say so I’ll be vague by saying there were different mechanics other than grabbing materials that were pitched and tested. Knowing this, I don’t think it realistically would’ve changed the game that dramatically and I love the Heartfall we have now.”
Zip-Zap: “Less of a moment, more of a mechanic — in my dreams, the fishing interaction at the riverside is a fully fledged mini-game. But in Kaze(hita)’s words (roughly), to make a fishing game that actually feels fun and not tedious, it needs a lot of careful design and refinement. It really didn’t make sense to make something like that a priority.”
HC: Any other comments about your process? Did anything in the process of creating Heartfall surprise you?
Kazehita: “Nothing too much! Perhaps just how awesome the staff, contributors, and the players have been. Love everyone lots!”
Sparrow: “My process, and the process of the level design team, honestly involved a lot of making broad estimates of how much time individual tasks would take, believing in ourselves real hard, and a lot of spreadsheets. A lot of spreadsheets. We organized level design around a series of feedback cycles with route teams. We would build a level, show it to teams, they’d request changes and then we’d make those changes: rinse and repeat. Every cycle was slightly different as we learnt on the fly what exactly did and didn’t work in the process. It was stressful, but a lot of fun, and I couldn’t have had a better team of level designers to work on it with. I can’t stress enough how much they all knocked it out of the park.”
Vanyel: “The entire process was a surprise, but I’m still baffled that this functions off of Google Sheets. It’s incredible. I also ended up doing a good amount of reviews since I hadn’t seen Third Life in a bit, and the way I view the story has not changed, since the first time, but deepened. Informed by what follows.”
Jas: “The amount of management and organizational tasks Kaze and everyone on the organizer team had to take on surprised me a lot for sure. With a project of this scale, we made endless spreadsheets, forms, and deadline reminders to make sure everything was on track. Many, many props to Kaze for handling the majority of that administrative work. It was genuinely so inspiring to see!”
“The character design process generally just follows the usual process of reference gathering (finding any types of clothing that could work with the Minecraft skin), sketching, and making different versions until Kazehita and I were happy with the design. Some of my biggest inspirations for character design are The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and many DND players’ character designs I found online. I also love to watch each character/YouTuber’s first episode of Third Life to try to capture their personality in the design!”
Ami: “There was a phase of pitching where every team gave the staff their favorite ideas to turn into routes. Honestly, the ideas and how everyone creatively fed into each other is the kind of thing that’s going to stay with me for a long time. The creativity of the teams combined with the assets and world building made for so many amazing ideas.”
Zip-Zap: “The other composers! Music composing and production can be a very solitary task especially when it’s all done “in the box” or without recording live musicians. During the planning stage, we imagined the composers would mostly keep to themselves… turns out we ended up being some of the most active and social people on our Discord server! The amount of energy and time they gave to the project is genuinely incredible.”
“Also, the scale … originally, we were only going to have a handful of routes, besides the canon one. As well as maybe 20 tracks for the soundtrack? But I think the modular way that the project was organized (in distinct teams), as well having a very wise and experienced mod team, let us get away with a lot of scope creep!”
HC: Do you have a favorite scene? A favorite route?
Kazehita: “My favorite route is “Have we been here before?” and my favorite moment is something in there that you sure have not seen before.”
Sparrow: “I’m cheating and picking three favourite scenes: MR8Revenge (the “You may slay me and take the enchanter” scene) written by Vanyel and illustrated by Jas in Route 0 is some of the most beautiful synergy of art and writing I’ve seen in the game. It gives me chills whenever I see it. I also just adore both the trial scenes, the divorce trial in LLD and the murder trial in RWD are both such interesting ways of using the game’s mechanics. They also just feel so distinct in how they function and are written, despite both being trials and part of the same game. They are both such awesome masterworks.”
Vanyel: “I’m biased towards canon, but I’m very curious to look more into the Dark Forest route, with the Crastle. It’s a little tricky to get, so even the online folks haven’t spoiled it as much, and I’m excited to see what’s in store there.”
“For Route 0, I again split — of the parts I didn’t write … the cactus ring. Cal nailed the ending perfectly, and Jas’ art brings it home to the point that it still makes me teary. For the parts I did write it almost feels like a cheat to say any part of the finale — it’s really easy to lean into heavy emotion there — but I’m going to lock in a tighter moment of “the ghosts in the water after you don’t kill Scar.”
“That was another logistics-turned-narrative beat, since the ghosts were originally just chat messages, which, well, there’s no chat in Heartfall. I got the mental image of the water, and the blood in it, and the ghosts only being visible in the blood itself, and then Jas just nailed the art in a different way than even I expected. Honestly, the whole back half of the final session is bangers. That, or the Post-Renchanting convo with Ren, where you’re offering payment. That’s the one where I worked the hardest with the Google Sheets, so that you can offer the options individually and have them disappear after you’ve done so. Harder than you think, but the effect is worth it.”
Jas: “The main route is my forever beloved! Forever! But in terms of favorite scenes, I will have to say I look forward to everyone reacting to the BigB quiz during Route 10 every time. It is the best bait of all time, I never get tired of seeing reactions to it!”
Ami: “My favorite scene is an ending to one of the routes that I haven’t seen posted yet on social media so I shan’t say! Themes of betrayal and plot twists until the end sit very well with me.”
Zip-Zap: “I’ve always been biased towards the fishing route! I can’t remember the details, but I’m fairly sure either a fishing or a power of friendship route was something that was tossed around as a joke while putting together teams, but then we found the perfect set of applicants for a storyline like that! They did such a great job with it! I’m also a huge sucker for fishing minigames. Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Animal Crossing — they’re all just fishing games to me. I had my heart set on writing the fishing theme from day one.”
HC: Which character do you feel for/relate to the most?
Kazehita: “I don’t believe I have one! Each character contains multitudes.”
Sparrow: “Cleo!”
Vanyel: “I don’t think it’ll surprise anyone that I’m a huge fan of the Crastle and their dynamic, and was glad to get to highlight it against the other pairs, since Third Life is a story of them — Desert Duo, Dogwood, and Flower Husbands being the big ones. Yes, I know Tango and Impulse are both, at points, affiliated with the Crastle — but there’s other people in Renchanting, yet the King and his Hand are set aside as a pair. So, Bdubs and Cleo can, too.”
“And of course, Scar. He’s probably individually the most compelling character to me — I’m biased because he’s so central to the narrative, but seeing the points where perception clashes with his actual actions always pulls at me, because the gap is huge. The fact that he genuinely wanted the reputation system to mean something to people pulled at me so much on my rewatch; it wasn’t a scam, not to Scar. He didn’t want to be ‘scary,’ even on red, but people treated him like such, and so he gave them what they wanted in the hopes it’d keep them around a little longer. I hear Route Two dives even more into this, and knowing who worked on that, I can’t wait to play it for myself!”
Jas: “I love our main character Grian and how we put him through endless torment! Sorry man, you can only ever be happy if you fish.”
Ami: “I feel the most for Joel. His dog is lowkey forever doomed by the plot. I think I’d also light a lot of things on fire if that happened to me.”
Zip-Zap: “If I remember correctly, poor Etho has to watch his tree get burned down in pretty much every single timeline. I’m so sorry, Etho. And I guess with my love of fishing, I relate a lot to Grian!
All information about Heartfall can be found at this link.