I really implore you to take a look at my friend @lunaria--annua // @arvale-artist 's posts about an all but entirely lost game he adores. He's done and continues to do an immense labor of love to preserve, spread, and show off this game, as a piece of art, that someone made years ago for a short lived "console" (pocket PC).
The love for the game, characters, story, is palpable even from afar. Their devotion to treating this game with this amount of respect and care, and their dedication to showing what the original dev made accurately is phenomenal and commendable and super inspiring.
I'm going to be sharing more stuff for the next few days but there is tons more so if you are a bit curious then absolutely go check it out, and if you are confused then asking questions is the way to go as he loves answering in-depth and the whole reason for this is to share the love for this piece of media.
And I think in this day and age where Thing From Media comes and goes in record time with little fanfare it's so important to get utterly obsessed with something close to your heart and keep at it like your life depends on it. It really shows a level of passion and love and care and respect that is rarely given to anything nowadays.
And besides, it's a charming game with a silly protagonist who gets put through the wringer, and a fantastical whimsical world with downright horrific undertones and terrible implications and overarching plotlines. And it's being documented by someone dedicated enough to stitch together all of the intricacies of all that happens in a tapestry we can all take a gander at, because he wants to share it with everyone else. What's not to love??
A comic dedicated to Arvale 2, an RPG that has been swallowed by The Oceans of Time.
If you wish to explore the story on your own, then you can.
Dive into the archived version of the old dev website and fish this gem from 2005 out!
Big thanks to @clownboybebop for allowing me to use the text from this banger post I came across on my dashboard one day, and even point out some errors!
Creation process and story explanations linked here! =)
Very inspiring text that infested my mind with a comic idea for quite some time now... Arvale 2 Ocean of Time and The Great DeMenchev, my beloved. <3
#ok first of all: You 🤝 Me; when it comes to drawing shelves full of books and scrolls and papers and candles and making it all a bit messy#I've been doing that for 10 months (no joke) for an AMV that's gonna drop at the 24 of may
10 MONTHS ???? woah. do tag me on it if you make a post on tumblr about the finished product (what's it about?). i can't imagine how many frames of shelves you've made o7
How many frames...
And it's gonna be about Beylord & DeMenchev, because yes, I did in fact spent 10 months creating an animated music video about an implied narrative in a partially lost RPG series of whom I'm the only current player off. Because I'm very normal.
We only ever see the bloody aftermath in Arvale Short Tales. We never see how everything came to be exactly. We get hints. But we never see what happened before.
We never see how exactly Beylord turned into a vampire, we never see the friendship they had when they were young, we never see what exactly Beylord's terrible accident was.
First of all- Thank you Alex... And second, of course, who am I to deny someone Arvale lore?
But beware:
This’ll contain major spoilers for the first game,
Arvale 1 Journey of Illusion.
Usually this is irrelevant. But unlike Arvale: Short Tales, I don’t have to be the sole player! This one can still be played on a normal windows computer by others. Here’s an archived download link, and yes, the game really is that small.
Despite his villainous appearance, Tsilon is the most benevolent creature in Arvale I can think off. And it is his benevolence (and the benevolence of the other Dragons) that gets him used and abused to a calamitous degree. Despite this, he never turns bitter or hateful.
Tsilon has an immense fondness of humans. He gives away his magic for free, teaches them how to use it, befriends them, and becomes close friends with one in particular named Blynt. Together they built the great city named Arhaeldem, with Tsilon as the caretaker and protector.
Unfortunately, a crafty kid by the name of Kryphen had the world’s worst case of envy, ever, and proceeded to ruin it all.
You see, Journey of Illusion takes place 2000 A.D.
After Dragons.
Long ago, Kryphen was friends with a Dragon who taught and gave him magic, as they do.
However, he got so ultra envious, asking himself why they were gifted with these powers while he and the other humans had to struggle to survive, which, okay, fair.
But then he betrayed the Dragon during a magic lesson by reversing it’s own magic onto itself, putting it in a stupefied sleep. He figured out that he can siphon their magic and then sell it in bottles...
On top of that, this fucked up alchemist poisons the Dragons he doesn’t siphon with his own brand of turbo rabies one after another. Artificial Scarcity! How was he gonna be able to sell his product and start his magic potion comapny »Sorcynth« if people could still get magic for free after all?
Now, when dragons are poisoned by Kryphen’s turbo rabies, they turn into the classic evil very-much-hostile-to-humans-and-devouring-them fairytale monsters we know.
Dragons started attacking Arhaeldem, and Tsilon as it’s guardian has to defend his city.
And… I always wondered how terrible and confusing that must have been for him, to have to fight and most likely kill his own kind. Enough that I made a whole comic about it.
Kryphen ends up poisoning Tsilon. In the end it is Blynt who has to take down Mad Tsilon. This was The Calamity of Year 0 :
But Tsilon is not killed:
He becomes one of the 4 Dragons left, that Sorcynth continues to siphon the magic from for 2 millennia.
Now, there’s a slight 🤏 issue in his business model here, and it’s the fact that Tsilon seems to stir from his sleep after around 2 decades.
