critical heaven – Page 3

To The Third Power

March 31, 2022 3/2 No Comments

Hiiiii, absentee internet guy here! I actually started a bona fide article back in December then didn’t finish it because it was pretentious as fuck and now isn’t even topical! So I just thought it was a good time to check in and report on some games I’ve enjoyed recently, dump some sketches, then come back in another three to four months. You’re fine with that, right? I like that about our relationship.

Alchemy Stars: Aurora Burst (Mobile)- First off, yeah, a lot of these are going to be mobile games. I’ve played entirely too many of them lately, and keep trying new ones just to see what looks promising and which turns into a dull slog of daily quests and template generated moeblobs and/or gijinka. Alchemy Stars is really cool, though, since it has a unique battle system involving drawing a line through like-colored tiles to move your squad around and attack enemies. It’s goofy as hell watching a conga line of characters run in awkward panels to either do a hit and run or just burn up tiles on the far end of the map, but I love the ‘gameyness’ in the same way I love STING RPG’s. It’s simplistic, yet has some nuance in how you build your teams and trigger your active skills. I broke my rule about joining games for collaborations since a Dragon Maid crossover was going on at the time, but I like the game itself enough to keep picking away at it a while every day.

I give it a 3 out of 2.

Guardian Tales (Mobile)- Okay I broke the rule again with this one due to peer pressure: there was a Slayers collab going on and other members of the fan discord I’m on were really enjoying it, so I bit. Guardian Tales is a surprisingly fun sort of Zelda-like title that gets bogged down a bit for me with Gacha Things. Overall, I’d say it’s worth a play but I prefer the bite sized stages, puzzles and exploration parts of it to the resource grinding, active and passive PVP, and vestigial but compulsory co op elements that every mobile game (or ‘mobage’ if you’re like that) and kind of wish it was just a stand alone thing that was just that. It’s got an interesting sense of humor and likes to casually slide dark notes in your way, which really made that Slayers crossover make sense.

I’d call it a 2 out of 2. Fun, nothing glaringly bad but I wouldn’t say I’m hooked.

World Flipper (surprise, it’s also Mobile)- I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for video games that take a physical game and do things with it that you couldn’t do on a real pinball table/race track/line at the urgent care. World Flipper is a pinball RPG where you build teams of adventurers then fling them violently at enemies and obstacles to score points and charge up for Power Flips and active skills. I love the presentation (tiny sprites for the actual game, colorful clean character art for dialogue and menus) and it’s pretty easy to get a fix in short bursts since each stage is usually just a two-screen ‘table’ that can be beaten in a couple minutes. The flip (heh) side of the whole thing is it’s a very light, fluffy kind of experience so don’t go in expecting LORE! or anything especially deep. It’s just a really good game to toss on when you’re in ‘head empty, actual RPG take too long’ mode. Given that’s been the philosophy of most of my attempted game projects myself, I can’t help but love it. Also worth pointing out the game just automatically ticks off daily quests and achievements as you hit them, so you’re never consulting a checklist and being compelled to do all of the menial bullshit on it on a daily basis, so it is a surprisingly guilt/FOMO free experience for what it is.

2 out of 2.

Final Gear (Mobile)- I like mechs. This shouldn’t be remotely surprising for long time readers, new readers, people I’ve sat next to on a bus, or those who quietly just stop responding on Discord after several paragraphs explaining the different VF-1 Valkyrie variants and who used them in Classic Macross. Final Gear is a mecha RPG that plays a bit like a side scrolling beat em up with guns added, until you can turn on Auto battle and much like Azur Lane, there’s rarely a reason to go back. Of course, these mechs are piloted by cute, merchandisable anime girls. They seem to have pretty frequent collab events, which could be a selling point if you’re into mecha because if there’s anything we mecha fans love is seeing a mecha we know in something else. The guest character art seems to be all done by their own staff though, which isn’t outright *bad* so much as kind of uncanny in some cases. A smiling, moe-fied Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the more cursed examples. (Original characters look fine though.)

