AKIKO WITH A GOLDEN HEART — ORIGINAL CAST / JAPANESE VOICES Version 0.4.2 · COSOM · 2026-11-03 Two original positive command-adventure stories: The Open Day and The Lantern Path. All six characters speak Japanese. Dialogue can be English with Japanese word hints, Japanese with English word hints, or plain English. Japanese subtitles use the exact289-line script spoken in the voice recordings. Interface, choices, guide hints and journal guidance remain English. Conversation history follows the chosen learning mode. Key words have glosses beneath them; optional Roman letters show Japanese readings. Words opens the bilingual line and a vocabulary notebook, with browser-local saved terms. Reading the notebook pauses the story and preserves its place; closing it returns to the prior playback state. Vocabulary is contextual, not literal word alignment. Readings and references are in source/VOCABULARY.json and source/VOCABULARY-SOURCES.json. Shareable modes: ?learn=en-ja and ?learn=ja-en. All audio, art, story state and manual save slots remain unchanged from the expression edition. The 289 Japanese utterances adapt the authored English script, including puzzle clues, conditional dialogue and all nine ending pairings. The aligned Japanese/English script is source/JAPANESE-DIALOGUE.json. An entirely new cast and all-new game artwork Akiko,28: a Black Japanese teacher, learning to ask for help as well as offer it. Naomi,35: an East Asian Japanese coordinator who makes room for other people's ideas. Marina,20: a Latina Japanese adult student and athlete finding her welcome speech. Priya,24: a South Asian Japanese reading-room volunteer who repairs rather than discards. Claire,55: a white Japanese resident who tends the community greenhouse. Daichi,32: a Black Japanese craft volunteer keeping a family lantern in use. All principal characters are adults. Everyone belongs to the same Japanese-speaking community; backgrounds are varied, and personalities and roles guide the story. The active edition uses twelve newly illustrated locations and six transparent character portraits. Each character has neutral, happy, thoughtful and concerned expressions: six neutral cutouts plus six three-cell expression sheets, edited with built-in ImageGen. Character sprites preserve genuine PNG alpha. Akiko is on the left; her conversation partner is on the right. Expressions follow dialogue. The wider, viewport-filling game frame contains subtitles, commands and all menus. Menu contains AI pace/route, voice/music/volume, help, eight save slots and credits. Opening, ending, journal and saves stay visually inside the same measured frame. Full screen expands this same window. No original Akiko game image is referenced by the active runtime. Exact prompts, dimensions and hashes are in art-manifest.json and source/art-prompts-v0.4.0/ plus source/art-prompts-v0.4.1/. The illustrations use a visual pixel-art style in full-color PNG files; they are not native indexed16-color X68000 graphics. Older public assets are retained only for previously opened editions. Japanese voices generated with ElevenLabs v4 Akiko: Rina - Young Adult& Natural Naomi: Honoka - Clear & Composed Marina: Miki - Bright, Natural, Expressive Priya: Soya - Clear& Bright Claire: Yoko - Calm & Resonant Woman Daichi: Ishibashi - Inviting, Natural and Smoky These are synthetic performances. Original service exports remain in the local production archive; browser MP3s are mono96kbps with matched loudness. Metadata, dialogue alignment, durations, hashes and source-archive hashes are documented in audio-manifest.json. Separate voice/music toggles, line replay and music ducking are available. Audio starts following a user click. Music One Small Kindness (opening) and There Is Room for Us (ending) are new original Suno compositions from the voiced edition, using a warm retro FM-synth palette. They are not uploaded-audio remixes. Suno rejected the original soundtrack upload; no speed-altered retry was submitted. The original gameplay theme and separately documented soundtrack archive are retained, as requested. Playback and progress The opening introduces the new cast. The closing reflects both selected endings, conversations and optional kindnesses actually completed, then plays eight credit pages. AI Play uses a local story planner, with no cloud AI calls. Story and Quick pace wait for Japanese speech; Fast demo is silent. Pause/resume, manual takeover, and visibility pause remain available. Version4 saves are separate. Older v3/v2/v1 saves can be read with character names updated for this edition; original stored copies and all manual slots remain intact. The active-edition source ZIP includes its current runtime, Japanese audio, new art, prompts, aligned dialogue and tests. Older runtime/media files are omitted from that ZIP. A byte-identical copy of the recovered gameplay theme is included so the game does not require the adjacent preservation archive when run from the source package. To run the unpacked package locally, serve its root with a basic local HTTP server, for example: python -m http.server 8000 --bind 127.0.0.1 Then open http://127.0.0.1:8000/ . ES modules need an HTTP origin rather than file://. Credits and licenses Original story and new browser code: COSOM preservation project, MIT license. DotGothic16: The DotGothic16 Project Authors, SIL Open Font License1.1. Gameplay theme: the original Akiko music creators, recovered from supplied disks. New illustrations: built-in ImageGen. New theme compositions: Suno. Japanese voice performances: ElevenLabs v4, using the cast listed above.