Why was Glenn going to be human in Crimson Echoes/Flames of Eternity

[Feeso]

Hey I'm a massive fan of crimson echoes but I always wondered why Human Glenn was planned?
The sprites are shown in the credits of the Youtube play through and flames of eternity actually went with a human version of Frog. I always wondered how this was meant to happen in storyline and from a technological PO. Like Frog remains a frog in all the endings of CT where Magus survives as far as I was aware. Was there gonna be a side quest where you could convince Magus to transform Frog back? (would be neat to explore Cyrus getting the Masamune I guess). But I don't think it'd be technically possible.

[Vehek]

I think a major reason was that he's shown as a human in the ending video added in the PS1 version. So as far as Compendium canon was concerned, Frog becomes human regardless of Magus's survival. Early versions of CE used the NPC sprite for his appearance in the intro chapter, and later the party complimented his human form upon meeting him.

[Feeso]

But I'm fairly sure Crimson Echoes starts by saying it's a sequel to the SNES version, not the DS or the PS1.

[ZeaLitY]

The short reason was that we wanted CE to be a technical showcase of everything up to that point. When Geiger made that Temporal Flux teaser back in 2004, which teased the idea of having Toma and Schala in your party, having a different party member because a killer innovation. Since the 8th character wasn't feasible, and since we knew replacing any member with Schala would offend the dearest fans of that party member, human Glenn was the best way to do this.

But yeah, it was just going to be explained that thanks to the conciliatory nature of everything after CT (and based on Magil replying that Glenn, in fact, wasn't his enemy in Radical Dreamers by being silent on the topic), the thrust would be that Magus lifted the spell.

[Feeso]

The short reason was that we wanted CE to be a technical showcase of everything up to that point. When Geiger made that Temporal Flux teaser back in 2004, which teased the idea of having Toma and Schala in your party, having a different party member because a killer innovation. Since the 8th character wasn't feasible, and since we knew replacing any member with Schala would offend the dearest fans of that party member, human Glenn was the best way to do this.

But yeah, it was just going to be explained that thanks to the conciliatory nature of everything after CT (and based on Magil replying that Glenn, in fact, wasn't his enemy in Radical Dreamers by being silent on the topic), the thrust would be that Magus lifted the spell.

Thanks for responding Zeality, I'm a huge fan. I guess it makes sense as a showcase, was wondering whether this would happen during the story or wheter Glenn would be introduced as a human. (techs like slurp made me wonder). I think it's a shame the flames of eternity people included human glenn and didn't explain it, but then they did stuff like making Agent 12, Agent 86 so IDK.

[ZeaLitY]

He was going to just show up as human from the get-go I think, no transformation or anything as part of the story. One of Agent 12's earlier goals before CE was to have a full-on Glenn story hack, so human Glenn was going to serve two purposes there, with potentially more story appearing in that hack.

[justin3009]

I can't recall much about it, but I do remember that getting the sprites properly done was kind of an issue. There 'is' a full sheet but it's pretty clunky in most cases.

Sprite Assembly and Animation Data as well were a problem. But there's a pretty good sprite assembly editor out which would help tremendously, not so sure about animation wise though. Doing manual labor via hex to get things just right would be an arduous task all around.