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The Phoenix Chronicles: Prologue

The story begins!
With a... prologue? Pilot? Proof-of-Concept? One of those p-words.

...phew.

There was a lot to learn. I changed nearly the entire way I render/edit/produce videos like this (except that I'm still trucking in Blender all the way, baby.) I got two shitty, run-down laptops up and running with Windows 10 (thanks for the donation, Ember!) and made them into a bedroom-based render-farm, in addition to the desktop PC in my living room and MAYBE TWO OTHER COMPUTERS I SHOULDN'T MENTION I WAS USING, shhhhhhhh. My VIP through all this was a 500GB external HDD that I used to move frames and assets between machines. There was ONE *hilarious* attempt at cloud-storage that fell to pieces (even with the placeholder setting turned on in Blender) because files were being written faster than internets could catch up. Go fuck y'self, The Cloud.

Lots was learned on the animating side, too. I would definitely like to make more things in this vein--maybe keep going?? Faster, though. Definitely need to make these things more quickly. Luckily, I know that's one skill that can be improved with practice. This was a helluva practice run.

I already have a script for the next episode. It's a good'un, very fun, different tone. I have LOT OF THINGS written. These are old ideas. Some of them survived high school (thank God, most didn't.)

The sound and music are crude as shit because--well, those aren't my skill-sets. I am *very stubborn* and wanted to try it on my own, though, and I won't say it was un-fun. I did LIKE it, almost. Yet I will recruit outside help for this kind of thing in the future. Also voice acting?? Depends on how far we get. Let me know what you guys think!

For those of us who played Squaresoft RPGs between 1995 and 1999, the fate of Zeal's Princess Schala was a huge mystery. Chrono Trigger was, otherwise, a totally solid, complete, perfect game. Even today it's still on "best RPG evar" lists, whenever video game blogs decide to conjure those up twice or thrice a year. Usually it's beat by FF7 at some rung on the ladder, but y'know... no accounting for taste on these things. I don't judge ye lovers of FF7.

But then Square made a little-known offshoot called Radical Dreamers, trying to address this Schala issue. They brought in these characters named Serge and Kid, said they were important. Also Magus changed his name to Magil and decided to stick around the 11th century, for reasons that I guess were good. He didn't talk much. It was a cute little text adventure that never made it outside Japan.

So Square decided to fix that, too, with a big Playstation release--Chrono Cross happened. It's a huge, beautiful mess, wherein immediately after the Ocean Palace disaster Schala (SPOILER ALERT FOR 19-YEAR-OLD-GAME?) falls into the Darkness Beyond Time, gets captured by some amalgamate between the Mammon Machine, a dragon god from another dimension and Lavos in his defeated state, and has to chill for thousands of years trying not to go insane. Also, she dyed her hair blonde and had a space-baby.

I can't even make this shit up. It really happened.

But now here's another dragon, hmm. I think things are going to go a little differently, this time.

~Myshu

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