TAOE Episode 24: “Too Close, Too Fast (4)” has been released, bringing Season 1 of TAOE to a close.

To go along with this, we have two rather large extras…

First, all of the midi songs released so far have been compiled into a zipfile (which can be found here), along with a few alternate versions (one MP3), and two songs from the next saga of TAOE…

To take it further, Jeqo Legends has been updated to include all of TAOE Season 1.

Now, some more about those last two…

The two new songs are from 2003/2004, but were both conceptualized much earlier.

TCD2 “The Child of Death” originated as my attempt at playing the “Monstercall” song from Mighty Morphing Power Rangers: The Movie (Sega Genesis), in maybe 1998 (1999 at the latest). As it turns out, the way I played the song and the way the song actually sounds differ enough that what I wound up with was effectively its own song. I tried making a midi of it in late 2002/early 2003, but the results were pretty terrible. A few months later, I tried again, and wound up with the version released here. (A couple other versions based on this one exist, but aren’t getting released. For now, anyway.).

As for the usage of TCD2… well now, that’s a spoiler if ever there was one!

Shairo.mid - Heard of Dragonball Z? Heard of the FUNimation dub of Dragonball Z? Heard the soundtrack they commissioned Faulconer Productions to compose for it? This song is largely based on that style, and two songs in particular, though I managed to play both of them wrong enough and mixedly enough that we wound up with something completely different. (Unlike TCD, that was my intention from the very beginning, which couldn’t have been any earlier than the debut of Perfect Cell on Toonami, so I guess 2001… I want to think it came from a little earlier, but I guess it didn’t.).

I’m not certain of when I started the midi, but I got most of the way through it, then stopped for a bit before finishing the ending. The current version was saved in October 2004.

As for the usage… that will be obvious when appropriate material is released.

Now, on to Jeqo Legends!

Briefly, Jeqo Legends is one of the first javascript games I created back in 2005… and the first for Jeqo specifically. The concept actually started out as a boardgame, and there is a huge influence from Dragonball Z Legends (Playstation 1) in things such as team play and “super attacks”.

What we have is a fighting game in the form of text prompts and alerts, with a simple enough system that I’ve been adding to it for the past five years. It started out with twenty Planet Seva characters, the ability to play against the computer or another player, in teams ranging from 1 to 3 characters. Eventually, “jq” mode was added–basically a story mode–and with it came unlockable content, including items, characters, and storylines. Arenas were added, and eventually EC characters and jqs were added.

When EC didn’t come out as quickly as I was expecting, JL kind of stalled, and I spent 2006-2008 trying to get a better idea of how to make games that… aren’t javascript. But with TAOE’s release, I decided to go ahead and update JL again, and now it includes a ton of TAOE characters and storylines. Ten new arenas, no less than six new jqs and at least fifty new characters… yeah, huge update.

The hugeness of it is why I only intend to update JL with a few more things, if they see release soon. Noone wants to play a javascript prompt-alert game for the time it would take to cover the rest of the jeqoverse.

And a bit of rumor: In 2008, I completed a simplistic fighting system for a realtime fighting game. The idea was something I could work with before something marketable. Since then, it’s been expanded, and now I’m thinking about using it to make a reversioning of Jeqo Legends. Anyone interested? (yes/no/all)?

And… umm… that’s all.

So here’s an early update for you, featuring two episodes…

Two, largely because they are dominated by lengthy flashbacks. But they are awesome flashbacks!

Episode 22: “Too Close, Too Fast (2)” - Taoe arrives in Eoce’s world to find it being merged with their own, and to top it all off, Fieron, Retanretla, and the Coincidence Kids have all wound up in the same place. After some squawbling over who does what, the decision is made: it’s time to do something about this world-wrecking merger. But to help convince us that the kids are worth including, we see a little of what they’ve been up to since we last saw them…

Episode 23: “Too Close, Too Fast (3)”. Now that Eoce knows he has company, things get a lot harder for our heroes and temporary-allies. And we get to see how that flashback in the last episode turns out.

And since the song that went with these episodes is kinda meh (I uploaded the version that was saved in 2003), we have two this week. Go check ‘em out!

And tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion!

And, you know, go talk about it on the forums. That would be awesome. =P

 So, half of this episode is an epic actiony flashback (If my one reader ever gets to it,… well… XD ), and the other half… Heh. Hehe… Mwuahahahaha!

Thing about this four-part season finale… I’ve had it planned for many years, but it wasn’t until my first run through (the version that I wrote last year but decided to withold from even the Members’ Area) that I had any idea what exactly would happen.

Oh, that little twist at the very end of the episode was planned from the beginning, along with the end to the season over all, but the vast majority of details… I was very in the dark on until they happened.

I’ll have plenty of other comments when episodes 22 and 23 go up next week.

We also have an obligatory song this week. This really was meant more for episode 15, but the flashback in episode 21 gave me an excuse to post it this week.

It wasn’t posted with episode 15 because… it didn’t exist then. .

 Basically, I wound up listening to the Pirates of the Caribbean music while working on episode 15 and beyond, and decided that the not-quite-sidestory in that episode desperately needed music. What I came up with isn’t quite on par with PotC … by any stretch of the imagination… but eh, there it is.

The music for the remainder of this season is a bit underwhelming, but I’ll get to that when I post it.

  Retanretla’s gotten fed up and challenges Taoe to an all-or-nothing battle, and Theracy learns more about her powers than she wanted to know.

The main point of this episode was originally supposed to be the… umm… outcome of the Retanretla deal. That didn’t turn out quite the way I expected… back in 2002-2004 when I included it in my original timeline for the series. Though I still kinda like the results, it feels hole-ish. Hmm.

The two-plotted episode returns, and won’t be going away until the season ends, if even. But that there are two stories going on from here on out should indicate the importance of each piece, so suffice it to say, we’re in for a Jeqo of a ride!

Oh, and today’s episode contains the most overt spoilers for another Jeqo series yet. I tried to give the necessary information without messing it up, because it will be a very long time before I get to that bit. I decided the information gained was well worth it; after all, I’m not convinced most of that information can fit in its home series without a sequence that is more of an infodump than what we have in episode 20.

Suffice it to say, episode 20 explains a bit about the Jeqoverse at large, but happens to focus on a particularly bizarre event, so expect the picture to only evolve from here. Hopefully without getting more confusing. XD

Ah, poor Captain Fist… XD

Episode 19: “Blue Turns Green” - Retanretla starts experimenting on a lot of people in a small town (any similarities to existing places is completely coincidental!), and all kinds of stuff goes down, including a look into Fieron’s past. Probably the darkest episode so far, and there are some concepts there that I might have made unclear in an attempt to avoid pushing it up an advisory level.

This week’s song was finished… oh… like half an hour ago, and I wasn’t expecting it to turn out as it did. As for what it’s for… well, keep in mind that I said this episode is the darkest so far.

Working on a song that I’ll probably release with episode 21, though 20 is a mystery. Episodes 22 and 23 will probably see simultaneous release; the next few episodes have a bit much of the “two stories happening at once” thing, but it was pretty well necessary.

Stay tuned; the Jeqoverse is about to explode…!

 {Partial Spoiler} Thanks to Episode 16, Black Eagle finds himself facing a demotion, which makes things difficult for Taoe when there is evidence that Retanretla is causing trouble in Nebraska.{/partial spoiler}

 Meanwhile, Theracy tries to track down a couple of criminals who stole a unique book, all without using her powers.

And today’s song is another from 2000-2001, written for Liquaro and Rani, with a style vaguely based on that of some of the Faulconer Productions music to FUNimation’s initial releases of Dragonball Z. Meep.

This episode is an aweful lot of nothing happening. XD. In the members’ area version, it was only the Omaha bit (not to say that the rest wasn’t meant to happen off screen. XD ). Ouch.

But but but! I’ve managed to get back ahead on the writing, and I can assure you that things will get far more active in the next several episodes.

Well, and episode 19 is…. well… I’ll get to it next week.

I guess we’ll have to deal with two episodes, then!

