Those of us old enough to remember the grainy bits of Megatokyo on bad early 90s tv sets recall there was a definite look and feel to the punkish-not-quite-Blade-Runner-eqse Megaa tokyo. It looked a lot like a bad upgrade of LA with buma.

In TIA, it seems to be somewhat past that. No mention of urban deconstruction, no mention of the Kansai quake except as a bad memory, and none of the grittiness I recall from the source material.

Now that said, TIA starts with the protagonist telling us Tokyo is different. My question is - How different??

Are we in the BGC 2040 for the visuals?

Is the city going to have just a couple iconic scenes with the rest organically developed as the plot requires?

and

Will it be one of those strange, hermetically clean cities of the future?

Just curious,
t.

Trigger Argee
trigger_argee@hotmail.com
Manon, Maccadon, Orado, etc.
Denton, never leave home without it.

"If we are marked to die, we are enough
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater the share of honour
God's will I pray thee wish not one man more" - Henry V, Act, IV Scene III

Well, keep in mind that it's early yet, and most of what we've seen has been in prosperous downtown districts which would presumably have been rebuilt first. There's been little reason, other than that one brief visit to Priss's camper, for us to go down into the Barrens or visit any of the other less-fully-repaired parts of the city.

>Now that said, TIA starts with the protagonist telling us Tokyo is
>different. My question is - How different??

Considering that most of the city fell down and had to be rebuilt, even the parts that have been reconstructed and are now in good condition - the showpiece districts, if you will - are going to look considerably different from what was there before. So someone more familiar with the city as it existed in, say, 2024, is still going to find Mega Tokyo strange and unfamiliar, even if what makes it different isn't "those buildings shouldn't be lying on their sides like that, should they?"

>Are we in the BGC 2040 for the visuals?
>
>Is the city going to have just a couple iconic scenes with the rest
>organically developed as the plot requires?
>
>and
>
>Will it be one of those strange, hermetically clean cities of the
>future?

Not particularly; probably; not everywhere.

Just as the cast of The Iron Age mingles characters from both series, so I expect the "visual design" of the rest will do likewise. For instance, most of the service and industrial boomers look, to my mind's eye, more like the ones from BGC2040 (though the ones specifically built for combat are models seen in the OVA series), and I expect that the central districts - the ones that were rebuilt first and with the greatest care - do have a certain city-of-the-future cleanliness about them. The whole city's not like that, though.

See, here's the thing, and this is both advantage and problem: Tokyo is really, really big. Even in real life it's colossal, and in the world of TIA it's even bigger. Which means that there are going to be parts of the city that conform to pretty much any preconception one might have, but also that there are also a lot of other parts that don't.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Remember that a lot of BGC's inspiration came from Blade Runner, and a lot of Blade Runner's aesthetic came from Ridley Scott living in Los Angeles, where the cops don't bother with patrol cars in a lot of places because helicopters are safer. ;)

Ard Sumhenner
that Janice chick
Usual Suspect and general menace