Final Gear is a tough recommend for me. I like mecha, the construction system is cool (if you get the full parts set and pilot for a Custom unit, you can transform it into a cooler looking, more powerful version) but resources for upgrading can get really grindy and as far as I can tell, whaling is about mandatory for some machines (you get points from making gacha pulls on a banner which can be used to buy parts of a character’s Custom from the banner, but going through the Eva collab f2p only ended up giving me enough parts for Eva-02’s backpack and arms.) It’s worth playing if you just can’t get enough robots in your life, but it has a lot of annoyances that might dampen your enthusiasm including crashes, typos, and a high maintenance base that seems to consume a baffling amount of system resources when you visit.

If I gotta be real, this is a 1 out of 2 but has potential to improve if it survives. On the other hand, my Research on -booru sites has yielded mostly official art rips and barely any risque fan art so that may not bode well for its popularity.

Azure Striker Gunvolt: Striker Pack (Switch)- I bought the individual games at launch on my 3DS, plodded through them, then never touched them again, but I’ve been on a major Inti Creates fanboy kick lately and decided to go back to the beginning of the series to see how I like them now. And, as happens to me a lot, really, I enjoyed the replay a lot more. I’ve heard that some tweaks were made to the collection, like additional platforms in Zonda’s upside down flipped sequences and the script to GV1 was essentially de-4Kids’d, but I barely remember the first time around so I got to just appreciate it as is. Hunting for jewels for… Joule was less obnoxious than I remembered, but the bosses remain as tough as I thought. I think I’m just more welcoming of challenge than I was back than- at least not counting attempting the good end- fighting those bosses a second time without prevasion on sucks. I like GV2 more overall, due in no small part to just liking Copen’s play style a lot. Gunvolt’s tag and zap mechanic is neat, but physically ramming enemies to tag them, ricocheting off walls and air dashing is just plain fun. I jumped at his spinoff when it came out. Overall, it is two good games bundled together, so it’s easy to suggest.

I’d give the Striker Pack a 3/2 but the limitations of my forced point scale means I can’t give iX a slightly higher score, I guess.

Luminous Avenger iX (Switch)- Gunvolt’s edgy boi rival Copen gets a spinoff where it turns out he was right to want to kill all the ~~Mutants~~ Adepts, actually, because in the future they’ve taken over the joint and hunt the surviving humans through their ruined cities. This game is a joy, it’s all about mastering Copen’s movement and weaponry to rack up combos and score, and it’s been polished and streamlined a lot since the 3DS entries. Since I didn’t get too deep into it before, basically the GV series are Mega Man X-likes as they appear, but designed more around getting through stages quickly, untouched, and chaining up points. Survival itself is actually pretty easy since both characters have an ability called “Prevasion” that basically trades their electric gauge or bullets to take a hit before you start losing health, and either of those things can be reloaded by double tapping down at any time. So if you play deliberately, it’s usually pretty simple to get out of the way and quickly reload before going on the offensive again.

Also, considering Copen’s play is based around different kinds of dashes, combos, and the bosses in iX2 are more or less expies of Mighty Numbers, the entire thing kind of feels like a big flex on Mighty No. 9 and I love passive aggressiveness in the games industry.

Luminous Avenger iX gets a 3 out of 2 in my book, nudged slightly higher than the previous games as mentioned above, though honestly, play ’em all!

Gal*Gun 2 (Switch&Steam)- Yes, I own this game. Twice. If you have to pick, I would pick PC for mouse aim. I don’t know where to really begin breaking this down while still keeping things kind of snappy since this list is getting longer than I planned, but do you like rail shooters like House of the Dead or Lethal Enforcers? It’s like that, but horny. You play a nondescript loner boy who is given a Pheremone Shot and Pheremone Goggles that will help drive out and defeat the mini-devils serial prankster Korona is spreading to cause mischief. The side effect of this demon busting gear is it makes every female member of the school irresistibly, violently attracted to you, so you must take them down by ‘satisfying’ them with Pheremone Shots to their weak points. It is exactly the kind of game you think it is assuming you know they stop short of actual nudity because it’s a console game for Grodd’s sake. GG2 has a surprising amount of content in it though, in the form of numerous side missions, different types of stages including defense stages (which suck), hidden object searching (which kind of sucks), and the route-ending Doki Doki stages where you just get right in there and drive the devils out of your chosen gal pal’s body at point blank range while they writhe and my friend judges me and tries to think of an excuse to go home.

