Bwahahaha, nothing but the highest-quality Rickroll for my Compendium buddies! You know I love you all, right? I'm gonna leave it up another 24 hours linking to my post here to clear up any confusion, then pop the thread into General Discussion so it goes off the front page.
Yeah, all the imagery was from
Chaos Rings II with just a teeny bit of doctoring. Man, you guys keep up with your mobile games! The idea started when I thought to myself, "I sooooo wish SE would put that kind of production value into a new Chrono game...wait a minute, that guy already looks like a Guru!" It all came together over the course of my spring break (to answer Boo's question, haha). My hope was everyone would know it was a joke once they read "Fancy Feline Festival," but I probably underestimate just how powerful realistic-looking screenshots can be -- I guess people see the images first, and then read through, rather than looking through a big article linearly. My bad if anyone actually got their hopes up when they saw those. The imagery sure is beautiful though! I've fallen head over heels for Yusuke Naora.
Most of the images originated on Square Enix's Chaos Rings II
website, in the character section. Battle screenshots came from
a video review of that game.
Here's the six tracks of "the soundtrack sampler." I'm gonna delete "TimeNinja"'s YouTube channel soon but here are the actual sources for everyone who listened to that music as dreamily as I did:
"Wills Aflame ~ The Guru Speaks" =
"The Door" from Mitsuda's overlooked but totally awesome "Sailing to the World" OST.
"Weaver of Fate ~ Showdown With The Guru" =
"Point of No Return" from said album
"Storm of Steel ~ Dalton's Mecha Puppets" =
"Confrontation" from said album
"It's a Cat Herder's Life" =
"Rhythm of Red" from said album
"Guldove ~ Home Sweet Home" =
"Guldove Home" from Mitsuda's "Hopeful Weeds" album (IIRC!)
"Look Who's in Town ~ Guile, Cat Wrangling Champ!" = midway through the
"Warlock Battle" track on Mitsuda's "Brink of Time" album
--
The "Kairos" label is a reverse-color image of
this random company's logo with a reverse-colored image of the Frozen Flame shooped in.
I had "The Guru" pegged as definitely Gaspar at first just because of the cane, but I showed the art to ZeaLitY and he said, "That looks like a badass Belthasar!" So I guess I imagined Gaspar and Belthasar merging somehow. Might as well toss Melchior in for good measure. Hey, it could happen.
"Alethe" is a reference to "
cholo/thyolo alethe," an endangered bird species.
--
It is really cool to see that a couple people actually registered over this. Welcome, peeps! Dunsparce, the font is all from
Chaos Rings II so that it looks natural in context (aside from any mistakes I made while doctoring). I also figured a real announcement would get Japanese screens at first, but then again, Square Enix is taking the multi-lingual thing more and more seriously with its simultaneous launches nowadays. From a marketing studies standpoint, it'll be interesting to see whether they do eventually release screenshots in different languages for initial press releases.
The screens probably aren't correct aspect ratio for the PlayStation Vita, so there's also that. I just looked up
Square Enix's PS Vita lineup -- pretty small, but I was surprised to find a Final Fantasy X port in there. I guess that's through PSN though?
I actually have no idea what the Japanese below the "Kairos" label means either. I translated "The Fate Unwound" into that with Google translator, and we know what happens there...!
And for the record, after thinking about it awhile...I'd totally play a Chrono game that had cat herding.
