Posted to "News" on 02/10/2005: "A Gift from Nincom! part 1"

The following post was retrieved from the wayback machine, and was originally posted to the now defunct Nincom fansite "Battlemaniacs United".

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Hi gang! NightmareBuster92 here and man oh man, do I have an awesome post for you today! Loyal maniacs remember that about a month or so back, I promised y'all something super exciting was in the works, and I just had to get a few logistics sorted out b'fore I could share it. I expected it to take a lot longer to get everything that need sorting sorted, but thankfully we here at the BMU HQ hit a spot of good luck and as a result I am thankful to say the following: Nincom themselves sent us a care package!

The die hards among you will know that the 15th anniversary of the super gory tragic beat 'em up Efiáltis is coming up this Halloween, and given its seen a surge in popularity the last couple of years we thought we'd reach out to the company through our usual channels, see if they have any upcoming plans for a milestone celebration. As expected, they didn't- though project planner for the title (and present producer for a chunk of games developed by Nincom's arcade division) Kazumi Yokoyama was pleasantly surprised to hear that Efiáltis has a dedicated cult following today- 'I had no idea my own personal B-"movie" was so beloved by the freaks and geeks of the world, but I am delighted (and slightly terrified) to learn that that's the case!', he said during our recent email correspondence. In fact, so delighted at the news was he that he let it slip that Nincom still had a bunch of production materials for Efiáltis saved in their archives, and that if he could talk his higher up's into it, he'd send us as much of it as he could so we could document it on the site. And, well, here we are!

Don't worry, that ain't all of it, lol! We just figured it'd be a good idea to break it all up into multiple posts- we gotta keep you lovely lot comin' back to site after all ;) Oh, yea, quick shoutout to our gal Wife_of_PQ for doing all the translation work both during the email process and the notes we got in the care package, and in general being ultra awesome! Without her, this and previous talks with the company never would'a happened.

Ok, enough preamble; let's get stuck in, eh wot?

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First up, we got a pretty early image of the games protagonist, Sandra (right), and her damsel in distress Lucy (left). Looks like initially they were gonna give the ladies more summery and casual clothes. Maybe this was before the "nature hike" angle was conceived? The notes don't say, but they do state that "the [Converse] were suggested by co-designer Toshiaki Inoue", which explains a lot. It seems like their hairstyles were ironed out by head designer (and the artist behind all these images) Akira Ishida pretty quickly into the process, as they look practically identical to their final appearances- the notes states that there were previous design passes that looked different that Mr. Yokoyama is still trying to locate.

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Oooohhh, now this one's interesting! The notes claimed that for a small period, the game was actually explicitly set around Christmas (apparently as a subtle homage to the director and scenario writer Shigeru Mizuno's favourite horror film, Silent Night, Deadly Night), and so plans were made to shift the outfit design towards more wintery outfits. Perhaps ironically, almost all of the concept art from this period were destroyed in the infamous fire that swept through the Nincom archives in 1999, but this singular piece of Sandra in a bomber jacket survived. Somehow looks weirder then the halter top, don't it?

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Now here's something that oughta look familiar; this is the first pass of what would become Sandra's final design. We're definitely in full, unrestrained Akira Ishida territory now, if that bodywarmer is any indication (man, what is it with Nincom devs and their clothing fetishes?). Not much got changed between this and the final, beyond the shorts being lengthened into trousers and the tights being curtailed entirely (probably to heighten the contrast between Sandra and Lucy's respective designs), though I admit I kinda like the look myself.

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Speaking of Lucy, here she is! This was also a first pass, but the notes claim that the team fell in love with the look for her immediately, so going ahead nothing was really changed. Though apparently, there was a brief arguement between Akira and Toshiaki as to whether her jacket should be emerald green (yeesh) instead of bright red; whoever vouched for what colour isn't outlined but can I just say, on behalf of all the Battlemaniacs out there, that it's an unequivocally good thing that that idea got nipped it the bud.

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Awwww yeah; the badass post-pact Sandra, in all her grisly glory! As with her look up above there wasn't much changed beyond the trouser-shorts swap, but you can see that the tights are torn up and ripped on the same leg that'd be exposed in the final design; the idea to have an asymmetrical design for the heroine was well ingrained at this stage. Bonaparte's design, however, was very clearly not; not only is it (he/her?) much shorter in length here, but the design is a lot less ornate and ritualistic then what we'd know. There's a direct quote in the notes from Akira regarding this; "I am not good at designing or illustrating weaponry", Fair 'nuff, guv. Bonaparte's design would eventually be completed by one of Nincom West's transplants, Roger Hewlett, ostensibly as a favour to the team as the old rumour goes.

