Savage Skies: Part 1

Intro 

Savage Skies is a little-known PS2 fantasy flight simulator from the now-defunct British game studio iRock Interactive, and a reminder that once upon a time there was actually a middle ground between shovelware slop and overpriced AAA bloat!

A real bargain bin gem, Savage Skies was one those lower priced, no-name games that you'd find buried and forgotten at the very bottom of the pile, but if you ever gave it a chance you'd be very pleasantly surprised. You can tell it wasn't a top of the line release and it has many shortcomings, but it's also charming, ambitious, imaginative, and most importantly, fun to play. Back when it came out none of my friends had ever heard of it, but once they tried it they all wanted to play more, and that still holds true today! Just last year I introduced another friend to Savage Skies and she was borderline shocked by how good the flight mechanics in this game feel. She's still playing it! I go back and give it a replay myself every couple of years, because after highschool I sold my original copy and had regretted it ever since. Now I feel the need to periodically come back to my new copy, almost like a rite of penance. It's become a new tradition!

Before I get too far into this post I want to give a special shout-out to Lauren for taking most of this post's screenshots, as well as to The Internet Archive & Wayback Machine, The Cutting Room Floor Wiki, and YouTube user BandicootCommando95 for cataloguing and preserving so much of this game's history online! Trying to find footage, press coverage, and even just screenshots used to be a major endeavor but I was able to find sooooo much more info this year thanks to internet good Samaritans like them! Thank you all, you're doing Gog's work!

Needles to say, if you already read my "Savage Skies Tier List" post back on DeviantArt five years prior, this post WILL contain more content! So much more that I'm splitting it up into two parts, even!

Crazy Train of Development

For most games, there isn't a lot to say about the early stages of development that casual readers would be interested in. Savage Skies is not most games.

The tale starts with "Red Fury", an EXTREMELY different game about politically charged naval warfare during a Martian civil war. Not exactly what you see on the front cover art up there, huh? Very little still exists of that project, but it was a faction-based vehicle shooter where you controlled heavily armed "powerboats" instead of creatures. Here's one of the few pieces of concept art still circulating:

The developers (known then as Team Fury) had been working on this title for at least a couple of years and had purportedly crafted a "revolutionary" new water physics system to animate the restless red seas of Mars, but after their parent company iEntertainment Networks "completely changed its focus from CD-ROM software development to online-only entertainment", they had to walk away.

Boy, that sounds familiar... I wonder if anything like THAT has happened recently? Hmmm. Sony, what do you think? You've been awful quiet lately!

The dev team found a new publisher after that, BAM! Entertainment, and changed their name to iRock Interactive. They carried over some amount of their work, but "Red Fury" gave way to an entirely different title, "Black Skies", which- hmm? What's that? "Black Skies" sounds familiar, too? It's an Ozzy Osbourne song? Hell yeah it is! It was written for this game!

Yeah, you might've thought the weirdest part of this story was how a science fiction game about space colonies and guerilla warfare on boats turned into a fantasy flight simulator with flying goats and half-naked zombie chicks, but you'd be wrong. BAM! Entertainment was a publisher of licensed tie-in games, and the tie-in here was Ozzy Freaking Osbourne. As evidenced by many, many sources including developer updates, press interviews, concept art, official game listings and screenshots, music files, and even playable demos, the first version of this game to look anything like Savage Skies was going to be all about the Prince of Darkness.

And I do mean ALL about! I'm sure you could predict that the soundtrack would've been chock-full of Ozzy Osbourne tracks, but the in-game announcer was going to be voiced by Ozzy too, and so were the three main characters, who were all also modeled after Ozzy. You read correctly: Savage Skies almost chronicled the great war of Ozzy versus Ozzy versus Ozzy, as narrated by Ozzy, with Ozzy playing in the background.

Incredible.

As absurd as it sounds, this gleefully shameless celebrity vehicle actually drove WAY farther into development than Red Fury. It got far enough along that an early build of it was actually shown off and even played at Ozzfest, and according to most sources was roughly 70% complete when it underwent its next metamorphosis. Even after it changed several aspects of Black Skies still endured, like the heavy metal soundtrack, campaign missions named after Ozzy songs, and this guy.

iRock on!

Obviously the final game does not have Ozzy Osbourne plastered all over it, so this departure should not come as a shock to you the reader, but still, it does beg the question: why did this game change its identity a second time? What could have possibly happened to make iRock willingly change so much of their work that far into development?

9-11.

