Chapter: AXL Development Documents, Axl's MMZ Redesign
Make sure to look at the picture descriptions for each of these! They contain more information about the designs and I put them in like this to make the blog post less bloated than it already is.
Fun fact, I did redesign Axl into a MMZ character one and a half years prior to that "life-changing" Halloween art. I didn't know anything about the series yet aside from some basic concepts and I didn't understand its style much yet, but I still wanted to go an do that.
Well, you can certainly say I tried. His character was also altered, with him becoming a pacifistic hermit that lives with a real dog in a forest (it doesn't make much sense but 14 year-old me thought differently at the time). However, you can probably see some design quirks already that ultimately got used again in his look for Chapter: AXL, a scar over the right eye and shorts with suspenders in particular. There's actually a reason for this choice of clothing though since I did see something like this in his original MMX design, and I thought it could make the design more "fresh" while staying true to what was before (even if it does look a little goofy).
Then, a year and almost a half later, I came up with the idea of making a MMZ Halloween Axl drawing as a follow-up to the MMX Halloween Axl one I did a year prior (I will probably post it on Halloween this year on my random blog). This resulted in me coming up with a redesign for Axl, starting from a clean slate.
Something curious that I've noticed while looking into the design of Zero here was that... his silhouette was mostly the same. Despite the entire body overcoming changes, you could still recognize that it was Zero thanks to the hair and the shape of the helmet, mimicking what came before through the silhouette itself. That also was the design philosophy that Keiji Inafune persued and the only advice he gave to the designing team when they were trying to design Axl for X7, and that's... a really great tip to character design/redesign as a whole.
I was trying to follow the 'memorable silhouette' tip while remaking Axl for MMZ universe, but unfortunately I wasn't able to change his helmet much without losing the silhouette so I left it mostly as-is. Some parts of his armor do look strange (like boots for example) or too similar to what came before (the shoulderpads), the wings pack (or whatever it's called) looks really different and blocky, and the jets on his feet are a bit weird too, but I still think I did a good job reimagining this design, to the point of not changing it much in the next revisions.
I was trying to make Axl look sharper and more mature than before. I gave him a serious look, a few new scars (one on the left cheek as a reference to Grey and another over the right side of the face as a reference to Red), a blind right eye and a jacket with high collar (that doesn't close all the way because of the chest crystal). Shorts on suspenders still remained, though... which still kinda makes sense because he was supposed to still be young here, plus they help greatly with retaining the same "silhouette" as before. In addition, they actually have a functionality - Axl keeps his scythe folded behind the back and suspenders keep them safely in one place.
Oh, and yeah, this time Axl was supposed to become a grim reaper much like Red. I saw this as fitting, like he was following his old friend's footsteps, and eventually I realized it would be a great melee/middle-range weapon for him.
However, once I decided to make a full-blown game concept out of "What if Axl was in MMZ?", I chose to redesign him, to make him more in-line with the official designs (You can judge how close I came to that as I am still not sure if I am good at imitating them).
For the longest time, I thought that I perfected his design, but eventually as I started to fool around with the sprite arting, I realized that it was difficult for me to translate all of his details into a sprite while dealing with color and size limitations (which resulted in me never finishing that sprite too *chuckle*). I ended up going around all of the characters I had and giving them redesigns if needed, removing the unnessesary details (or adding on new stuff for some that needed them to fit in better). Axl was one of them... a-a-a-and I never remade his character art. Fortunately, I still have the promo art I did a few months ago and he had that design here.
And actually, there was one more redesign in July I did for the visual novel adaptation of Chapter: AXL (which I decided to put on hiatus for now because doing all that alone would stagnate the main project badly). It just removed the scar on his left cheek. I just thought that it wasn't necessary for now (maybe he will get it back during the story, who knows).
