Fault Milestone One is a visual novel video game developed by Alice in Dissonance and published by Sekai Project.
Fault Milestone One follows the royal guardian Ritona, who uses magic to escape the kingdom of Rughzenhaide, along with princess Selphine, after it gets attacked by mercenaries.
The story was initially based on a pitch for a role-playing game delivered to Munisix; being underwhelmed with it, he reworked it until it according to him no longer resembled the original idea.
It included the premise of a princess defeating an enemy that had devastated her homeland, as well as character names and personalities, and asked Munisix to write a story.
He did not consider the characters' sexual or affectionate attractiveness to be a primary goal, and intended for them to be "gritty and cool" rather than "cute and lovely".
[11] He aimed to give each part of the game world its own feeling: Rughzenhaide and the Alliance were made similar to the Age of Enlightenment, but with an information technology (IT) revolution that did not require computers.
[13] He tried to write slice-of-life scenes for the game, but felt that they were not compelling or convincing, stating that the tense situations the main characters are in throughout the story leave little room for levity, as they need to get home alive and constantly have to consider potential dangers.
[16] Some locations that did not exist in the original draft, such as the Zhevitz family manor, were added to the story late during the game's production when Alice in Dissonance was low on money.
They contacted Alice in Dissonance and organized a meeting in Tokyo, where they discussed the licenses that would be needed to publish the game in the West; the only one required was for the music.
As Alice in Dissonance felt that the game required some more polish before getting an international release,[19] they decided to finance development of improved character sprites, new cutscenes and an English translation through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.
[5] Originally, Munisix had planned to handle the localization himself, but due to the success of the crowdfunding campaign he was instead able to focus on developing the sequel Fault Milestone Two.
[28] An update in March 2018 replaced most character and background art with higher quality ones, as well as a new score composed by Luiza Carvalho.
[3] Meanwhile, Barker thought that the translation was well done, and that the script was mostly free of errors; he did however find it to read awkwardly at times, with unnatural-sounding dialogue.
[2] Ethan thought that Sekai Project had done a good job with the game's presentation, calling it a "professional package".
[2][3][34][35] Thew enjoyed the premise and Rune's history, calling it "interesting and thematically resonant", but found it too disconnected from the main story.
[2] Thew found the game world interesting, calling the detailed magic system fascinating, but felt that the exposition of it was overly long and clunky, and unnecessary due to the included encyclopedia that already explains it.
[2] Impress Watch did however like the world building, calling it unique and believable, and commenting that it made use of magic without turning it into a miraculous power that can accomplish anything.