Really, it’s just a goofy as hell anime fanservice game that’s more fun than it has any right to be. I was laughing my ass off when it gets to extremes like the girl next door revealing her pet project of an Anti-God Laser or classmates chasing you in the air vents like Xenomorphs. If you miss light gun or shooting gallery type games, it’s a pretty fun one though it feels like a missed opportunity to let you use the detached joy-con to aim like a pistol instead of doing the awkward Splatoon whole-Switch tilt on console. Steam’s port has mouse aiming which makes things much easier (much, much easier- they probably dumbed things down a bit expecting console aiming response times.)

I give it a solid 2/2. I had a blast playing through it (Chiru best gal, classic gaming five-ever) but I’m not really itching to return to it any time soon.

I think that about does it for stuff I want to dish on right now, I’ve been in aggressive CONSUME MEDIA mode for the past month or so and felt like sharing. I haven’t gotten as much PRODUCE CONTENT done as a result unfortunately, but hope to turn that around once things stabilize a bit. Had a lot of vet trips for Nia over the past couple months and work is jerking my schedule around for the first time in a good while, so here’s hoping it’s stable hours even if they’re not the ones I prefer to work. Friday Raffles have also been getting back in swing over on RGL, so I can be caught there most Fridays when an event isn’t going on. But I’ve been thinking lately, I really need to just nail down a project and get it out there instead of talking endlessly about My Game that doesn’t actually exist as yet so I can’t show it off.

Until next time, adios.

The Pre July 4th Art Dump of Freedom

July 1, 2021 3/2 No Comments

Sketch Dump of the Whenever

January 24, 2021 3/2 No Comments

I sort of trailed off doing my recap sketch dump postings, huh? Let’s have ourselves a masterpost of my late 2020/early 2021 artwork!

Building Character: Tomcat

October 17, 2020 3/2 No Comments

I decided it would be fun to go back and look at the evolution of original characters I’ve been using for a while, show off how their design changed and why, and just generally hear myself talk. Hopefully, you find the process interesting as well, maybe it will even help some of you in some way. For this first installment, I ran a Twitter poll and was actually sort of surprised Critical Heaven’s Tomcat beat out my de facto mascot Eishi, but there’s a lot of stuff to say about her character and design over time.

You could almost say that Tomcat’s design began with an Arwing girl I drew ages ago during my daily sketch project. Of course, she would be a fox rather than a ‘cat,’ but the brown hair and white streak were already there to mimic Fox McCloud’s hair. It’s also pretty obvious I’ve been into the “anime girls as planes” thing for a very long time at this point. The design was actually designed to work best as a chibi with her toting a rifle shaped like the Arwing’s nose so the overall shape of the ‘sprite’ would look like a chunky version of the inspiration. I’d done plenty of designs like this for kicks in the past but didn’t have much idea what to do with them until I started getting into mobile games like Girls’ Frontline and something… clicked.

Earliest version of Tomcat was very… Anime American

Really, breaking down Tomcat will say a lot about the project overall since she was the first ‘plane girl’ I started working on. A-10 sprung to mind more or less fully formed, but Tomcat is more of a guideline for the rest of the conventional strike fighter class. The very first take on Cat was kind of a cynical “what would an Eastern-made video game do with a personification of an iconic US fighter,” so she’s a top heavy, blue-eyed blonde. Several early takes use a more drab jacket which was inspired by Tom Cruise’s Top Gun flight suit- but a flight suit isn’t really that fan servicey, so…

The twintails were actually probably about the most clever part since the F-14 *does* have two tails (thrust nozzles and rudders that is.) Her ribbons carrying Jolly Rogers was kind of intended to be a deal where if she was deco’d as other units their logo could replace it, but I went with those since they looked cool and it sort of doubles as a Macross ref. The aviators stay a constant through basically all versions.