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Early Chaménoi designs! According to notes, Chaménoi were some of the first enemies conceived of for the project, and were intended to appear from the outset as, and I quote, "at the time we thought, 'zombies are always a crowd pleaser!'" Hell, if that doesn't place the early parts of development at the tail end of the 80s (ironically right before the living dead became well gauche), we dunno what does. It seems like they were pushing for a slightly less recognisably human angle for the Chaménoi even at this stage, but they still look abit People-y here.

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A further refined version of the Chaménoi on the right in the previous image, looking a lot... ickier. Dude's still got some impeccably clean Chelsea Boots, tho (the notes don't comment on them, sadly). The actual design hasn't really changed much at this stage, though the exposed brain has become slightly more prominent (and the hair covers more of at least half of this poor blokes head). This more obviously-human design stuck around for a while if this art is any indication- this is dated several months after the last piece- suggesting the change to more surreal designs came close to the end of the development cycle.

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Two Syllogí for the price of one! Another bit of internal strife is documented in the notes regarding this creature: throughout almost the entire first half of Efiáltis' development cycle, the team was roughly split in half over members that thought the position of the head-body of the Syllogí should look like the coloured sketch up top, and that thought it should look like the sketch on the bottom. This debacle was finally settled when Mizuno stated, rather bluntly, "[the Syllogí] do not eat through their ass", a statement that became an in-joke amongst the staff for years to come, supposedly.

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Fans of the site will know from older coverage of the series that i friggin' love the game's first boss, Thlípsi Pollón; sure it's just a big ol' pile of angry meat and bones but man, what other game at the time even had the nards to go whole hog on the splatter like that? No one, that's who, and the design team went all in on making it look super gross and ultra terrifying. So naturally, seeing this early design was a big treat for me! Seems the guy ain't got any bone spikes yet, but look- there's teeth in that maw! Dang, I'm kinda sad they got nixed in the final design; it's somehow way groser this was.

So that's it for the art, but hold up! Before we close out, we got a real neat treat for ya; one of the items included in the care package was a USB drive containing a few little extras, among which was music. But not just any music, folks; these tunes are the original demo takes recorded by Gonkaka, before they were converted and re-written for the sound chip the final arcade machine used! That's awesome in of itself, but we also got some extra trivia alongside them; according to the notes, though the demos were initially written just to get concepts for the music outlined before being reworked, at one point during the development cycle there were talks between Nincom's main sound unit + in-house band Gonaka and the manufacturing leg of the team about experimenting with early CD sound technology. The idea, essentially, was that a CD reader would be placed in each machine with a soundtrack disc inside that would be, via techno wizardry way too complex for me to understand, be queued up with the game as it ran, playing the right tracks at the right moments, leaving the sound chips free to handle purely digitised SFX and Samples. Primary composer Fumie Saso even went back to the initial demos and mildly touched them up- adding a little more finess to the synths and adding additional sounds in- but the idea was eventually shelved due to both how much it would cost to manufacture the machines, and how much it would cost the end user to buy. This wasn't a total loss, however; due to a miscommunication, the slightly beefed up versions of the demos were used by the sound converter, Nincom's legendary chiptune-geezer Manabu Kawashima, resulting in some very awesome music that pushed the sound chip to it's absolute limits.

It'd be rude not to talk about this and not share a little bit with you, so we've taken the liberty of uploading one of the demos- the first stage tune specifically- and uploaded it to Fileplanet for you to enjoy! Who knows; maybe I'll share some of the others in later posts? ;)

Thanks for reading Maniacs; be sure to check back next week for more awesome Efiáltis concepts!

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We were unable to recover the prior mentioned article and the Fileplanet link expired a very long time ago; we were, however, able to source the music mentioned in the post, and have taken it upon ourselves to upload it to soundcloud alongside the images contained here for archival purposes.

For further reading on Efiáltis, we recommend consulting the post in this hyperlink, which features the first part of a breakdown of the game from the same fansite a few years later.

~ Decon Theed (24/10/19)