Belatedly learned: the Marauder family of enemies in the original Phantasy Star appears to be inspired by Frank Frazetta’s Death Dealer series of paintings.
(Hat tip to the Talking Time forums for the screenshot and the Bard for the discussion of Frazetta that led to the discovery.)
I was flipping through old issues of the Angelique official fan magazine LoveLove Tsuushin recently, having gotten into Ailes Noires and Maren again, and I began noticing, for the first time, the section in the back of the book that showcased doujinshi. The franchise was way ahead of the curve in leveraging fan engagement, and instead of attempting to quash fan works, TPTB recognized their usefulness in stoking fan enthusiasm and actively promoted them: outlining and listing order info for a select assortment of doujins, soliciting and printing fanfics and a whole bunch of fanart. (None of the shounen ai that proliferated in the fandom, of course, though based on the titles listed, some was clearly getting in under the radar.)
I never took real notice of the doujinshi section before, but lemme say: there's some interesting stuff on display. The book that really caught my eye was an Ailes Noires title focusing on Walter, of all people. Not a character whose depths are typically plumbed in canon or fan works, for good reasons, but seeing an entire volume dedicated to a quite ancillary character (yet one from a part of the franchise of which I'm inordinately fond) made me curious.
I went looking for it. No dice. There's utterly no trace of it on the internet 20+ years later. Searching Suruga-ya, Yahoo, and Mandarake brings up Yu-Gi-Oh! titles by the circle, but its numerous Angelique works have disappeared from the face of the earth. Not even the search engine Suruga-ya customers can use to check what the shop might offer for an item turns them up, meaning Suruga-ya's never dealt in them in their history.
Which brings me to Ama no Kairou/Heaven's Corridor/Heaven's Cloister, the four-volume fan doujinshi taking off on Vheen Hikuusen Monogatari/Tales of the Vane Airship about which I've posted a few times previously. I had recent cause to document these books (photographing every page to create an admittedly-imperfect digital record), and the Walter doujin incident caused me to recall how Suruga-ya once had an apparent good stock of Ama no Kairou, still listing the book for a long while after I'd posted about it and the shop's then-largely-unplundered bounty of Lunar doujin were a topic of conversation, but they eventually ran out once they shifted their business from Yahoo to their own storefront and word started getting out, and I haven't seen it since. It went from plentiful to completely gone.
Now, I know "gaming's past is burning" is far from a new or unique lament, whether it's for unarchived PC or mobile games or discontinued live-service stuff or vanishing gaming websites. Some may take issue with including doujinshi in this - though Koei themselves considered it a sufficiently significant part of the subculture surrounding their franchise to feature front and center, and good fan material can be a significant part of one's enjoyment of games. But I think of Ama no Kairou, how its creator built their own personal sequel to a canon work with a rich and elaborate narrative that addressed the originals' themes through the lens of one fan's personal reactions to and unique perspective on the franchise - not one with which I agree in every respect (an unlikely prospect in any event, of course), but one with ambition and a vision - and I think about how it isn't available for anyone interested in it to read, despite having been available relatively recently. What about those other Angelique comics? The listings detail a bunch of stuff tailored even to my pigeonholed interests: doujin where the Knight Captains are part of that Sweet Ange high school AU (they did this officially, but in a not-great Slam Dunk-inspired plot); one where Leviath never went to the other universe, and a new conclusion to his story happens in his own... Is one of them as expansive as Ama no Kairou, to the Leviath storyline what Kairou was to Vheen Hikuusen? Unlikely; most aim probably just to be frothy fluff. But, say, surely someone who takes the time to dedicate a magnus opus to Walter isn't content to be derivative - has a story worth telling? I'd like to find out. I likely won't, ever.