So what does this alchemist who is starting to control the entire continent/world and control the beliefs and people’s way of life with his magic corp. do? Every 20 years some unlucky bastard is chosen by ‘destiny’ to go on a Legendary Hero Quest™ to administer a knockout potion to the ‘Evil Dark Dragon’.
Why doesn’t Kryphen/ Sorcynth do this himself? Well, for some reason, this knockout potion has the nasty, or probably intentional, sideffect of making Tsilon briefly wake up, go mad, and consume the unlucky ‘Legendary Hero’.
My ongoing theory is that Krpyhen is feeding Tsilon a ‘Hero’ every 20 years on purpose to just barely keep him alive- and/or keep his entire business model secret, leaving no witnesses.
Now your player character, Duncan Forsythe, the last of those Legendary Heros, does not do the same mistake and just wakes Tsilon straight up. Tsilon confuses Duncan for Blynt briefly when he wakes up, which is totallyyy not foreshadowing something, nooo…
At the end of Arvale 1 Journey of Illusion, Tsilon is one of the final bosses, and only after:
1). Being drained for 2000 years
2). Being additionally extra drained right before the bossfight
3). Only eating a single 'Legendary Hero’ every 20 years
Only THEN Tsilon is so weakned that he becomes vulnerable to normal weapons.
So just IMAGINE the calamity he caused when he first went mad 2000 years ago, when he was still in his prime? One of the survivor’s entries described how the entire city was engulfed in flames, which, hey, another neat reference to classic evil fairy tale Dragons.
When you visit Arhaeldem in Journey of Illusion, despite 2000 years having passed, the earth around it is still pitch black, barren, and there’s no plants anywhere unless you go to the very edge of the level, where you can spot a measly few. Nice contrast to the flora filled Arhaeldem to back then. My guy practically nuclear bombed his own city!
Just before going mad again, Tsilon begs Duncan to kill him, even if Tsilon’s death results in a world without magic… which brings up some questions:
What are Arvale Dragons, and by extension Tsilon, anyway?
They’re… almost like laws or powers of nature with sentience? They are responsible for the magic in the world, not only being it’s source but also being able to generate seeimgly an infinite amount. There are 4 major ones, the ones Sorcynth/Kryphen kept alive:
There's Malzubed, The Dragon of Fire.
There's Hyandine, The Dragon of Water.
There's Klaetrocus, The Dragon of Earth.
And finally Tsilon, who not only possesses all 3 but is also The Dragon of »Everything Else.«
Which seems silly at first, and probably is supposed to be because Arvale is intentionally silly. But it starts to make sense when you take a closer look at the magic that’s being sold.
Because Sorcynth sells Fire, Earth and Water magic for offensive battle purposes. You attack with them. Obviously they get the fire magic from Malzubed, water magic from Hyandine, earth magic from Klaetrocus.
But they also sell potions that heal, boost your attack, defense, magical resistance, dexterity, magical intuition… And, well, they probably get that all from Tsilon. They get Everything Else they can’t get from the other Dragons, from Tsilon.
In the good ending, Tsilon returns to the ruins of Arhaeldem. You can see Duncan visit him. I always wondered how that conversation went…
Tsilon is said to be the oldest and strongest Dragon. And in Treasure of Memories, DeMenchev figures out how magic, such as remnants of a cast spell, likes to concentrate in a place. How it attracts more magic and how from that mass, even in completely inhospitable places with no water or sun, lifeforms can spawn. It also allows for otherwise impossible lifeforms such as water, earth or fire elementals to exist. They don’t have organs, flesh, bone and blood and yet they are still alive!
So... Where did the other dragons come from? It is said gods created them, but I’m not sure if I believe that, because if Arvale 2 Ocean of Time & Treasure of Memories taught me something about gods in Arvale, it’s that they are usually just selfish, lying and power hungry entities cosplaying that are not as almighty as they make themselves out to be.
If Tsilon dies, not only does all magic vanish, so do the remaining Dragons. And Tsilon has every type of magic, so… maybe he created them? But why?
This is extremely speculative theory posting on my part, it’s err, pretty much fanfiction. But… imagine…
Eons ago, there was a lone person. The primordial person. They look like a creature, with wings and horns and claws and limbs resembling the animals around them, maybe they modelled themselves after them. But unlike those animals, they were sentient, and they were alone. Through their primordial understanding of the world, they observed how life needs 3 elements to exist:
Energy, Water, and Mass. And after lots of trail and error, they figured out how to make more of themselves. Could you imagine a young Malzubed accidentially creating the volcano on Aphote? A young Hyandine toying with a sea serpent and mutating it into The Leviathan? A young Klaetrocus making the tectonic plates shift and create the cavernous mountains of Melonchi? I imagine whatever Dragons came after, Tsilon made sure they were not nearly as powerful to not further endanger the enviroments of Arvale.
But eventually, Tsilon came across a species of apes that acted different from the other animals. There was something familiar about them… and over the millennials Tsilon observed how they evolved, and began to understand what it was that made them feel like kin: Every one of them was a person. No wonder Tsilon was so enamoured.
Could you imagine DeMenchev, on one of his many expeditions, stumbling across a cave painting of hand stencils, and among them, is a Dragon’s hand?