I decided to change her to brown hair pretty early on for no particular reason other than a preference for redheads and brunettes. I wanted to give her cat ears in some form or another but shied away from giving her *actual* cat ears in favor of her headset including them. Another idea was putting small copies of the tail fins on her headset positioned like cat ears, but they don’t look much like a pair and having them sideways creating drag is basically the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Looking back at the second draft I think I like having them smaller like this than what she currently has, especially since giving her kind of a pixie cut instead of twintails makes *anything* on her head stand out more. The armor isn’t more than hinted at but early on I was planning to have everyone wear their wings at hip level so I could do whatever when posing the upper body. The Jolly Rogers scarf is probably a little too on the nose GFL-ish but it looks cool, dammit.

As things went on, I decided on more of a “cool big sis” image for her and ditched the twintails and knotted undershirt. She looks so dependable in this stage! She also lost the Jolly Rogers imagery around here since I sort of started to get an inkling of saving some of the cooler themed paint jobs and stuff for variant costumes and the like and also wanted room to figure out an original look for the squadron. (In the end they all kind of just do their own thing, though…)

The white streak found its way into Cat’s hair at some point (I honestly forgot it left other than her blonde phase!) I think it helps a bit to make her look more like an alley cat if her ‘coat’ isn’t all one color. I also made her a little younger looking since the fighter line she and her team are inspired by are collectively known as the “Teen Series” and I wanted her to be more in line with them in appearance. Her outfit became something more like a street racer’s and is supposed to be covered with patches and logos, even if I leave them out of a lot of sketches. I think sporty clothes suit her well, I love outfits that have a sexy side and a practical side to them. Since the other Heavens Squadron members have a dominant color, eventually I decided that Tomcat’s should be white but she has light greys with black and gold for emphasis here and there so it doesn’t look too sterile. She also gained a little cat bell alongside her dog tags about here.

The NO STEP warning and the number 6 patch on her bottom are some of my favorite parts of her outfit. Put together it kind of comes off as “Stay off my ass,” which fits her attitude nicely.

I think this is about where I was pretty satisfied with her basic look.

The girls’ armors in general have gone through a few changes, as mentioned above the original idea was to have the wings and engines around waist level but it sort of felt like they were just riding their armor instead of wearing it. The current general arrangement is for the engines and tail to rest at the small of the back with a ‘spine’ piece running the wings up to the shoulder area. In earlier takes the plane parts were spread out a bit more and Tomcat had a sort of unique arrangement where her intakes and wings were affixed to the shoulders themselves (the note about the shoulder clamps being padded and ‘comfy.’) Since Azur Lane and Girls’ Frontline were big inspirations, a lot of these designs sort of minimize the armor in favor of showing off the outfits underneath. In older sketches, the leg armor in particular is mostly limited to some straps and braces with big thigh panels and boots with landing wheels incorporated into them and the arms are basically bare. Alternative wing arrangements included them floating just outside the arms ‘anchored’ to upper arm braces and briefly, as forearm shields since wings both tend to house weapons and they’re just such nice big ‘shieldy’ looking bits. I was more or less approaching them from the angle of “how annoying would this be to pose with a toy?,” so a lot of the concepts were centered on how to leave the arms as free as possible.

Some of the broader ideas regarding what Sprites are and how they should look and act were gelling around here, which is when I began drawing them with light-up pupils instead of normal eyes. It’s an idea I’d sort of kicked around for another project but made more sense for a total non-human to have eyes that work differently than a person with nanomachines. Eishi’s have been missing for a long time so I’m considering retconning her into being a Sprite. The earliest concept when I sat down and went “I want fighter jets to turn into cute girls” was having them be ghosts or angels that emerged from the wrecks of downed aircraft, maybe even restless dead pilots wanting a second chance. Another idea was just plain androids, but a certain part of me just wasn’t satisfied with that. So, kind of cannibalizing an idea from a shmup concept, it was decided that they would be servants summoned from ancient relics- basically walking generators with a lot of power they weren’t able to actually use without human masters to give them devices to channel it through and/or permission to tap into it. This also provides a good excuse for them to have quirky personalities that a military/pseudo-military group would be willing to tolerate. So the final form of the Sprites ended up being ‘data beings’ of unclear origin brought out of black slabs from an old civilization that used them as some sort of archives.

