December 29, 1997

The December 29, 1997 Document

Here are what I found to be the most interesting pieces of information from this early RPG designer file as I scrolled through.

Towns

Although the file's named "Blades of Exile Towns," it only has any real details on one town, Amiriac. It does have a population of 28, though--larger than almost any RPG town I'd seen! Other named towns are Kerotys, Laceria, and Kello, but almost nothing is said about them.

Dress Code

The town is run by a mayor, but the country is ruled by an Empress Alexia and she's imposed dress codes for girls and boys, broken up by age groups. I've shown the key elements below, with more commentary to follow afterward. I'm sure psychologists could have a field day with these details, especially when mixed with the implications of an Empress imposing them and my penchant for turning myself into both genders Since 1997. XD (1993 even!)

Group	Top	Waist	Legs	Feet	Winter permissions
Boys 0-5			anything modest
Girls 0-5	anything modest		anything modest
Boys 6-10	shirt or tunic	no belt	pants or shorts	boots, sandals, or sneakers	jacket
Girls 6-10	shirt or tunic	tied sash required	shorts or skirt	sandals, slippers, or sneakers	jacket, leggings
Boys 11-15	shirt only	belt required	long shorts only	boots, sandals, or sneakers	jacket, pants
Girls 11-15	tunic only	tied sash optional	skirt only or nothing with a long tunic	sandals, slippers, or sneakers	jacket, leggings
Boys 16-20	shirt only	belt required	pants only	boots or sneakers	jacket
Girls 16-20	tunic only	tied sash optional	shorts, skirt, or nothing with a long tunic	sandals or slippers	jacket, leggings, sneakers
Older than 20	anything modest		anything modest

Interestingly enough, the dress code only applies while in town. At that time, I was in junior high where I met my first (and last) school dress code, which might or might not be a coincidence. Maybe it says something about my view of civilized society and how it might have been modeled by school!

No, don't take that seriously. :P Maybe it was just easier to imagine character designs if I limited the range of possibilities! Considering how many sword-wielding elven heroines I came up with (see the Discarded Characters section) and that I'd thought it through enough to come up with long tunics, I'd bet I just liked the Elf's outfit from Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom and Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara and made a mental template out of her tunic, circlet, and mostly bare legs. Then it was all copy-and-paste from there--change her colors, change her shoes, and sometimes give her a skirt, and voila. Insta-heroine. :O

(If only it was that easy. :P)

Town guards and mages are exempt from the dress code and so are priests, who can dress according to their religion. Seeing the word "religion" when I was that young surprised me; I wasn't raised in any faith and by that age I'm very sure I still pictured the "Lord" and "King" in "Joy to the World" as a medieval king (maybe even confusing him with Good King Wencelas!). And it wasn't until years later that I learned there was more significance or history to the sign of the cross than to, say, the state birds I learned about in school.

Discarded characters

Some characters who didn't survive past this document include:

