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Ashley

Concept Art Appreciation Thread

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I was watching this video which featured some Super Mario Odyssey concept art and I know I've seen the stuff before but was struck by how much I like it. It taps into the kind of things I like (bold colours, simple shapes, stylistic design etc) so thought why not make a thread where we share some concept art we enjoy.

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I always liked DKCR's concept art that you can unlock in the game...

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Of course, Metroid Prime 1-3's concept art is legendary, but I'll let somebody else post that...

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Don't look at me, Metroid Prime is the easy answer for this.
And quite frankly, I'm gonna use this opportunity to shill a game I love.

300px-Wonder_Boy_The_Dragons_Trap_-_Cove

Awwww yeah! That's the good shiz!
Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, for your info, is a remake of an old Master System game, redone to astonishingly high standard with a drop dead gorgeous hand drawn style. I'm not joking when I say it's one of the best looking games on the Switch.

There's a gallery that adds various pieces of concept art, concept animations, and even footage of audio recordings as you play the game. It's very in depth, and I'm a sucker for these kind of things.

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Piranha Man and Wonder Boy looking completely wrong there

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Some pages providing the Master System sprites and some different designs for the hand drawn versions.

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Wonder Boy designs that were never to be.

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The mad thing about the last two pictures is that it doesn't look far off from the final product. That's how good this game looks and it's something you don't see in a lot of concept art.

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Here's an actual screenshot of the finished product.

 

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I own the Fire Emblem Awakening artbook. Naturally, that's a game with gorgeous art behind it, so it's worth looking at, for sure. Even though I find most armour designs to be garishly awful, there's a lot of material as to how they were designed and conceptualized.

Yarne_concept_art_02.png

The most interesting thing about it, is that there are a lot of developer notes actually left a few notes here and there. For example, they redesigned the Falchion only after finding a random piece of Archanea lore that said it was possible, they intentionally made Priam's Ragnell look old and cracked, stuff like that.

Anyway, the real gem for me is found in concept artwork for the final boss, that is, the gigantic dragon known as Grima

GrimaConcept.jpg

This page right here is how I learned that Grima's forehead... is actually a helmet! And it has a frigging human face underneath it! What the hell!?

(Sadly, the only pictures of the book that I can find are these tiny pics from the FE wiki. Uploading pics of my own is troublesome right now, it's frustrating that Google can't help me more than this)

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29 minutes ago, Jonnas said:

This page right here is how I learned that Grima's forehead... is actually a helmet! And it has a frigging human face underneath it! What the hell!?

Huh... Now, that's interesting. I'm gonna have to put this under two spoiler tags, because simply knowing this is related to a different FE game is spoilers itself, if you've played it and found this out though, you should know what I'm referring to.

Spoiler
Spoiler

That corresponds to what you find out about how Grima was created by experiments of some madman from Archanaea. Interesting that the artbook implies they planned that one back in Awakening.

Also, now's a good time to mention that I always find it amusing that all the bad things that happen in Awakening happened because Alm/Celica couldn't resist removing that blinging shield from the seal.

EDIT: Oh geez, my phone made me typo "Valentia" in the spoiler title, but I can't edit it.

Oh well, guess people are gonna have to think "Wait, isn't Valentina that boss from Mario RPG?"

 

 

Edited by Glen-i

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Regarding what you spoilered... yeah, I thought that as well. Fascinating to see how lore can develop, internally

On 27/05/2023 at 1:27 AM, Glen-i said:

I always find it amusing that all the bad things that happen in Awakening

To be fair, what you're describing is very likely non-canon :heh: Not the lore bits, just the... singular event that "caused all the bad things in Awakening". It's a bonus chapter that those characters aren't experiencing, so it probably happened at some other time, in some other fashion, with somebody else.

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