Nerve Tower -10 Great Heat Newsletter

Introduction

May 14th, 2022

    The year between the -11 Great Heat Wave Anniversary (2021) and this one (2022) has been a difficult one, but I somehow managed to find the time and energy to tackle a huge number of new projects. To this end, the Nerve Tower website has been split into two entities - the usual public website hosted on Neocities, and a new private mirror hosted elsewhere for posting and organizing the new private projects I’ve been undertaking. While I’m still maintaining the public website with legacy updates to pre-existing translations and posting new analysis articles, the private server has received the vast majority of new content. This is because these new projects involve material that is either still actively being published and sold, or work that belongs to independent artists and collectors (upon whose rights I don’t wish to infringe). While I have to keep quiet about a lot of it due to these potential ethical and legal issues, I can finally talk about the biggest discovery I managed to unearth…

23 Tales to Change the World

    I have stumbled upon the holy grail of Baroque (nearly) lost media: Yonemitsu’s series of prequel stories, “23 Tales to Change the World”. Everyone should already be familiar with the first entry in this series, Baroque Report Z’s “Little Girl, a Songbird was Distorted by the World”. Although the full series of 23 stories was never completed, three more were written and distributed following the initial installment. Trying to track down this lost trilogy has been such a conspiracy theory labyrinth that I often questioned if it was even real. I’ve gotten to talk to a lot of incredibly nice and accommodating people who were prominent Baroque fans back in 1998-2000 but even then, most didn’t know what I was talking about. I’ve sunk hundreds of hours and dollars into this pursuit, ran into countless dead ends, posted bounties, and lost an invaluable and longtime contact who vanished off the face of the Earth after selling me one of the publications in question. It’s been a surreal journey.
However, with the start of #GreatHeatWaveRadio: Text Edition, I finally had another chance to request information directly from the source. I jumped on the opportunity immediately, and Yonemitsu actually responded this time. Now the lid’s been blown off this secret and Yonemitsu has been posting hints that he might not just publish the other three stories, but also finish writing the rest of the series. In the meantime, you can read a summary of my research in the translation notes for “Little Girl, a Songbird was Distorted by the World”.

Baroquism Syndrome Revisited

    Speaking of Baroque prequels, my initial translation of Mariko Shimizu’s “Baroquism Syndrome” and “Baroque Interludium” was an awful rush-job full of embarrassing mistakes. From November of 2021 to mid-January of 2022, I poured every free minute I had into painstakingly retranslating the entire series from scratch. My initial translation missed a lot of details or got them completely wrong, so I would strongly recommend giving the series a re-read if you haven’t recently. It really is worth it; the difference a proper translation makes to certain scenes is staggering. Although it’s a less dramatic improvement, I also completely retranslated “Little Girl, a Songbird Has Been Distorted by the World” (Baroque Report Z edition). And finally, my translation of Yonemitsu's dynamic poem, "Geo-Spiritual Quantum Interference Train, Birth of a Chaotic Future", has been updated as well and includes new information from the 2022 anniversary event. Please see the Translations page for a full listing of the revised stories.

WIP Translation Patches

    There have been two new Baroque translation patch projects started in the last year - a Spanish patch for the PS1 port and an English patch for the Saturn version. Both ran into the same character limitation problem we personally encountered a couple of years ago when attempting to swap in translated text. Both of these teams’ solution was to heavily truncate the text into an abbreviated form and focus on making the game mechanically playable by ensuring menus were comprehensible. I just want to clarify that despite my translation being used as a basis for these patches, the Nerve Tower website wasn’t affiliated with these projects in any way and the abbreviated dialogue used in these patches doesn’t reflect the quality or accuracy of the translations hosted on this site. Additionally, this website doesn’t provide translations for the new dialogue found in the PS1 port, so any attempts to translate those lines are purely the product of their respective patch teams.