Part of the original Black Skies storyline included a Lord of the Rings inspired pair of towers which were going to fall under siege by airborne assailants, and nobody surrounding the game felt good about that. The similarities were purely coincidental and none of the game's scenes would have actually looked like the September 11th terrorist attacks, but can you blame them? I mean, who in their right mind would have wanted to risk coming across as insensitive or supportive of that? Certainly not the businessmen funding the game, at least.

There were other major concerns too, mind you, like production costs and investors questioning whether Ozzy was really popular enough at that time to pull in mainstream audiences. The twin towers thing might have just been the last straw, but oh what a straw it was... What a peculiar chain of events in general, really. Speedboats on Mars. Ozzy Osbourne. 9-11. Not to mention the abandonment of game discs almost 30 years before PlayStation shot itself in the foot.

Anyway, Black Skies the song was quietly pushed out as a bonus track on Ozzy's next album and Black Skies the video game was renamed Savage Skies and completed without his endorsement.

Since Black Skies was already mostly done, Savage Skies ended up being more or less the same thing, just with more of it own identity. It featured different voice actors, character faces, and songs, but most if not all of the same story elements, game mechanics, and creatures. Aspects like prominent warring factions and a multi-stage campaign seem to hearken back to the project's earliest origins as Red Fury, although obviously applied to very different subject matter. So the final game doesn't look like it has anything to do with Ozzy Osbourne or Martian battle-boats, but if you go into it knowing that backstory already it makes a weird amount of sense!

Fire in the Sky

Savage Skies starts with the great and noble King of Fraewyn (whose name is definitely not Ozzy, by the way), who after declaring a ban on necromancy is cut down by an especially powerful and put-off practitioner of the dark art, Mortalvis. Though his physical body is destroyed, the King is able to endure thanks to a spell which split his soul into three pieces and redistributed them randomly to new bodies. Completely unrelated to this, three distinct factions form in the aftermath of Fraewyn's fall; the three avatars of the once and future King all appear within these factions and have to crawl their way to the top, best their reflections, and regain control of their land.

Oh, aaand flying monsters fit into that! Somewhere. For some reason. They're how the three factions wage war.

Honestly, it's all pretty pointless as set-up goes: all you really need to know is that there's a fantasy world where people ride on dragons and other mythical beasts. Everything else is more or less irrelevant since the three carriers of the King's soul are nameless, voiceless, and only appear in the game's ending cutscenes. Everything else is just set dressing... the abundance of which is, to be fair, a huge part of the game's charm! It's a very detailed and imaginative setting with lots of world-building: some of it necessary, most of it not, all of it fun.

Gameplay is much simpler and more straight forward, which I think is a huge part of why Savage Skies feels so approachable. You start a level, your faction's narrator tells you what you need to do in that level, and then you go do it. Sometimes there's more than one way to accomplish your goal, but more often than not, there's not. There's usually a list of sub-quests you can do, but they're all optional. The control scheme is simple and stays the same no matter who you're playing as and there aren't any really advanced mechanics you need to learn. Exposition dumps are relegated to opening text crawls, over the top voice-overs narrate your progress, action is fast-paced and consistent, and there are a lot of very classic video game style pick-ups all over the place, like floating health potions and power-ups that get gleefully announced by a corny narrator. When you die, you burst into an over the top gore-splosion.

It isn't the kind of game that takes itself too seriously or expects you to do research or grind. You're just there to enjoy the thrill of the experience presented, and if you want to further challenge yourself by upping the difficulty or take some extra time to appreciate the fine details of the setting, you can. It isn't any deeper than that, and honestly I like that about it. It's almost arcadey. Very classic. Just fun for fun's sake!

But, if the story doesn't matter and the gameplay is so simple, what else is there to even yap about...? 

YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS!

Good Times (with Monsters!)

While most of this game's roster is fully playable, there are a handful of beasts that aren't, so let's start with them:

Wraiths

Despite having almost no lore and only being about the size of a person, these spooky specters are some of the most powerful and important monsters in the whole story. It's these that lay waste to the kingdom of Fraewyn and kill the King, not warriors or dragons or even the chief necromancer himself, and they're a pretty big deal when they reappear later on, too. In-game they function like undead heat-seeking missiles: kamikaze units that can't be outran, afflicted by statuses, or killed. Very annoying and basically impossible to deal with. The only way to survive them is to destroy the portal-casters that summon them. They play an especially prominent role in the final mission of the bad guy campaign, where Mortalvis once again uses an army of "great Wraiths" to completely level the good guy capital.

Obviously Wraiths are some sort of evil spirits, but they aren't the kind of ghosts you're probably used to. They snarl and swarm like wild animals, don't act intelligently, haven't got goals, can't cast curses or turn invisible, and aren't intangible. If they touch something, they explode. They can be repelled by magic, but if you're looking to kill them then regular old swords will actually do the trick. I don't know if any specifics like silver or enchantments are required, though.

