joe randel's art dump

During the end of a game systems life you’ll generally get the most fantastic looking games.  Developers will have found all the secrets and tricks hidden with in the console and so treat us to wondrous eye candy.  It’s a win, win.  The Nintendo DS is in this era of games what with the 3DS just around the corner and one of the treats of the season to be held is Sola to Robo.  Sola to Robo is an adventure RPG set in the world of Tails Concerto.  Scratch that… it’s actually the spiritual successor to Tails Concerto.  So much so that some of the characters from that game make cameos in this title, including Alicia Priss.

Game play seems pretty typical for an action RPG, only your main character, Red Savarin, rides around in an open cockpit mech.  You get out to flip switches and other such tasks.  The story has you on a set of floating islands where there are cat people and dog people.  Robots are used to help with getting jobs done, hence the mech you ride.  You’re set out to retrieve a package in an air ship, but you come across a medallion instead.  Enemy ships show up and all hell breaks loose.  During your escape, you come across a cat girl named Elh Melizee.  You take her with you and travel the islands in your airship base that is piloted by you little sister and mechanic Chocolat Gelato.

The game is being known as “that furry rpg” in the game circles, and with it comes negative furry comments and such.  Which is a shame because the game as a whole is probably one, of if not the finest developed DS games I’ve ever seen.  No question.  The amount of concept art and marketing that has gone in to this title is astounding.  Namco-Bandai actually set out to break a world record by airing 100 different commercials of the game.  I’m not sure if they actually broke a record though.  Dragon Magazine (a light novel magazine in Japan) printed a prequel called Red Data Children which takes place 7 years before the games story and sets everything up.  On top of that, if you preordered the game, you got the game (duh), a soundtrack CD, an art book filled with concepts from the game (more on that later) and “Prelude disc” DVD.

The concept art is really something to see.  They’ve designed just about everything you could imagine.  From the way lead goes in to a pencil, mail boxes, native fruits and veggies, to location illustrations, forms of transportation, how tails fit though clothing and everything in between.  I’ve shown all the images I can find below for you to drool over.  It’s absolutely marvelous and makes me jealous that I’ve yet to be on a project that goes in to this much detail with it’s world.  Then again, this project has been in development for about 3 years now so I can see how they’ve had the time to make it as rich as possible.

So will this game come to our shores?  Maybe… maybe not.  There was a demo of the game made done in French for a Tokyo expo in France and the Australian ratings board has rated it.  But, no one really knows for sure.  Also, it’s a DSi enhanced game, so those of us with a regular DS can’t play it.  That is until we fork over the cash for a 3DS.  I would assume that it can play DSi games.  I really hope that it finds a publisher over here.  It has over 80 quests, tons of characters to interact with and… well… heck, any game that has this much work put in to it deserves to be played.  I know I’ll be hoping.

I really wish was able to get these two images bigger.  ~sigh…

Buy Solatorobo: Sore kara Coda e (Nintendo DSâ„¢)