Text / Mobile game that little thing Sparrow
In recent years, Station B, which has made a small improvement in the game business, first revealed a blockbuster agent product in the early hours of this morning: the two-dimensional mobile game "Blazing Sky" jointly developed by Wright Flyer Studios and Key Society, which was served as the original case and main story by Jun Ma Zhi. And before that, this game also has a more familiar name for players - "Braised Paradise".
In fact, as early as the beginning of January this year, some sharp-eyed players found that a blue V Weibo called "HeavenBurnsRed" was quietly registered, which then led players to speculate: Could it be that the simplified Chinese version of the game is finally coming?
Sure enough, in the early hours of this morning, Station B officials conveniently released the first exposure PV of the simplified Chinese server of "Blazing Sky Dome", which confirmed the players' conjectures and quickly expanded the circle, triggering a large number of players and KOLs to spontaneously share and spread.
Bilibili,,,
Ma Zhizhun's latest masterpiece "Blazing Sky Dome" was first exposed PV, and "Special Message from Simplified Chinese Service" was released for the first time
Mini programs
"Blazing Sky" is not a small work, and before the official announcement of the national service, the game has achieved good results overseas. Not only did the Japanese server top the double-end free list on the day of its launch, but it also set a record of more than 200 million US dollars in turnover in the first year, and won many awards such as "Best Game of the Year 2022", "Most Popular Game Award in the User's Vote", "Drama Category Award" and other awards on Google Play that year, becoming the veritable No. 1 hit mobile game in Japan in 2022.
("Blazing Sky" surpassed the second place in Japan's revenue in 2022)
(The game is always at the top of the best-selling list on iOS in Japan)
(Official Celebration Twitter)
After a year, the traditional Chinese and Korean versions of "Blazing Sky" have also achieved outstanding results. The double-end free list of the Taiwan server reached the top, and the iOS best-selling list topped within half a month after the launch of the service. The game also won an honorable mention in the categories of "Best Story Game of the Year" and "Best Tablet App of the Year" on Google Play Best of 2023 in Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively. Hanbok has also achieved good results, entering the top 10 of the best-selling list within half a month of opening.
Although the game has been verified by the overseas market, in the face of the domestic second-game market, which has become a "sea of blood", I can't help but have some questions: can "Blazing Sky" withstand this expectation and be favored by domestic second-game players?
Further, will it be able to become the first hit of station B in the two-dimensional field this year?
01
Narrative-driven core design
Speaking of "Blazing Sky Dome", we have to mention the golden sign behind the game: "Galgame" professional key club and its soul - Ma Zhi Jun.
Players who know Japanese ACG culture must know the gold content of the name "Jun Maeda". Jun Asaeda was at the pinnacle of the Gal era, and his "tear-jerking trilogy" "Kanon", "AIR" and "CLANNAD" have long been famous in the Japanese animation industry. He is good at depicting family, friendship and love between people with delicate brushstrokes, and his works are famous for touching people's hearts and tear-jerking, and are affectionately known as the "tear-jerking demon king" by players.
(CLANNAD壁纸)
The game developer Wright Flyer Studios, which has produced "Another Eden: Cats Beyond Time and Space", "Dungeon Encounter: Memory Vision", "Destroy the City" and other high-scoring two-dimensional games, has a strong research and development foundation and experience, and cooperates with Key, which is famous for producing beautiful girl game visual novels, so that "Blazing Sky" has a delicate plot content and performance effect, and also makes users' impression of this work different from the traditional second game.
Specifically, "Blazing Sky", as a sequel to Ma Zhi's 15-year absence, continues the consistent plot style, telling the story of the girls and their companions saving the crisis together in the context of the apocalypse.
It is not difficult to find that the collocation of this set of "Girls' × Academy" as the framework of the whole plot has a strong key club flavor. Further excavation, although the story involves apocalypse, war and other plots, it is far from labels such as "hot blood" and "royal road", but starts from the daily life of the girls who constantly meet and fight side by side, focusing on portraying the "complex and entangled feelings" between them.
("Blazing Sky" represents to a certain extent the persistence of KEY Club and Ma Zhijun to "complex feelings")
In order to better highlight this emotional concept, most of the design in "Blazing Sky" revolves around the "main narrative", focusing on conveying the charm of the characters and the plot to the outside.
First of all, the game has a main story conceived by Jun Aeda for five years and experienced for dozens of hours. Even in the second-game category that emphasizes the expression of the plot, the amount of text in "Blazing Sky" can be said to be very amazing.
