Hongou at child Akane in the incinerator when he was like "you could never understand... you don't understand what it's like to spend every day surrounded by monkeys"
last minute mermay! inspired by the mermaid designs seen in smt iv final, and her first concept art i feel like we were robbed of
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i don't get mermaid's smt iv final design at all. what are the flaming skulls for? maybe to throw us off and make us use bufu skills on her? i guess the green hair works for her zan affinity.
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i love this concept art. i get that there's a lot of water going on because at the end of the day, she IS a mermaid. but the amount of blue used, plus her diamond scales look very icy and fit a lot better with her bufu affinity. i really like that her eyes are green, perhaps hinting at her zan affinity too. her hair is majestic and her jewelry is gorgeous as well.
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i tried incorporating my favorite elements of both designs into this drawing, plus some extra stuff. i know we don't usually want affinities to be a dead giveaway the second you look at a demon, but i've always liked when that was the case.
for bufu, i did the same blue diamond scales thing from the concept art, for zan i gave her a little tornado (plus some green scales), and she has an ailment affinity too, so i added a bit of purple to her hair and tail :D
two wires got crossed in my brain (sprites and my thought process under the cut)
satan was easiest to draw because thankfully there is no shortage of naked angels in smt compendium that i could draw inspiration from; mainly i used virtue, angel, and narcissus's sprites as a visual guide.
the pose is in reference to a scene from crybaby and also this panel from amon (which i haven't read properly yet, just flipped through volume 1 to ogle at the art lol):
for the race i was choosing between divine, tyrant, and fallen (all among previously attributed to smt's various versions of satan) but ultimately settled on fallen because it feels more accurate to this version of satan, at least in name.
the stats + resistances are taken from smt iv apocalypse's satan, with the exception of the level (in smtiva satan is lvl 99) just because the screenshot i used as a base to edit had a long "next xp" window and i didn't feel like editing it further to say 0 xp so i just made it 98 lol. the number is a silly reference to that "i love you" equation (128√e980) that was going around on the internet a million lifetimes ago except obviously without the root sign & e. so i guess it just says iloyou. but it's the thought that counts.
the skills (both satan & devilman's) are taken from devilman grimoire which hand on my heart i thought was really stupid but it was very funny to me that the artist assigned names to the attacks that they yell out during fights:
i love that they made satan straight up screech like a harpy... i wasn't sure whether to make the cosmic (...) skill a support or a recovery skill because in the manga satan uses it during a fight with miki & akira to undo being chopped in half (taste of their own medicine...) so i reasoned that as a videogame skill it could undo a previous round of enemy actions, but since smtiv doesn't have skills that are this specific it would be something like hp recovery + removal of ally debuffs and enemy buffs, if there were any, and buff/debuff stuff seems more fit for support category. then again it could also be hp recovery + ailments removal making it akin to smtiv's salvation (not the lameass nerfed smtiva variant... no offense krishna) therefore a recovery skill, but in the end i thought agaisnt making it a recovery skill simply because recovery skills have a heart icon and there is no such thing as love, as per crybaby satan (oh well).
the almighty skill wasn't in grimoire, my wife just argued that it would make sense for satan to have an almighty skill & i thought it might as well be the beam of light that crybaby's satan shoots at devilman (to shorten him up a little, you know). to elaborate: i really loved how in smtiv chaos and neutral routes when you fight merkabah (who i've compared to devilman satan on this blog a couple of times before), it has an almighty skill called "shalt not resist", a name i found to be very poetic. satan's almighty skill & its name are similarly thematically appropriate, with a little bit of ironic "symbolism" woven into it, which is that with almighty skills being un-dodgeable by default, you could make a reach and say it's sort of metaphorical of how satan's multiple lifetimes on earth are cyclical & (almost) always leading to the same outcome (making it un-dodgeable, in a way, but always a result of their actions). and it's the very last thing they say to akira in the original manga:
now onto devilman... i'm ashamed to say i put way less thought into him LOL
for visual inspiration i couldn't think of any specific demon designs to lean into, he's sort of an amalgamation of a lot of different sprites (namely baphomet & camazotz), and the thought process for the pose was just "it should be something devilman-y"...
i was stumped for a bit as to what to choose for the race, my options were fury, tyrant, and fiend, because fury seemed fitting, and a post on reddit (i know) said that apparently in the original japanese version of smtiv the name for the races tyrant & fiend mean "demon lord" (which is why i also considered it for satan) and "demon + man" respectively. i thought of demon lord because amon is very powerful and a lot of demons seem to be afraid of him, but thinking more on it amon =/= devilman so it wouldn't make sense to use that race specifically. fiend also felt off (and a lot of people in the comments under that reddit post were fighting with op about translation correctness) so in the end i settled on fury because i recently played through the first raidou kuzunoha game and in it the fury race was reserved for more physical-combat-oriented demons, essentially fighters, and i thought that would fit devilman just fine.
the stats + resistances i wrote in mostly at random; the level obviously just a haha funny number, the next xp number is the date the original devilman manga started running (as per wikipedia). like i said above, the skills are from devilman grimoire, but i also wanted to give him an electric skill because he does electricity-based attacks with his eyebrows/antennae (at least that's what i interpreted them to be), but i couldn't come up with anything for the name so i just put it in the learnable skills section since you don't know their names until after the demon learns them lol.
also, as a general fun fact, since i wanted to have all the text be written in smtiv's font, but didn't feel like assembling each word letter by letter from screenshots, i went through a very convoluted journey to make it an actual typeface font. here it is (google drive link), in case you'd like to use it too. it's kind of really bad because the site i used to process it rounded all the edges, and for some reason the default kerning is absolutely atrocious (and i don't know how to fix it), but thankfully the program i draw in lets me adjust kerning & leading of text so i was able to make it look more or less presentable (5% horizontal spacing in ibisx, for reference).
to see the uncensored inks, clean lineart, my mockup screenshots, and uncropped sprites (and satan's TITS!!!), click here (google drive link)
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