[Project Announcement] Lycoris Drama CD - Another Heroine Inverter

Lycoris the game has been out for over 4 months now. The base game included the majority of the female main and side characters... but the gameverse original characters were strictly left out of the action. However, an upcoming free update some time after the New Year will add the gameverse-original heroines as playable characters. How does that work from a plot perspective? Well, the answer to that was actually released on the very same day as the game came out.

The limited edition of Lycoris the game in Japan came with, among other things, a Drama CD titled "Another Heroine Inverter". This Drama CD is basically a story of what all those original game heroines were doing while Asuna and co rushed into Underworld to save their veggie, I mean, the harem protagonist, I mean, Kirito. This story teased that the gameverse heroines would be joining the Lycoris gang at some point in the future all the way back when the game was just released. And since the update that will introduce the gameverse girls into the game is only a few weeks/months away, we decided to translate the Drama CD story ahead of the release to build up hype.

What's a Drama CD, you ask? Well, it's basically a story told through audio only. A script of the story was acted out by the voice actors of the characters in a recording studio. So, you hear all your favourite characters speak out like in an anime, but there's either no accompanying visuals, or just backgrounds... or at least, that's usually the case... However, as some of you may recall from one of the gameverse streams before Lycoris came out, Futami actually had the idea of adapting the Drama CD into a visual novel format. Well... the guy actually delivered. Aside from the audio recordings, the limited edition of the Lycoris Japanese game package actually included a nearly 40 minute (yikes!) long, full-fledged visual novel version of the Drama CD. Does that make it a Drama VN? Or a VNCD?... Anyway... since there was a version of the story with visuals, we decided to sub the translation onto it!

Although, the Drama CD explains how the gameverse girls are going to join the Lycoris cast, it's not exactly plot heavy... unless by plot you mean gameverse harem shenanigans, in which case it's full of that stuff, so knock yourself out. The story is basically a best girl contest among the girls on who gets to go save Kirito. I mean, what did you expect from a gameverse side story? A deep and bloodcurling plot with tons of character development?

We plan to release our translation at some point when more details on the Lycoris update come out. So, you have something extra to look forward to whenever Futami sets up another Lycoris news stream (that contains actual news)!

-Gsimenas