zakiwana guide

what you're about to see serves as a guide for a long japanese adventure fangame named ざきワナ, translated as zakiwana. this game was made by chip to celebrate the first anniversary of zakuzaku's niconico community page co1875301, which has been deleted at some point between 2021~2022

during the making of this guide i took goldee's unfinished guide as a good reference, you can take a look at it here, it covers most of the important stuff. given this one is not finished mostly because i was already making this guide at the time, you will notice that it does not go through all the content the game has to offer, which i will attempt to cover in here as well to avoid confusion like missing passwords

this game is quite big and has several endings, so order differs a lot depending on each path and ending. therefore, i will include a link to a map made out of several mini-entries on this post. before doing that though, i need to cover the most important things first:

how to download?

the game is split into 4 exes, the reason for this is because according to chip the game would otherwise be too heavy, leading to long loading times on reset. you will need all of those 4 exes to properly beat the game, on any route. all the exes were avaiable through zakuzaku's community page, but as i've mentioned before it's gone, so here's the link to all the files individually. the password for all of them is zaqzaq3939, which is automatically set through the following links:

ざきワナ, 激おまけ, 強制, ？？？

there is also an optional exe named 暇潰し, this one is not required as it's a stand-alone version of some of the avoidances that are present in a specific part of the game. this will later be pointed out in the guide to avoid potential spoilers

if you haven't done it already, make sure you have enabled japanese locale on your computer as it's necessary for the game to recognize japanese input. if for whatever reason you don't want to, here's the whole thing compiled in gm81

for future reference: out of all the exes i linked, we'll be using the first two a lot. so we'll be naming ざきワナ as Disc1, and 激おまけ as Disc2

hidden savepoints

a good amount of the saves in this game are hidden in suspicious spots, and only appear when you get to those spots. so if you see a spot that looks like a place where you would put a save, that means there's most likely a save hidden in there. a certain sign at the beginning explains this in a better way regardless of jp knowledge, so if my explanation wasn't enough, make sure to read that sign

obtaining passwords and spoilers

this game has a lot of passwords in japanese, hence why you needed japanese locale for this. all the passwords will be provided in this guide, but to make it a little bit more fair to the game, i'll cover them on a gray background, similar to how discord spoilers look. to reveal a password, simply hover your mouse on them while holding left-click, like this:

hello→hello

on the other hand, stuff like spoilers and potential backseating will only require to be hovered to be shown, like this:

hello→hello

backing up your saves

by far the most important advice. there are certain sections where the game may delete your saves. this guide will tell you exactly where to make backups, so you don't have to guess where to make one. be careful when making backups though, because the game also deletes weak backup attempts. to put it in a more understandable way, it will delete files with these names:

save#, save# - コピー, controls, DeathTime, temp

make sure not to name your backups like that, and if you do, do not put it in the same directory as the game executable. making a folder and putting your backups there is a way safer solution and is highly recommended, as the game does not check for folders to delete

finished reading? go to the map