The riddle is entirely fair, and none of the hints in this thread are truly necessary to solve it once "Find the Key" has been reached. I encourage solvers to give it their very best once they've seen that screen, taking a screen capture for their own reference or using the one in this thread.
Everything you need to solve this puzzle can be found on that screen, possibly in combination with a little bit of out-of-game research.
Mr. Q:
Spoiler for Are you sure there's a mistake?:
White does move first. You just have to think like Battler...
Quote:
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My only complaint was that there wasn't enough to show the riddle was keeping the Umineko theme. Sure you can infer that it should, but I feel that a tiny tiny hint to show that it still fits the style would have helped a lot. Then again, maybe it would have helped too much.
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The main strength of this riddle is its use of misdirection - I pulled out a hex editor, and started looking at Unicode values, too, because the way the setup was coded made it look like characters stored in memory. I wouldn't recommend sacrificing that strength.
I ALMOST reached the chessboard epiphany myself; I thought that it was "awfully similar to the 07151129" puzzle when I saw the blocks of 8 characters, so your diagram made me facepalm with the realization that I'd missed the logical step.
(EDITED my post to obscure the answer a little more.)