I could go on about vanished fan stuff. I was reviewing the old ausanctuaire and angemedia Tumblrs I used to run - again, for Maren stuff. The first, I shut down because a few Japanese fan artists objected to me reposting art with credit & links back - which is a big no-no nowadays but in that time period was still acceptable, at least in the U.S. I closed the Tumblr regardless because I genuinely didn't set out to hurt anyone's feelings, but I was browsing Pixiv the other day, and...well, more Maren art has survived than I thought, but a lot of it is indeed vanished. Some of it is extant only on that Tumblr, like the excellent Knights-with-glasses pics the artist kicori drew, brimming with character (Eugene's schoolmarmish prissiness; Gerhard's comically-confrontational, slightly-unhinged look that always makes me laugh). I'm concentrating on my recent fixation of Maren here, and I realize some erasure via the sands of time is understandable as it's a niche game, but I could go on with other Angelique examples. Those two Tumblrs are now the only source of a number of screenshot collection posts, for example - their source Tumblrs have since been erased or moved. There was an interesting analysis someone posted relatively recently of how Luva's Twin Collection music video foreshadowed visual gambits the same animators used in the Utena movie. It's gone from the platform. The OP erased a good portion of their Tumblr archive, including that post, and I can't find it even in reblogs.
I suppose this post is devolving to lamentation devoid of a cohesive point here, so I'll attempt to identify a few takeaways to try to make this appear not like a total waste of time.
- LoveLove Tsuushin was a remarkable publication in that went beyond its role as a promotional vehicle for Koei to capture, showcase, and celebrate fan output and fan sentiment in the moment - through the lens of what was acceptable and useful to the parent company, yes, but I'm not familiar with any other game series that had anything like this. I would have loved to have had an LLT equivalent back in the day for Final Fantasy or Phantasy Star.
- Records of where fan communities were at past points in time, be it through unicorn publications like LLT or old Tumblrs, are not only valuable (and overlooked) resources but also quite fun to browse in the present, particularly if you're getting back into an older title or franchise.
- That said, it can frustrating to get glimpses of stories and media you'd like to experience but for various reasons now can't. It's important to be as active as you can close to the release of a media property so you can capture the zeitgeist and keep what you want of it.
ITEM: How could no one alert me to the fact that there is a new English-language Angelique fansite! Well, archive.org has it dating back to 2018 - but it's new to me, dammit, and I love it. Evidently, someone's decided to create a media gallery for the franchise (books/CDs/DVDs), along with personal notes for the books they have. It warms my heart to see someone putting in the effort to create an entirely new, big site in the English-speaking fansphere in this day and age. Or even the day and age of five years ago.
ITEM: I downloaded the Sparkle! CD of character songs for Angelique Luminarise. (Which you can do, too, through that Amazon Japan link, provided you go through the rigmarole of buying yourself an Amazon e-gift card in the exact denomination of the album price to get around credit card region restrictions - or you can stream the album on that page, if you must be so 2023.) It's actually awesome! The songs are top-class, with great variety, and they do a better job of showcasing the characters in an appealing way than all of the pre-release promo info put together. Way better than I was expecting given what had come before. Of particular note: Shuri's song, "Recollection," is not only a legitimate banger (blasting it and "Lovesick" from an open vehicle while driving down the Missouri banks near sunset is one of my fonder memories from earlier this year) but recontextualizes everything I've seen of that character and makes me really eager to learn his story.
(Also, yes: despite it being also two years after its release, I have not yet started Luminarise. It's been a strange two years, all right. Then again, this is all part of my typical Angelique game release cycle: follow everything assiduously up to the release, get the game shortly afterward, plan on doing an LP-type series of posts, fizzle out after a couple, not play the game again. I enjoy the franchise primarily through other media, it seems. If all goes as planned, I should be cracking Lunimarise open in the upcoming few weeks.)
ITEM: I've actually started pasting the lines from the Angelique translation into a spreadsheet with the corresponding Japanese text to facilitate a patch. For the Japanese text, I'm working from an incomplete online script compilation; otherwise, there would be a heck of a lot more Japanese typing than I would have to do as it is. Frustratingly, the online document is formatted in a completely different manner from the book - with text grouped by event, not character - but it's the only source of pre-digitized text I can find, and with what's looking like over 600 rows of cells per character right now, anything to cut down on busywork, however imperfectly. Even if it creates its own manner of busywork.