• Aurora, a legendary elven ranger who's the second greatest hero in the world. Although she's gone now, I did reuse her name for an unrelated very tall female character in WWF No Mercy who specialized in submission maneuvers.
• Lady Shendara, an old lady magic user who knows both offensive and healing magic.
• Jock, a soldier who seems to be filler.
• Wendy, an elven paladin and the world's greatest hero. Although she's blonde, her name almost surely comes from the Wendy's fast food chain.
• Joxer, the greatest swordsman. He's totally an expy of the Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess, especially from the episode For Him The Bell Tolls. Alternatively, I did have Dekar from Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals as a model of a superpowered medieval male plus a funny elementary school teacher who claimed to have the strength of ten men, so he might be based partly on them.
• Korie, a young human thief who's popular but hangs with questionable company.
• Autol, a king of thieves who's unquestionably an expy of Autolycus, a Bruce Campbell character also from Xena: Warrior Princess.
• Kelurr, a wizard nepharim (a cat person in the world of Blades of Exile).
• Nexa, the third greatest swordfighter behind Joxer and Celty. Another expy of Xena: Warrior Princess, right down to wielding a chakram, but not as strong in the context of her world as Xena is in hers.
• Cossser, a mage slith (lizard person) who's lived long. Even today I love that a lizard person would have three S's in his name. My 13-year-old self was on the ball with that one. ^^
• Letono-Ihrno, a Vahnatai (alien-like species) paladin whose name I ripped from canon NPCs in the Exile series.
• Nectar, the elven archmage and arguably the greatest elf. I've always been oddly drawn to her name, so at least that aspect of her might be revived one day.
• Merry, an elven paladin. I probably got her name from the male hobbit Merry of Lord of the Rings--not that I read the book, but I somehow played J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: Volume 1 for the Super Nintendo long enough to meet him.
• Lucia, another elven hero who's Wendy's sister but mostly filler.
• Okolo, a "troglodyte" warrior.
• Dragon, a dark elf ranger accompanied by Scythe, a female wolf companion who would later become Ari. He's an enigmatic character dressed in black who may be a ghost, a god, an immortal, or an illusion. (Translation: I was trying pretty hard on this one. :P) Anywhere in 2002-2008 I probably would have been embarrassed by a character named Dragon, but hey, if it's a good enough name for Eiichiro Oda, the author of One Piece, I can live with it more comfortably now.
• Flavia, a dwarf warrior who wields a golden axe. No relation to the Golden Axe franchise, which I hadn't played yet--and, of course, no relation to the Flavia from Fire Emblem: Awakening, which didn't exist yet!
• Shree, a heroic phoenix.
• Princess Rainbow, Celty's weaker older sister and an elven warrior who doesn't enjoy being a princess and wants to go on adventures. Ya know, like Princess Alena (Dragon Quest IV), Princess Nadia/Marle (Chrono Trigger), Princess Jasmine (Aladdin), Princess Yuffie (Final Fantasy VII), Princess Ariel (The Little Mermaid), Princess Toadstool (Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars), and every other princess I'd seen. (Hey, even by now nothing's changed--there's Princess Estellise/Estelle (Tales of Vesperia), Princess Natalia (Tales of the Abyss), the Princess class from Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City, the Princess class from 7th Dragon, Princess Melia (Xenoblade Chronicles)...)
• Starr, an elven gymnast paladin who wears white and yellow. Credit where it's due: I'd like to believe I'm still creative, but "gymnast" and "paladin" aren't two words I'd think to put together. XD
• Nerry, an adventurer who's found imprisoned. Not much else is written about her.
• Princess Celina, a damsel in distress who's captured in the fullest: bound, gagged, and even blindfolded. That's something I'd never put in a game now. =/ Even if it was only written out in text like in Blades of Exile, that's pretty scary and extreme. Or maybe I'm just squeamish. Anyway, in her dialogue she calls herself a great warrior and says she has mage training but has also only been on an adventure twice, so I don't really know. I wouldn't write her off as a weak, weak, weak girl too fast. She might have been damselized, but it does mean something that I needed the phrase "taken by alien beasts in the night" to justify how she got captured.
• Merst, the evil leader of the alien beasts and an affiliate with the underworld.
• Flute, an adventurer who goes on a suicide mission against an army and gets captured. Unlike Princess Celina, the instant you free her, Flute starts destroying armies alongside your party.
• Lallo, a twilight elf warrior who leads an army of gremlins and dryads. I don't know what a twilight elf is or how it's different from a dark elf like Dragon. :P

Beryl

Beryl is a left-handed, flaxen-haired mage with glowing clothes, winged slippers, and a magical shield shaped like a fireball. She's immortal but I still made her only 16 for some reason (maybe that seemed old to me back then, though), and she's a happy-go-lucky and playful hero. =)

She gets her own section because if anyone from the "Blades of Exile" document's ever going to be resurrected, it would be her! =) She's the most lighthearted of all my characters in this file and she's a beautiful case of the past mirroring the present back to me. Unlike other characters who were blatant rips from franchises I enjoyed, I probably made Beryl from my own imagination. I hadn't yet played an RPG with a genki girl mage archetype--Lemina from Lunar: Eternal Blue Complete wasn't until 1998 and other mage characters didn't fit that mold. They were too serious like Paula (EarthBound) or Terra (Final Fantasy VI) or too science-y like Lucca (Chrono Trigger) or too AI-controlled like Mara (Dragon Quest IV).

