#this week on: spending too many hours overthinking a throwaway screenshot of a character I don't even particularly care about

[declawedwildcat]

ok gonna ramble my actual thoughts about yesterday's new screencap just to get it all out of my head onto a plate

As unlikely as it is that this is anything more than the artists playing around with making fighting game alt palettes of the characters, I want to pretend that the red-eyed Kuras is a timeline where he drank from the seaspring. We learn from Mhin that Ais hasn't forced anyone to drink yet, but maybe when things start heating up towards faction warfare he takes any power he can get his hands on, even from those he considered friends. Or, conversely, Kuras is just tired of his whole cycle, this endless quest for redemption, the divinity and power and mistakes. His resentment outweighs his trepidation about the seaspring, and he decides to try and get rid of it the only way that seems powerful enough to finally free him.

Of course this then also comes with the insinuation that people who join the groupmind get a thematically recolored evil-twin version of their everyday outfit courtesy of Ais, which is pretty hilarious 😌

it's definitely a strange choice for a placeholder though imo, generally a placeholder should be something that's eye-catchingly obvious so that even someone who's not familiar with what's supposed to be there can immediately catch it at a glance if it gets left in and let whoever is in charge of changing it out know. That's why you often see that eye-searing shade of magenta on placeholder assets. I would think a simple in-engine color layer (like the accidental green Leander) would be more useful for that purpose since black and white would blend with the normal sprites when left on "skip", so this feels like either an inside joke the team put in for their own amusement, or it's just staged for the screenshot lol

But! all theoreticals and wishlists aside, what this actually shows us is two things:

Kuras has a short hair asset, so he could potentially get a haircut at some point in the story. Of course, as anon pointed out this could be just part of how the model is divided, but in my experience modular parts don't usually have covered-up lineart at their division points, they just extend past the point that should be covered to fill any seams. It's a tiny detail, but to me that says they intend to have both hair variations accessible for them to use on finished sprites (whether this is one or not). I haven't worked on a professionally-produced VN though, so maybe their pipeline is different and I'm completely wrong!

Assuming this is not MCR Kuras being introduced here, that means we're seeing a different character's introduction, one that warrants a sprite but doesn't have one yet. Someone's monster form could make sense for MC to vaguely recognize without being able to immediately place them, but having anyone wander around the middle of the Wick in that state seems fairly unlikely. A smaller side character who happens to get an appearance? Or perhaps meeting Elyon? 👀

#wow this got longer than I meant for it to #as always we take things with a grain of salt here‚ i've just had the new pic in my head non-stop since they released it #touchstarved #touchstarved game #i'm not even actually invested in whether or not he gets short hair it's just super interesting to me #DMMd plot-based haircut holdovers maybe lmao #this week on: spending too many hours overthinking a throwaway screenshot of a character I don't even particularly care about #catch me writing 500 words just to say this could be Elyon's entrance