To engage in a bit of cynicism in an overall positive post: I frankly suspect that once I get the spreadsheet done, the goalposts will be moved yet again, and I'll be asked to do yet more of the patch work proper for none of the credit. I almost think we're never gonna see an English-language version of Angelique unless I myself learn how to put together a patch - which isn't a underestimation of the skill ROM hacking takes but a pragmatic appraisal of the extraordinary resistance this project has to movement on any front if I'm not the one directly behind it.
(Incidentally, if this beast of a project ever, ever gets done and Angelique does get patched, I'm moving to Requiem immediately and skipping Special 2. I don't anticipate a problem with introducing the new characters through Requiem, and there's no reason to delay the introduction of the series' most indelible villain or what's likely the franchise's most accessible installment any longer than necessary.)
ITEM: Recent reblogs reunited me with this Heritage Post by kathisofy, and it reminds me of how I miss fellow Angelique fans. I miss the jokes, the fan content, and the analysis of new material from the heyday of angemedia. I don't have anything deeper to say here. I hope everyone from that community's doing well, and I just want to note that I enjoyed our time together.
ITEM:
Enclosed please find an assortment of brief, quizzical evaluations of vintage Capcom titles. This was kicked off by the Bard switching from his usual warm-up game of Rastan to Magic Sword. It looked neat; I wanted to give it a try! The quickest legit way that came to mind was the volume of the Capcom Classics Collection I didn't have on the PSP - but the retro price boom has hit that platform as well, and the cheapest copy on Amazon commanded as much as the game did when it was brand-new. It was then that I remembered the Capcom Arcade Stadium collections that were released last year. I checked Steam, and sure enough: Magic Sword and a bunch of other titles were there, available à la carte for $1.99 each! The base launcher was even free!
Sounds great, but I gotta say: save for the non-negligible ability to play these titles in 3840 x 2160 (well, 1920 x 1080 - the launcher will sometimes ignore your specified resolution), I found the PSP Capcom Classics Reloaded a far more enjoyable way to play Capcom retro titles. Arcade Stadium does everything it can to get between you and the games. Dismiss 10,000 tutorial screens! Turn off screen tilting and filters! Hey! Do you want to use the rewind function!? No? Too bad! We've mapped it to the right trigger and made it go off if you so much as breathe on the button! Oh, and the other trigger has a speed up/slow down function that's adjusted who knows how, because the same button controls time in opposite directions, apparently! (I don't have a problem with those who want to use these assists, but they shouldn't be effectively foisted on those who choose not to use them.) Also: we've mapped inserting a coin to depressing the R stick, when no one should use depressing an analog stick for any input ever, much less something as important as continuing!
And I'm not even unlocking cool concept art by playing a slot machine with Street Fighter II sound effects.
So I'm afraid the Arcade Stadium launchers were deleted as soon as my gaming experiences were concluded. As the unexamined title is not worth playing, though - or, well, it is; fun is fun, of course, but it's nice to talk about games, too, and as this is a space for doing so, here are brief thoughts on some random famous arcade titles with which I took this opportunity to catch up.
Magic Sword: I played this last night and have near-completely forgotten the particulars of the experience in the interim. You're a swordsman climbing a 50-floor tower of side-scrolling hack-'n'-slashing and intermittent mild platforming, occasionally facing a boss (one of two, a palette-swap of a dragon or a chimera). The big gimmick is that you can rescue a variety of partners from the tower to fight alongside you - bow-wielding amazons; thieves who spot hidden treasures; skillful lizardmen who want diamond bribes - and you both level up independently; not too far, though.