Analysis Article Revision

    It’s comparatively minor, but nearly all of the analysis articles on the site have been heavily revised or rewritten completely over the last year. My completely excessive answers to the 100 Baroque Questions webring fan questionnaire have also received a number of large revisions, including photos of my Baroque collection and original/commissioned fan-projects. And on the topic of fan-projects…

BAROQUE ~ Knee Deep in the Distortion ~

    I’ve been increasingly aware that my relentless search for more Baroque is inevitably going to run dry, so I knew I’d eventually have to begin making my own content. To this end, I figured that the easiest way to maximize my efforts would be to piggyback off of existing games with healthy mod communities. It was this reasoning that led me to Doom. A weird choice, considering FPS games aren’t really my thing, but Doom has an unbelievably talented and prolific mod community. Even better, many of the levels already have a post-apocalyptic feel. They strongly give the impression of stray Koriel #12 clones exploring and experiencing what the rest of the world is like following the Great Heat Wave. Considering that mods and custom maps can be effortlessly combined in source ports, this Baroque reskin of Doom yields virtually endless content.

    The mod is mostly aesthetic in nature, although various elements have been re-coded slightly in order to make them act more like their original counterparts (Gliros steal ammunition when they attack, for example). I also created a number of new Koriel #12 headshots for Doom’s animated health bar “mugshot”. This might be my favorite part of the project, as getting to see Koriel #12’s haunting face moving and dynamically emoting is something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. Another desire of mine was to see weightier depictions of Baroque’s arsenal in action (as I was disappointed with the remake’s interpretations), so I created a full set of original weapon animations by hand. I tried to include a little of everything, from the mainstays of the Malkuth arsenal (bones, a couple of swords, parasites, torturers, and the Angelic Rifle) to weapons from Baroquism Syndrome (the Malkuth adherent spears, Tarantella Melody discs, and the Special Hunter ‘blender blades’).

    I lifted the depiction of the Malkuth Spear directly from the “Baroque Syndrome” visual novel, but the rest of the weapons required some original design work since Baroque’s first person perspective doesn’t show how Koriel #12 operates any of the game's items. The still images the game provides of each tool leave a lot to the imagination when it comes to how they'd move in action. The only clues to these mysteries were the sparse design notes that made it into World Guidance and the Baroque Report series. So when there was no information to go off of, I tried to lean into the “distorted” quality of Baroque’s world. However, some proved incredibly difficult to construct mental images of.

    Baroque’s “Purification Sword”, for instance, required me to build a cardboard mockup based on measurements derived from comparing the size of the sword sprite to the box sprite, and comparing the size of the box sprite to the size of Box Thing’s (seemingly average human) head. What I discovered is that the rung on the side of the sword can’t be used as a belt loop from any angle. It leaves the sword to awkwardly flop all over the place and run into your legs. This led me to believe that it’s a second handle, and the sword is only meant to be wielded with two hands. When held this way, the weapon handles a lot like a chainsaw - something that fits perfectly with World Guidance’s description of the sword’s energy field ripping enemies apart. I also drew inspiration from SMT: Nocturne’s Demi-fiend (the idle posture for the Burst Bones) and ACDC from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (the parasites snaking out from under Koriel #12’s fingernails).

    The issue of when this mod will see a public release is complicated. If Sting or any of the original staff have a problem with me using their assets in this way, I'll abandon further development and any chance of a public release. Even if everyone's okay with it, the mod is only compatible with certain source port setups, and even then, it’s my first solo coding project so it has plenty of problems. On a similar note, my anxiety and overall mental health state are still not at the point where I feel capable of dealing with the greater English-speaking fan community. Assuming there are no copyright conflicts, please bear with me until both the mod and my mental stability are in a state befitting a public release. Until then, please feel free to watch the trailer for the closed beta here.

Conclusion

    As for the future, I have less and less Baroque content to work on these days. There’s quite a bit of ground to cover with the Doom mod yet, and there are still scraps of new Baroque information to be translated occasionally. However, the flow has been gradually slowing to a trickle. I can’t complain, as there’s only so much information that can be released on one game. What little I translate these days can’t be posted publicly due to potential ethical and copyright conflicts though, so I can’t say that I see many more updates coming to the public Nerve Tower server. But that’s what I thought before I discovered “23 Tales to Change the World”, so you never know. Baroque never fails to surprise.