Worth pointing out in the original blonde ‘Cat, it’s partially visible she’s wearing gauntlets with pylon attachments on them so she sort of got downgraded then gained them back later. The arm bracers the girls wear both function as deflector shields and hardpoints for weaponry. The leg reinforcements were originally intended to be specifically for carrier-based planes’ use but seeing as how all Sprites are small enough to work on one they basically all get some kind of leg armor.

Currently, Tomcat (and everyone else) are being steered in a more typical mecha musume-ish style but most of the outfits are being kept as ‘civvies.’ I had a few people wondering why I wasn’t drawing them more in the style of all the Guardian Legend stuff I used to post, and I didn’t have a particularly good answer seeing as how I love that stuff. The current iteration of Tomcat keeps a lot of her older design aspects but streamlined a bit to go with the form-fitting body armor. The skintight leotard parts are called Insulators- since the Sprites are effectively solidified data clusters, the most practical kind of armor they equip would be something that keeps their ‘signal’ from leaking out, right? Just don’t think too hard about how much skin some of the suits leave out. I just had to leave her her jacket though, it just doesn’t feel right without it there.

In short, I feel like the most drastic changes happened early on but once I settled on a personality I liked, her appearance settled in pretty solidly. She’s the sort who comes off as reckless, careless, maybe even a little dumb, but with sharp instincts and a lot of experience to back up her lack of taking things seriously. Tomcat is also infamously hard to keep track of in her off duty time, often wandering off into unexpected places looking for some kind of entertainment. At times, she’s been known to wander into enemy territory from time to time just to have lunch or mingle with off-duty rivals, generally to their annoyance. Despite that, she’s fiercely loyal to her squadron and sees them as her family.

October Surprise (i updated)

October 10, 2020 3/2 No Comments

I forgot to do a recap post for last month, though it wasn’t an especially productive one. I got a mostly finished Tabletop Sim version of Critical Heaven put together for testing, then proceeded to not do much testing. I had a few requests to use a hex map, which I honestly do like parts of but hope that the turning restriction doesn’t trip the pace of the game up. I’ve yet to put skills to the Tactics Cards, but the individual girls’ skills are there to test and once I’m satisfied with that I’ll slap that last layer of complexity on top of it all and hope it doesn’t break.

My goal is basically to keep the game fast paced and simple, but ideally with enough meat there for people to have fun with team compositions and deck builds. As with Irrgarten (god, remember that? I should finish that too), I’m doing the tabletop approach so I can put something out there while I struggle to absorb rudimentary coding lessons. That and I like the idea of a mecha musume tactics game with ‘feelies’ and I swear I don’t mean that in a bad way. (Ideally it would be cool to have miniatures, even/especially customizable ones for people to personalize squadrons with.) I plan on adding some more static pages to the site as more game stuff is presentable, so keep an eye out for that.

To recap, Critical Heaven is a short-session strategy battle game featuring Sprites, cute and powerful beings attached to AirFrames who battle for air superiority and claim to the land and resources below it. It’s inspired by the art trends of humanizing machines and programs as well as some of the weird, nichey tactical RPGs I’ve enjoyed. (Yggdra Union and Rondo of Swords were particularly big influences in how to work ‘action’ and ‘flow’ into a turn based battle.)

Since my posting’s gotten so erratic as to distrupt the monthly recap format, I’m just going to batch upload some of my recent works, stopping short of the Slayers Artober I’m participating in since that should be enough images to be a thing in its own right.

THIRD HALF//

Posts tagged critical heaven

To The Third Power

The Pre July 4th Art Dump of Freedom

Sketch Dump of the Whenever

Building Character: Tomcat

October Surprise (i updated)

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