It looks good, but while there is some visual variety, there's not enough for its 50-level length. The same could be said for gameplay, actually. There are lots of options for partners and power-ups, but I don't feel like exploring them through replays? Your options just don't seem to alter the basic gameplay that much. It simply goes on for too damn long. One of your partner options is a bald wizard. I got some mileage out of pretending that he was Solas. More fun than I was getting from the game in the later stages, actually.
It's fine, in that unenthusiastic, dismissive sense of the word. I'll probably play it again a few years from now when I forget how undistinguished it is. It's better than The King of Dragons (which I rate lower than most - it's a cardboard-cutout gallery of a beat-'em-up) but worse than Knights of the Round as far as Capcom medieval action goes. I greatly prefer Mystara to all three of these. Magic Sword did, however, prove the most successful of this campaign's entertainments, as we shall see.
This screenshot deserved to be in 3840 x 2160, you lying launcher.
Forgotten Worlds: There are some interesting visuals in this mostly-sidescrolling shoot-'em-up, aesthetics derived from a blend of technologically-advanced alien lizardmen and ancient Egypt (which I'm sure is the foundation for a racist conspiracy theory somewhere). Some impressive stuff, too, like a massive full-screen boss you have to take out muscle by muscle, or the famous interstitials, such as the bold challenge to eukaryotes above. I like the idea of the 360° shooting, yet there seems to be a slight mismatch between your speed and the speed with which the enemies appear? You seem just-so-ever too slow to react, yet I think if you were sped up, you wouldn't have enough control? Maybe I'm just bad.
Anyhow: despite this, I was having an all right time until halfway through the game, when I got completely depowered upon respawn for some reason - I even lost my option, which is base equipment - and got caught in a positive feedback loop where I couldn't defeat enough enemies to afford the current power-ups, falling further and further behind in the arms race to the point where even the most humble mooks were too bullet-spongy for my peashooter. I was dying literally every few seconds. Even the mohawked heroes stopped bothering to show up between levels to comment. I don't know if the depowering that kicked this off was intentional or a bug, but the results were just awful.
Legendary Wings: I considered this a gap in my gaming knowledge, being a relatively well-known title in its NES incarnation, but it didn't pass the vibe check for this expedition, so to speak. It's one-hit deaths; you can't credit-feed your way through because you restart at the beginning of the stage, not where you died; and your character's jump in the mandatory side-scrolling sections is complete garbage. Perhaps it takes some acclimation, but instant gratification, and not patience or skill, was the theme of this venture. So I moved on to a title totally unknown to me that caught my eye while I was scrolling through the selections:
Progear: Forgive me for what is going to be a big "I don't get it" to an entire genre. I was drawn in by Progear's utterly gorgeous pixel renditions of a quasi-European WWI-era landscape. Those utterly gorgeous graphics proved near-completely unappreciable, however, as Progear is a very aggressive bullet-hell shooter. I knew this was a title by Cave, for whom bullet hells were bread-and-butter, but I wasn't prepared for this iteration of the formula to go down so like Marmite to me. Bullets kill you in one hit, but only sometimes? The only reliable tell is if they have you pinned in an inescapable situation, whereupon they are 100% lethal. Your only defense is a limited supply of bombs, which, upon activation, grant you an invincible force field for a bit and turn all bullets into bonus items. Therefore, the best way to play Progear is consume all your bombs, get as far as you can in the fifteen seconds or so they'll buy you, then see how many seconds you can dodge until the bullet-lethality coin toss turns up tails for you and you lose a life, whereupon you use your new stock of bombs to get a little farther - rinse and repeat. It sucks and takes any skill or challenge out of the title, but it's the only way to see anything.
Shmups are, like beat-'em-ups, a "sit back and turn your brain off" genre for me. I just want to enjoy the reflexive action and spectacle. I don't at all enjoy staring at a little bunch of dots and squeezing my avatar through the tiny gaps between them, and I don't see the point to expending anything on graphics when you by necessity have to keep your eyes glued to a very, very narrow slice of the screen and can't look at anything pretty or fun.
In conclusion:
"Love and Courage"? That isn't the Ares I know.
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