I've developed a bit of an obsession lately with the "alpha" footage/screenshots that are out there. Hopefully my posts aren't coming across as spammy.
So, there's a point in the
V Fes '94 Video where everyone's talking, and there's gameplay footage playing on the big monitors in the background. What appears to be Crono, Robo, and Ayla cross a bridge over a river that runs through the continent. At each end of the bridge a location label pops up.
The only place I've really seen this discussed is The Cutting Room Floor page, and they just show a really low-res capture and say that it's hard to read. I have a slightly better one I've been staring at for a while and I
think I know what it says.
The text on the top and bottom is screencapped from the video (the only difference is the bottom is deinterlaced, which didn't make much difference). In the middle is my recreation of the same text using the final game's font. It's a little blurry because I stretched it horizontally to try and match the aspect ratio from the video.
I think it says おもかげ橋 or Omokagebashi/Omokage Bridge. The only part I'm really not sure about is the 橋 on the end. The kanji character in the video seems a little simpler/like it's lacking some bits. The overall shape seems right though, and 橋 is the same character for bridge used in the final game's label for Zenan Bridge.
There is apparently a real bridge in Japan called Omokage bridge as well, although it's written as 面影橋. I tried looking up the meaning of Omokage/面影.
This site says it means "face; looks; vestiges; trace" and gives the following example sentences:
This town still retains something of the old days.
Hollywood isn't what it used to be.
At her age, she still preserved the appearance of a young girl.
The village is now different from what it used to be.
Seems like kind of a melancholy/nostalgic word.
Later I was looking at some screenshots from magazines and it occurred to me that this bridge that shows up a couple of times is probably Omokage Bridge as well.
I don't know whose tombstones those are, but their presence kind of fits the vibe of those Omokage example sentences above in my opinion. The larger of the two tombstones seems to be the unused tombstone sprite from the Prerelease ROM that Vehek posted about
here, so that's kind of neat as well.
I guess that's it. I don't really have an "in conclusion" for this. It's just some odds and ends that have been floating around in my head. Hopefully it's not all stuff that's been discussed to death. If it has I couldn't find those discussions.
Oh, I didn't know where else to mention this, so here's a random tidbit: The bridge in the shots above with the tombstones is 16 pixels/two tiles (subtiles I guess in TF terms?) narrower (meaning vertically on screen) than Zenan Bridge.
Random tidbit #2: I think
maybe a playable version of this (or possibly a video tape) may have been sent around at some point. I'm basing this entirely on the fact that we have two shots that seem to be from different moments in the same battle. If it was just a mockup I'd think there'd probably only be one. That's just wild speculation though.
