ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS

This post-mortem was originally a 1500 word essay expounding on my moral considerations while writing this review, but I realized that that's super boring and nobody wants to read about that anyway so let's instead talk about all the fun creative stuff that went into making this video.

I want every one of my reviews to be very stylistically unique, so originally the plan with this one was to do a southern hip-hop thing with all the visuals based on bling-era mixtape covers and the music being some kinda DJ Screw, Tommy Wright III, Three 6 Mafia beat tape OST:

As I developed the script more I decided that I wanted something more in line with my interpretation of the game's aesthetics, so instead I went for a super punk, industrial, counter-cultural style. I think the Machine Girl inspiration is pretty obvious; I also like Sonic Dragolgo, Nanoray, etc (there was also an unignorable Yeezus and Crystal Castles II influence, but uhh let's celebrate ppl like Arca and Alice Glass for that instead of Kanye and Ethan Kath). This OST is so short because I knew I had to be in the right headspace to make music for it, so I would literally wait until I was pissed off about something to open my DAW and draft tracks which took like 5 months (for reference, I drafted most of LOVEWEB Shuffle in 2 weeks). I also cut probably double the length of the OST from the final tracklist because songs just didn't fit exactly what I was going for stylistically. Here's a seapunk/chopped n screwed track that I ended up cutting from the OST:

While I was fighting a continuous war in FL Studio, Charlie was entering a new one in Blender. We finished Heisei Pistol Show for the first time in a discord call together (please imagine two guys platonically playing this game together it's so funny); I had told him that I already knew I was going to review it beforehand just from playing 2 minutes into the game by myself. The thumbnail for this review went through tons of phases, ideas, and redesigns. Originally, I asked Charlie to make something super edgy and punk to recontextualize the imagery of the game and convey how abrasive it was in a still image. We just had a ton of issues with framing and positioning, and trying to recreate Parun's character designs in 3D turned out to be more complicated than we had expected.

We decided to continue with the theming of the previous two thumbnails, just recreating some poignant and visually interesting part of the game -- the obvious choice was the princess scene:

This version of the thumbnail is a bit hard to make out at smaller screen sizes, and I kind of wanted it to have a different primary color since the Shenmue thumbnail is primarily blue/sky-themed, so I made some modifications to it. Neither of us could figure out how to do the eyes so we just left them blank.

I didn't plan a title sequence for this review like with the last two, so I realized while editing that I had to figure out a way to open the video. I wanted to very quickly convey the central dichotomy between the game's dark themes and light presentation, so I ended up doing this aggressive, flashing cut thing with a bunch of overlayed effects and a pitch-bent noise version of the princess song. This sequence was heavily, heavily inspired by the original TV commercials for End of Evangelion:

Because all of the music I made for this video was way too aggressive to play in the background, I decided to relegate them to these section openers between chapters. Some chapters just didn't make sense to have music between them, but the idea was to make little windows into an alternate universe where Heisei Pistol Show grew up alongside the internet and was popular in different eras (geocities, early 2010's youtube, late 2010's tumblr, tiktok/instagram reels). The first half of this video doesn't use all of the openers I made for the project, so you'll have to wait to see them all.

I made the little VFX containers for the act sections & music in Womp 3D; I was gonna use Blender but Womp did everything I wanted and was unbelievably easier. It sucks that it basically has always-online DRM but you can do a lot with the free tier. The materials and the way lighting/reflections are handled reminded me a lot of I Spy which is sick, although I'm sure most people will associate the style with either Mason Lindroth or Mushbuh.

I wanted to do some kind of nostalgic callback to the Yume Nikki review by adding an intermission in the middle of this review, but I decided halfway through that I should actually split the video into two parts for a ton of different reasons (mostly my own sanity). It made the most sense to split between CHASING THE MOON and A HOLE THROUGH BLACK PAPER, which is exactly where the intermission was going to go, so I ended up just taking it out. I can't help but leave nothing on the cutting room floor, so here's that intermission if you want to watch it:

Finishing this review has been an ethical and existential nightmare but we locked in and went as hard as we could to honor this game & what it means to people and I hope it shows. I promise that the work put into this single video could have constituted a year's worth of regular uploads if I was a lame ass regular youtuber. I'm at a point where I don't even care if this video only gets 100 views, the video itself is even kind of about how much metrics don't matter to me anymore. We made/are making something raw and honest and beautiful and that's the only way I would want to contribute to this game's legacy.

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