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A tale of two cats.

(General reflections about the game and its inspiration below.)

Coming to think of it, "The Year of the Cats" would have been a better title, though a less poetic one.

The "cat" of the title has a variety of meanings, but it broadly refers to two men: Otranto, the elected Prime Minister of Alderia, and Scalzi, the military dictator of the Republic. Why are they cats? Well, that's a long story, but part of it is that they aren't dogs, monkeys, or chimpanzees.

...

Who am I kidding?

...

Actually, this game began life as a "my first game" sort of project. I needed something other than the default RPG Maker XP title screen to look at, so I looked around on my hard drive, and I found one of my all-time favourite images: a still of Miss Minchin, from World Masterpiece Theater's Princess Sarah, giving the school cat a vicious kick when in a particularly bad mood. This image was satisfying on two levels. At a baser level, it speaks to our inner sense of schadenfreude: seeing someone or something else getting kicked is, in a way, funny (this is the principle on which Tom and Jerry, whose appeal is timeless, operates.) At a more "exalted" (ahem) level, the scene is a foreshadowing of what will happen later in the story, when Miss Minchin ends up utterly crushed and the cat gets its revenge by scratching her. What goes around comes around, as Lenny Kravitz once sang.

In fact, the first working title was "Kick The Cat", but that didn't quite have the gravitas I was looking for.

None of the playable characters is a cat, though one of them can have a cat as a pet if she looks around a little. However, the two "heroes" (protagonists would probably be a better word: the player has the choice to make them heroes, villains, or something in between) can both take a shot at assassinating one of the titular cats near the end of the game. Should they do it? A lot of the game, including the ending, hangs on this question.

There are five possible endings, and I don't think I'll add any more right now. Why five? Well, The Way, which I revere, had three (or four if you count the two versions of the "normal" ending), and five is the next prime number after three.

The names of the characters also have their own stories:

Waldemar gets his name because it sounds like Vladimir. (I'm a fan of Vladimir Kramnik, the chess player.)
Rodney gets his name (though not his personality) from a forgotten classic of English literature, Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott.
Emily gets her name because, well, I like the name. (Also, "A Blurred Line".)
And Crescent gets her name from a forgotten minor classic of American children's fiction, Cress Delahanty (Cress is short for Crescent) by Jessamyn West.

From such exalted beginnings to some newbie's RPG. How are the mighty fallen!