untitled_trails_in_the_sky_parody.mp4
In spite of being longer than Persona 5 (when including Second Chapter), I rushed through this game surprisingly quickly. I got a little upset that a combination of Old JRPG Appearances and lengthy play time would probably mean it wouldn't ever become so popular.
If you don't care for spoilers, the only useful things to know are that "Bracers" are basically heroes-for-hire, generally the good guys of the game, and this sequence involves rescuing a captured princess from a building run by an army of bad guys.
In the vein of Team Four Star's FF7: Machinabridged series, I thought about how fun it might be to do a parody series on it, exaggerating the characters and condensing its better moments with added humor. So during the evenings of an especially boring work trip, I wrote a bunch of sequences generally based on scenes from the game.
I planned to show this script to my close friends, but then having decided that good delivery and comedic timing were too important to its enjoyment, I instead took one of the better scenes, and voice-acted it all myself. Then, realizing that pitch-shifting did not make very clear who was talking, I grabbed the game's sprites and animated it out. I ended up having too much fun assigning expressions on each line. I found it kind of ironic that the voices of the male characters ended up being the least distinct, since there's less pitch-shifting applied to them.
When I did show it to my friends, they figured it was good enough for YouTube's low standards, and at least it's not a ten-minute game design analysis video using randomized stock footage and Google Image Searches. So here you go.
I honestly might have a lot of fun working on a full, from-the-beginning machinima parody series of this game, but not alone. There's some cool modding work available on the game's engine that might help, but there's only so many voices and jokes one can handle. In all likelihood, this will be a one-off I made for fun, but if you're interested in prototyping a bit more and have some skillset you think could be useful, drop me a line at [email protected]