Taoe Episode 16: “Don’t Bring Rules”. - This episode probably features the least screentime for the main characters since the series began. But don’t worry, because…

Episode 17: “Dolls Bleed Red”. Episode 17 is all about the Taoe. And… kinda short. I suppose it’s technically phesible (how do you spell that, anyway?) that I could have just condensed episode 16 and combined it with episode 17, but… I like the ending to 16, so nya. . And … well… it’s kinda necessary.

And there are two songs. I suppose I could put up a third, but… let’s save that for next week, ‘k?

Both of these were wstarted in 2004, and kinda went on hold for quite a while, with very little work until recently. The longer one (read: the more appropriate one) I mostly finished because of the storm of stuff that went with the virtual series. The other… was kinda meh and meant to be short to begin with. When I started them, I had a different idea on how these episodes would play out, which is why the more dramatic guitar-covered one just doesn’t seem to fit with episode 16 at all. Originally, I was going to have Vento fly all the way to America and deliberately get Taoe’s attention, resulting in a fight between him and Black Eagle while everyone else made their way to the battle; there wasn’t anything to do with the ‘demon’ plotline, making it completely pointless. This actually remained the plan right up to that point in the previous members’ area version, when I realized how pointless it was and completely reworked that portion of the story. As it turns out, this made the entirety of the Jeqoverse more cohesive, so yay!

That short-and-dramatic song? That was for the cutaways to the team trying to get to the battle between Vento and Black Eagle. The more upbeat, semi-orchestral song (That’s A Hero… I don’t really care for these titles. ^^) was meant for Gravitor’s arrival at the battle. I moved the ‘Doom’ song (XD) to episode 16, though it doesn’t feel like it fits there so well. The ‘Hero’ song, though… well, I copy-edited most of episode 17 from the previous version, and there’s a moment or two in there that were written with that song in mind.

There will be more multi-threading going on in future episodes, but most of it will hopefully feel far more natural than episode 16. I think episode 20 should be the real moment to judge, even though you can expect to see multiple plotlines occuring simultaneously in episode 18 (and to a much lesser extent episode 19). After that… well… *says nothing more*.

It won’t be long, now.

http://planetseva.com/taoe/index.htm#eps]See? episode 15 Came out and everything! Episode 14 even got a song that I’ve been waiting like, ten years to use. XD

So, like, yeah. I was all like, “Ah! Spring Break confusion!”. Then I was all like, “Let’s get two episodes ahead!”. Then I was all like, “X_X”. Then I was all like “AH! WHERE’S EPISODE 14?”.

 And then I started finishing the episodes right on the deadlines, which is why the past two came out a few hours late. Hey, it’s still Saturday in… ur… Hawaii? :-/

Anyway!

Episode14: Introduces a character that I really should have been more excited about. Anyway, Retanretla’s back, and oh nos, he’s experimenting on a children! Maybe Taoe should beat him up?

Episode15: Hey, Fieron’s building a fortress on an island in the Atlantic! Nothing suspicious about that at all! Well, that’s not what the ISDA Chairman said, so Taoe gets to check it out, resulting in awesomeness.

 Oh, but to make things simultaneously more awesome and more confusing, something trippy happens when Theracy goes to look around the island all remote viewer-ly. To make a long story short, I wound up downloading a midi of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme when I wrote the final sequence of the episode.

 I sorta want to write a song to go with Theracy’s effective sidestory in episode 15, but that will have to wait.

… What? I’m totally not setting anything up. Nope, totally not. XD 

 It wasn’t until I was finished with the episode that I realized how much it does–or rather, tries to do.

I wonder if it’s kind of messy because of that?

Oh, hey, check it out:

 *** SPOILER ***

      The whole “Ring shard video” sideplot? Until I got to that part of the episode I wasn’t planning on it in the slightest. Kind of… ur… planning on not-it, actually.

    **** END SPOILER ***

I suppose the mess of attempted character / plotline threads in this episode make up for what it originally was: pointless. It doesn’t feel so pointless anymore. But I suppose that’s for you to decide.

 Behold: Plot stuff that’s been in store for about as long as the series has been vaguely plotted. Probably why it’s so messy. ^_^

Also, awesome music.

Suuri Bunshoudai~!