Therefore, the plot of the game accounts for a very high proportion, and it is more like a text AVG than other second games. Moreover, it has quite a lot of story text at each plot point, and even the material copies have been performed accordingly.
These huge amounts of text support the evolution and development of the entire game world of "Blazing Sky", and also build different stages for the growth of the characters in it, making it more three-dimensional and vivid in the hearts of players.
Secondly, in the narrative process of "Blazing Sky", "Blazing Sky" pays great attention to the player's sense of immersion and substitution.
Judging from the performance screen, there is no complicated UI in the game's "main interface", and many system entrances are hidden in invisible menus, which makes the graphics of "Blazing Sky" very simple and clean, allowing players to feel the changes and development of the game's plot more attentively, and quickly integrate into it, further increasing the sense of immersion.
From a narrative point of view, in "Blazing Sky", players cannot create their own characters like other two-dimensional games, but experience the story centered on the protagonist "Mao Sen Moon Song", and put themselves in the shoes of other characters to feel the joys, sorrows and sorrows of the apocalyptic world.
(The heroine's standard oral fetish)
The game seems to limit the player's choices, but the actual sense of substitution is no worse than that of entering the game yourself, in my opinion, there are three main reasons:
First, compared to the plot where everyone revolves around the "player from the sky", the third perspective will be more smooth and natural because the heroine originally exists in the story;Second, thinking from the heroine's position will help players intuitively understand the impact of what is happening on the characters; Third, the heroine has her own personality, both daily off-line and responsible, and players can experience the unique charm of the character in the interaction, which is more interesting.
(Occasionally, there will be some off-line, nonsensical answers)
It is worth mentioning that the production team's investment in funny jokes can also be called "crazy". Not only is the game full of memes, but it also has a special option system, where players can freely choose to shake their wits and make up nine different combinations of answers, some of which will trigger crazy complaints from other characters, and the process is also fully voiced.
In terms of experience logic, the game world is also closer to reality. For example, the player's experience of the script is not simply a reading process, interspersed with many map interactions. Players need to move to different locations in order to move on to the next progression, and this is a reflection of the game's many details of life incorporated into the script.
For example, the time system of "Blazing Sky" is also very distinctive. The development of the plot follows a unique timeline, and the girls' schedules are closely related to the time, such as getting up at half past five, having lunch at 12 o'clock, and if the bond plot is opened, there will be an additional bath event at half past eight at night.
And this setting, which is close to the logic of the real world, is also to tell the story step by step, and to further deepen the sense of immersion. Although the schedule is similar every day, there are always different bonds and encounters, isn't it a portrayal of our real life?
(Blazing Sky has a detailed calendar and a separate sleep face for each character.)
To sum up, the series of designs of "Blazing Sky" are all accumulating and preparing for the subsequent emotional warming, the story it tells is slow but real and delicate, and it also uses a step-by-step approach to make all the details traceable, until the final emotional explosion that comes naturally.
Through the various important memories left in the works in the early stage, the reality of these daily stories can be highlighted, and the audience's understanding and resonance of the works can be deepened. It can be said that Jun Aeda's works are always accompanied by miracles and touches, and it is this touch on the softness of human nature that constitutes the tone of Jun Aeda's works, impressing two-dimensional players again and again.
02
Dynamic comic-like audio-visual experience
In addition to the highlight of Ma Zhizhun serving as the original case, "Blazing Sky Dome" also has good quality at other levels. One of the most praised is that it allows players to watch a first-class audio-visual experience as if they were watching a drama.
First of all, the characters are brilliantly portrayed and the picture performance is excellent, which is a major embodiment of the delicacy of "Blazing Sky".
From the character painting, players can see how much attention "Blazing Sky" attaches to character creation, after all, for the audience of the second game, the most direct sensory stimulation is still at the visual level.
The beautiful girl characters in the game are all created by the well-known art designer Yuugen. On the characters, you don't see a lot of ornate decorations and revealing clothing, instead of simple and uniform campus uniforms.
(Uniform and girls with different looks)
But with such a unified uniform, we can still see the girls' respective personality traits from their standing, expressions, and dressing styles.
For example, in the same school uniform cardigan, the lively and competitive Megumi Aikawa (second from right) tied it directly to the waist, while Yuki Izumi (third from left), who is more rigorous and known as "the only normal person in the group of protagonists full of fools", is seriously dressed neatly. Kunimi Tama (second from left) shows off her past identity and position with a distinctive captain's hat, and Asakura (first from right) reveals her otaku attributes with cat ears and cat tail elements, and she is indeed a veteran FPS player. These designs may seem inconspicuous, but they can accurately depict the character traits of the characters, flesh out the characters from the level of details, and enhance the expressiveness of the characters.
