Same Old Story
A piece of fan art over a year in the making.
Guys, I really like Cassette Beasts. Like, I've been playing a bunch of ROM hacks of Pokemon games recently, and I realised to my horror that the classic formula for the pocket-men just doesn't excite me in the same way as it did before I played Cassette Beasts. I have tasted an authentic neapolitan pizza and the sainsburys oven pizzas cannot satisfy me any longer. (Can you tell that I am updating my website whilst hungry?)
I started this elaborate piece of fan art back when I had just played the game in 2024, but for whatever reason, I never got that far with it. Recently, I found myself housebound following my gender confirmation surgery (
) and I was taken by a sudden need to finish what I had previously started. I had my laptop, I had plenty of time. It was going to happen.
And happen it certainly has, because this is honestly one of my favourite pieces of art that I've done in a long time - and that's saying something because I am kind of a baller artist, all things considered.
My favourite aspect of this piece is the dramatic composition. I really had to push myself to draw characters from such an unusual angle, but I think I pulled it off!
The thesis
I wanted to capture the energy that I felt whilst fighting the Archangels, eldritch incarnations of humanity's various desires and impulses. Though 'Same Old Story' is not my favourite track in the OST (that's a tie between 'Cross Your Heart' and 'Like Chimeras'), it is nevertheless a verified banger that elevates the Archangel fights to greater heights. I needed to pay tribute to that.
One of the coolest parts of the game is that the boss fights deliberately break from the game's pixel art style in order to sell you on the idea that they are fundamentally incompatible with your limited human experiences. And on top of that, the Archangels don't even share an art style with each other! You've got Mourningstar as a low-poly character model, Poppetox looking like a pre-rendered 3D sprite, Babelith the child's scribble - the list goes on!
I knew that I wanted to capture the same idea by mixing my skills at low-poly 3D with a traditional digital drawing. Whilst I have practiced both media in isolation, I had never attempted to marry them together before. How would I make the scene look coherent without losing that incongruence? How would I attempt my own Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
The choice to go with the Mourningstar fight was twofold:
- Low-poly 3D matches its particular art style.
- My primary companion during my first playthrough was Kayleigh, who joins you for the Mourningstar fight.
The first aborted attempt
The side-view used for battles in Cassette Beasts works well for a turn-based system, but I didn't need to worry about mechanical readability when creating my piece of fan art. So, I produced a series of thumbnail sketches to experiment with different compositions.
You can see that I really wanted to make a triangular composition work, with Mourningstar sitting imperiously at the apex and the protags forming the base. By placing the Archangel above the characters, it would look that much more intimidating and powerful. A low camera angle would give the viewer an idea of what it must feel like to face down something much greater than themselves; although the protags are visible in the scene, the camera takes on an almost first-person perspective. I thought it would convey sympathy with the kids.
I also tried to make Mourningstar more visually opressive by vastly exaggerating the size of its wings.
I took the idea into Blender to start working on the 3D. I reckoned that if I sorted out the main environmental elements, I could experiment with the camera settings until I recreated my favourite thumbnail. This lead to my first model.
Unfortunately, as soon as it came to unwrapping my Mourningstar model for texturing, I must have burned out on the project because this is the final version of the project file. Whatever the exact cause, I am hardly surprised that I stopped at this point; to date, I still dislike doing UV unwrapping more than any other part of the modelling process. It takes so long to get all the UV islands arranged in a sensible and optimised layout. It's a problem with a solution that one has to discover through trial and error, rather than art in its own right (at least in my mind).
The revival
I'm not entirely sure why this is the unfinished piece of art that I decided that I wanted to revisit during my surgery recovery. I didn't even have access to the original files on my laptop, so I would be starting again from scratch!
Whatever the cause of my fey mood, I was fuelled by an abundance of free time and the euphoria of having the correct genitals for the first time in my life - this time I was going to succeed!
I started with my model for Mourningstar. Last time, I modified its wings for the sake of composition, but now I decided to be even less faithful to its original design. I went with much more humanlike proportions for the body and even interpreted the large lower spikes as a pair of legs. The smaller peripheral spikes remain, but are now arranged in a halo around the creature's hips.
There's admittedly little reason for these changes beyond simply thinking they look good. I was kind of improvising in Blender as I went.
In an attempt to make the texturing a bit faster than normal (surgery leaves you very tired and I felt lazy), I did not unwrap the UVs in the traditional manner. Instead, I created a small texture atlas comprised of some basic gradients and then projected various faces onto each tile. Whilst it was definitely a quick process, and I think that this works well for a creature with so little surface detail, I don't really see myself adopting this technique for the majority of my models.
For the subway station, I used a tried-and-tested process that I adopted back in my days of modding a PS1-style racing game. I built the environment out of simple quads and used Sprytile to apply parts of a texture atlas to each surface. (Well, I technically used ReSprytile because the original project stopped receiving updates for current versions of Blender.)
But this is where I encountered a major challenge: I could not make Mourningstar look visually imposing whilst also maintaining my low-angle, dramatic FOV camera settings. In 3D, Mourningstar would logically sit at the furthest point from the camera because the protagonists are in the foreground, but doing this reduced him to a very small part of the composition. Objects in the distance appear smaller, after all.
At one point, I had the Mourningstar model so big to compensate for the effect of perspective that it was larger than the entire rest of the scene! Now, forced perspective is a old art - you exaggerate the relative sizes of various elements to create a sense of depth that does not actually exist - but the lengths that I was going to in order to preserve my intended composition was stretching the definition of reasonable.
I needed to rethink. Could I accept a universe where I couldn't achieve my desired composition?
In my original idea, I wanted Mourningstar to have a dominating presence as befitting its power, but who was it that I placed in the foregound? It was the protags - Kayleigh and the player; the people who you actually care about.
And what happens in the narrative? You and Kayleigh absolutely kick that bastard's arse seven ways to sunday.
For all the power of the Archangels, it is the human spirit (with a little help from some magical music tapes) that eventually comes out on top. It suddenly occurred to me that it would work really well for Cassette Beasts if the humans were depicted as more important and powerful - and thus, the final composition was born.
I must confess that I have a lot less to talk about when it comes to the 2D part of the art. The main issue that I had was the question of how much focus to put onto Decibelle's...well, rear end.
Look, I ain't no prude. I'm not ashamed about people having bodies and being attracted to bodies - it's normal, it's good, even. But at the same time, I was not aiming to create something that was intended for titillation in this case. The dramatic composition - which at this point I was very unwilling to compromise further - required that both creatures be facing away from the camera. Decibelle, being the ranged attacker, made sense to be closer to the camera, and it is a beast with a very feminine silhouette. There was going to be a bum somewhere front and centre!
I don't think that the creatures in Cassette Beasts are intended to be 'real' in the same way that animals are. They're draped in mythology and metaphor - more Digimon than Pokemon. So, whilst Decibelle is almost certainly not supposed to be anatomically identical a nude woman, the problem remained of how 'accurately' to render its body.
In the end, I looked up pictures of female athletes - people who might wear close-fitting clothes and have bodies that are often appreciated in a non-sexual way. I did not shy away from what I was depicting, but also avoided giving it undue focus. Making Decibelle so muscular is partly a way to draw attention to other parts of its body - namely those wicked-sharp swords that it has on the ends of its legs.