🦑 SNEAK PEEK 🐙

hellsinker's manual is intentionally obtuse, in part for thematic reasons, but also in part to emulate the experience of trying to read the manual after buying a new game in an unfamiliar genre and forgetting like 90% of it before you play

in this section, tonnor finds the single most complicated possible way possible to explain "you have seven lives. if you get hit, you will lose one life."

this is followed by the single line

bass dropper to bassist communication

the joke here is lost in translation, p much calamar's JP title roughly is "Bassist Who Wants to Stand Out"

other than that I do not know a single lick of japanese

I love A.T.K.C.S.N. GARLAND being entirely well-meaning within its own mental framework, but also being a doomed attempt to make an artificial christian saviour mechanism and systematically paralyse samsara (this is textual, given the comparisons to driving a stake through the heart of the world in an effort to regulate karma and end entropy)

like the tragedy of that inherent contradiction is really felt during the breakdown where the system desperately reverts to customer service voice, trying to figure out what you could even want from it, because it's already offered to give you moral dignity

it's entirely incapable of understanding the distinction between refuge and salvation, so it offers one and delivers the other

calamar boasts his so-called telepathic skills to the public for the hundredth time

only context is that I headcanon calamar to be the type of squid that claims to be a psychic

cal is not a psychic, but he manages to convince ppl that he can read their minds

No thoughts 💬

"anemone why did you obliterate that unaware grizzco employee while we were in the desert"

reposting my bsky artworks hereI headcanon most of the promokids to hate the company behind salmon run

salmon run is my favorite splatoon gamemode due to it being the best 3d adaptation of a 2d shmup btw

while I'm on a STGposting kick, here's some lesser-known Hellsinker. soundtrack trivia that I couldn't justify putting in their own posts, pulled partially from old blog entries and also just the game itself (dude trust me)

stuff below the break is written without trying to avoid spoilers, because otherwise it'd mostly just be a huge block of censored text

see below list for bonus notes on certain points

in at least one instance, hiranyon (the name TONNOR was using at the time) played with the idea of having the boss themes start in mono and then explode outwards into stereo after the boss entered the stage. in the end, he opted for the music to make use of hard L/R panning instead, to represent the boss entering through the centre

Segment 1L Boss (F. Rex Cavalier) was titled Keep your dignity, and if that phrase being the title didn't give it away, hiranyon outright confirmed the foreshadowing to be intentional in a blog post talking about writing the song

Segment 4 Boss (Rusted Dragon) was titled Fade away. apostate with an added explanation of the intentional ambiguity in the title, with the apostate (the translation he gives is 背信者) being decided by the outcome of the battle

there was an old track called shrine.ogg which notably didn't sound even a little bit like a stage theme, especially not a stage theme like Shrine of Farewell. the pre-release song which has the most in common with the Shrine theme proper is actually titled boss3.ogg. if you think about the Shrine in the context of being a boss (which makes a weird amount of sense, it just doesn't register as one because it's kind of free-floating), I guess it could come third?

people used to theorise about Aozora/Aoxola, the final boss from Radio Zonde, being Lost Property 771. I don't really believe this is true, but it's worth pointing out that Aozora/Aoxola's hidden phase theme is incredibly similar to Shrine of Farewell, to the point where I wouldn't blame someone for thinking the Shrine theme is a direct arrangement. I'm actually still kind of suspicious, myself

speaking of Radio Zonde callbacks that imply... something? the string section in Fade Away. apostate appears to be an arrange of Opaque Heart from Radio Zonde

there are cat sounds in a startling number of songs. the earlier in the game the song is, the more distorted the cats will be, but they're still almost omnipresent. the most obvious are in the second to last phase of the GARLAND theme where there's a constant choir of cats singing the melody, but you can also hear them in Segment 4 and 5 (both sides, stage and boss theme) if you listen carefully. hiranyon likes to bury them in sections with lots of other instruments

there are, generally speaking, two kinds of cat sounds that I've noticed pop up in the soundtrack. I'm going to call them the "cat piano" and the "meow pad" because hiranyon uses both of them pretty extensively, and it's really obvious what he's doing because he uses them most in songs directly associated with Lost Property 771

most people know this by now and I almost wasn't going to include it, but it feels weird to have a list of Hellsinker soundtrack trivia without mentioning that Past Rising Again (reprised as PAST RISINGS AGAIN) is an arrangement of the boss theme for early bosses in Radio Zonde. it's a distorted version of that theme because you're fighting a duo boss that's meant to resemble the old players, now having been distorted into prayers

the cat screaming in The Great Majority isn't a sound effect playing from one of the enemies. it's actually baked into the song. this probably isn't trivia to anyone who got into the game through the soundtrack, but I felt insane when I listened to the soundtrack and realised this

The Way of All Flesh, being the finale, reprises the game in reverse order. as an aside, all of Hellsinker is synced to the soundtrack (and hiranyon prides himself on this), but it really stands out here more than anywhere else. there's one especially notable bit where the screen flickers, displaying the text "Wherever did you put?" before

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[1] hiranyon: 盛り上がる前のトコ　公開当初の時点では。音が中央に寄る（圧迫感）→ステレオに戻る（開放感）という　絵に同期した仕掛けを意図したものでしたが。後期のものは音を限界まで横に広げ中央を空けて、ちょうど画面上では音の逃げた跡の。真中手前にボスが迫る、という演出構造にしたつもりでした。

[2] hiranyon: 満身創痍になりながらもそれを気にかけず進む者・それに相対する敵。強くありたいが周囲に押し流されそうな危うさや　そうなりきれずともそうあろうとする姿

[3] hiranyon: そう言われている時点では、その場に居るどちらがapostate（背信者）かは不確定です。恐らくどちらかが膝を折った時、それは決まるのでしょう。

[4] shrine.ogg is REALLY short, almost like it was only expected to loop for a single input screen. this seems to imply that the Shrine of Farewell might have gotten its name from originally being something at the end of a run or stage, like the results screen theme in Radio Zonde, but afaik there's no actual information on this at all and I just like to draw conjecture.

[5] hiranyon being someone who likes motifs and also someone who has specific flourishes that he keeps unconsciously using when writing melodies makes it really hard to say anything like this for sure. he actually complained about his tendency to over-write organ sections in his blog post about about rewriting Fade away. apostate lol

[8] the first instance of the cat piano I can think of occurs in Segment 2b, although it's heavily filtered so you almost have to know what it sounds like in the final boss to pick it out here. the first instance of the meow pad, however, is in the first menu theme

anemone regrets her 9-5

super scuffed drawing I'm sorry

only context I will give is that anemone works for grizzco and her soul was destroyed working there

this squid is wanting redemption 💀💀💀 buddy how will redemption bring back the lives of the thousands of salmon you killed

The one and only C4L4M4R 🦑

calamar is the worst secret agent of all time

he's p good at dealing with mammals tho