Fast forward to now, though, and what do I have a bigger soft spot for than a spunky, quirky mage girl? Not much! :D Arche (Tales of Phantasia), L'Arachel (Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones), Maria (Castlevania: Rondo of Blood), Norma (Tales of Legendia), and Pascal (Tales of Graces) are some of my favorites. <3

Surviving characters

Celty

Celty is a legendary elven warrior and the world's second greatest swordfighter even at the age of 14. Her appearance here makes her my third-longest-surviving character, beaten only by Saturn and Ari (then named Scythe)! Though her modern incarnation doesn't care for weapons anymore, at least Celty can say she's always been in the top tier of power no matter what universe she belongs to. =) Even though her name is pronounced with an S sound, her name likely comes from Celtic music, a genre I loved when I was young.

In the Blades of Exile universe she's subject to the Empress' dress code at her age and wears a sky blue tunic and skirt, a dark blue sash, and an ice blue circlet; her only non-blue pieces of clothing are her clear slippers. I'm not 100% sure what I meant by "slippers," but almost definitely not house slippers or flip-flops and totally definitely not glass Cinderella slippers. I might have meant ballet flats or Mary Janes, but I believe I was probably thinking of jelly sandals. It's tough to say, though.

There are no descriptions of her height, hair color, skin color, or anything else, so it might be fun to have a fanart contest one day for her "Origin Outfit" and see what others come up with. ^^

Rae

Rae is a blonde 18-year-old human paladin from a snowbound land who wields a magical sword created by Nectar and wears almost entirely white: her cape, tunic, skirt, and leggings all blend in with her winter homeland's environment. Her only non-white clothes are clear slippers (the triumphant return of clear slippers!), which again makes me wonder what I meant. The text says her leggings end at her ankles and I was very specific earlier about wearing appropriate clothing for winter, so who knows?

Rae eventually merged into Snowy, another paladin. The name Snowy almost got into the game for her, but I wasn't too comfy with a character from a wintery area being named Snowy and I already had a character named Winter. So I went back to Rae, then updated the name to Tarine when I decided I didn't want it to be so short.

Limestone

Limestone was then mostly what Lime is now: a green golem with impenetrable armor that even the world's greatest heroes can't break through. When I put it that way, Lime sounds kinda like a defensive version of The Hulk, but I wasn't familiar with Marvel superheroes then. ;P

Harp

Unlike the current Harp, this Harp is a left-handed 17-year-old bard dressed in a cheerful yellow tunic, skirt, and leggings with an orange sash and red sandals. Despite being the eighteenth named character in my file, she's the first with named equipment: the Song Maiden's Blade and Phoenix Feather Shield. And, contrary to her name, she plays a flute. =) (And so did I!)

Boomerang

Boomerang is a ninja of unknown gender dressed all in purple with black sandals. I know I meant the traditional full-body ninja garb worn by everyone from Ryu Hayabusa (Ninja Gaiden) to Ibuki (Street Fighter)--the ninja outfit everyone knows by cultural osmosis. Still, with that description, I can't help picturing Kurenai from Sengoku 3. :P

Boomerang was another expy character, but less blatant about it than the Xena rips. Although s/he's named after Boomerang from Wild Arms, s/he's a character more like Shadow from Final Fantasy VI--a hero with mysterious motives, but at least you know s/he's on your side.

By the time of the other old file, Boomerang became Backlash. (With the power of thesaurus lookup! :O) Instead of one character of unknown gender, s/he became two characters: a vengeful, challenge-seeking male super warrior who plagued the party many times, very much like the Wild Arms Boomerang, and a challenge-seeking "bad girl" super warrior from another dimension who joined the party past the halfway mark. The modern Lash is somewhere between the two versions of Backlash.

Saturn

This Saturn is a male paladin claiming to be Dragon's brother. There's not much to him; he's a generic do-gooder and has little in common with the modern Saturn except name.

Document's End

At the very end are two lists that seem like they go against almost everything before them:

The Old Age of Heroes:

• Wendy (Female Paladin)
• Dragon (Male Ranger)
• Saturn (Male Sword Warrior)
• DoF Demon (Male Fist Warrior)
• Scion (Male Sword/Fist Warrior)
• Lucia (Female Ranger)

The New Age of Heroes:

• Coral (Female Sword/Fist Warrior)
• Lore (Female Paladin)
• Parry (Male Sword Warrior)
• Patience (Female Priestess/Mage)
• Reason (Male Mage)
• Blush (Female Thief)

Up to this point, though, eight of these twelve characters haven't been mentioned--and the four who have, Wendy, Dragon, Saturn, and Lucia, all seem to be active in the world and only the first two are great heroes who would define an age. When they were added, I don't know, but I doubt they were part of the earlier drafts.