The game's graphics are also detailed and crisp. The game uses the overlapping colors, deliberate white space, and soft light and shadow to highlight the atmosphere, which not only mobilizes the player's emotions and resonates in the progress of the story, but also shows the differentiated characteristics of the product's art style in the process.
Not only that, but the game also pays a lot of attention to the experience at the level of voice acting and soundtrack.
In order not to appear rigid when the plot is performed, "Blazing Sky" has made full voice coverage, inviting more than 50 well-known voice actors including Nanmu Lantern and Miyashita Saki to help. In the character's meme or complaining dialogue, the game will also draw a close-up of the face for the complaining service, expressing the character's emotional outburst, and also adding an animation-like sense of fluidity.
Secondly, the divine soundtrack that fits the plot is also one of the important reasons for the tear-jerking of Ma Zhijun's works.
The music part of "Blazing Sky" is a collaboration between Jun Ma eda and Yanaginagi, and there are many concerts of the main characters in the game, and the plot is gradually pushed to a climax through powerful graphics and moving music content, creating "Dance! Dance! Dance!", "Burn My Soul" and other famous songs.
Players also gave high praise to the music of "Blazing Sky", and did not hesitate to praise it on social platforms. With its high-quality soundtrack, "Blazing Sky" also won the "Best Music" award for Famitsu Electric Shock Game in 2022.
Whether it is the foreshadowing of emotions, the coordination of performances, or the careful creation of dubbing and soundtracks, they all reflect the focus of "Blazing Sky" on "quality". By polishing the quality of the game in more detail, it brings players a more diverse audio-visual experience, so that this bond breaks through the dimensional wall and touches the heartstrings of every player.
03
Can it become the next hit of station B?
Attacking China, "Blazing Sky" is undoubtedly a high-quality masterpiece, but the challenge it faces cannot be ignored, that is, can the culture from Japan transcend regional and thinking differences, and be accepted by domestic market users?
Judging from the overall tone of the game, the initial results of "Blazing Sky" should not be too bad, not only because of the endorsement of Key Club and script master Ma Zhizhun, but also because Station B has also played a big role in it as the publisher of the simplified Chinese version.
On the one hand, it is the multiple advantages brought by Bilibili as an exclusive agent. Station B has cooperated with Key Society several times in the field of animation, and has the exclusive broadcast rights of many dramas of Key Society, which also shows the long-term stability of the cooperative relationship between the two parties to a certain extent.
The large number of second-generation content on the platform provides an excellent ecological environment for "Blazing Sky Dome". Prior to this, the related second creation of "Blazing Sky" has had a very high level of participation, and the character charm of the girls in the game has also subtly broadened the game circle.
On the other hand, the localization team of the simplified Chinese version is full of sincerity.
For example, veteran players who have played the game know that the slogan of the Japanese version of "Blazing Sky" is "Mogami の, 切なさを." It can not only summarize the content of the game at a high level, but also skillfully fit the overall plot atmosphere, which is the essence of the game. However, on the premise of retaining the artistic conception of the original version, it is not easy to accurately translate and convey this text to domestic players.
The traditional Chinese version translates it as "憶深切慟", because the connotation of each word is extremely rich, it is more esoteric and obscure in the context of simplified Chinese, and considering that the slogan should be easy to read and remember, the simplified Chinese team did not simply use the simplified Chinese version of the traditional Chinese translation. Instead, it is based on the Japanese version of the sentence break structure, using the four-character + four-character pattern to translate the original sentence as "the deepest mourning, echoing the heartstrings", which literally means "the deepest and most extreme sorrow, constantly echoing in the heart, cannot be simply erased". Compared with the traditional version, it is easier to read and remember, and the threshold for understanding is lowered while retaining the charm of the original version as much as possible.
In this way, players can easily understand the content and main axis of the game from the slogan, and we can also get a glimpse of the dedication and love of the localization team from this small detail.
At the same time, in order to express congratulations on the smooth launch of Jianzhongfu, Ma Zhizhun specially presented a message from Jianzhong, which also reflects the importance and expectation of the development team to Jianzhongfu.
In general, the launch of "Blazing Sky" in China can be said to be a verification of the market, if the game's "heavy story" gameplay can be accepted by domestic players and take a new path of their own, perhaps there will be more different themes and gameplay attempts on the two-dimensional track in the future. I believe that Station B can play this card well, and look forward to the market performance of "Blazing Sky" in the future.