Besides self-detonating, Wraiths can also attack by unleashing a banshee-like scream, and in the opening cutscene we see one turn a knight into a pile of empty armor and bones instantaneously. Glimpses of swirling orange light are also seen inside one's mouth, possibly implying fire breath or an ability to suck souls straight down to Hell. Mortalvis does call them a type of demon in the good guy campaign.

Design-wise these are some of my favorite Savage Skies monsters. From a distance they look like a cross between a rubber bat and a bedsheet ghost, very goofy and Halloweeny, but up close the situation is more "Violator meets Megatron". They're so much stranger than they get credit for, with faces that are only barely humanoid, earless and noseless, with oblong, wideset eyes like wasps. They have teeth like deep sea fish and close to 60% of their face is just exposed gums. I'm not sure what's surrounding their heads, but it looks like downturned horns and incisor-shaped chin projections. Alternately, it might be a low poly hood with tassels hanging down. Curiously, they have no arms or legs and only the faintest suggestion of a ribcage under their ragged clothes. Parts of their cloak jut upward as if there are spikes or limbs underneath, yet seem hollow. Weirdest of all, their whole bodies are encapsulated in a thick, transparent layer of something, like fog or ectoplasm.

Ooga...

BOOGA BOOGA!

Carriers

Later in the game, players take on a mission to stop one of the factions from delivering a biological super-weapon, and these faceless green things are carrying it. They have a plant-like texture which is repeated on a lot of their faction's jungle foliage and overgrown architecture, but the narrator calls them "creatures", implying something a bit more animate than just big sky-drifting plants. They bear a passing resemblance to swimming octopi, or maybe a giant starfish caught in a wind tunnel, but have wide, flat, wing-like projections and a crescent shaped body. Almost reminds me of something from the Cambrian era, like Marrella.

While mostly featureless in the traditional sense, they do have what appears to be a mouth on their front. No teeth or anything like that, but maybe they don't need them. They might be filter feeders, or maybe the plant association isn't a coincidence and they do photosynthesis?

On the opposite end they have a tubular organ that spits out fumes like a car exhaust or jet thruster. It must be what generates all the thrust they need because their tendrils don't move at all; actually, I wonder if that means these creatures can't land and have to fly perpetually? It's a good thing they're as rigid as they are, though, because those thorns on their tentacles look like they'd be pretty wicked if they could be wielded against you. Not to say they're defenseless, though! If you fly too close to their front they'll light you up with arcs of bio-electricity!

It's worth nothing that some other missions feature living projectiles which may or may not be related to these things. Completing this faction's final mission gives you a glimpse of a spiraling bio-missile that's basically a giant vine, and in other campaigns you have to contend with "foul organisms" that chase you around like living bullets. They have a similar vibe, but their designs are far simpler and I'm not so sure we could classify them as "creatures".

The WarBeast

"The WarBeast is a living fortress. A hairy, stinking sack of mutant filth, no doubt bred from a dung heap and Kalavin's own mother..."

So slanders the narrator when the player starts their mission to confront this thing. My, what colorful language! But, to be fair, this is a pretty absurd and loathsome creation we're looking at: a town-sized floating pig head with two noses, a gaping round mouth with no jaws or teeth, and more orifices than I'd care to count. 

 

While the WarBeast's enormous size does allow it to be used as a mobile weapons platform, this aforementioned super-weapon is surprisingly helpless. It has no attacks of its own, no limbs, no wings, no way of generating thrust, and has be towed along by its entourage of carrier creatures to even move; how it stays airborne at all is never explained, though I would guess it probably involves lots and lots of methane.

Just pootin' along.

The WarBeast is too big to defeat with conventional attacks, so your mission to stop it gets delightfully gross. You see, the Beast is at least self aware enough to know it needs to protect its weakpoints, so if it sees you coming it will seal off its openings with these phlegmy green sphincters. To get at its soft bits you'll have to blast out its eyeballs and blind it to your approach, then sneak up one of its nostrils and fly through its innards to bring it down. A successful gut-run requires the destruction of its heart.

Its oddly small, round, and valveless heart.

Unidentified

As is always the case, there's also a good bit of content that just didn't make it into the final product. That includes monsters of both the enemy and playable variety, and if early promotional material is to be believed at least six mounts made it far enough into development to be cut before release. Unfortunately most of those creatures will probably remain a mystery forever, but we still know more than I would have thought!

One of the six cut creatures was called Gillbourne (it's featured next!), but the rest are only barely hinted at. There are, for example, files in the game for a creature called "Kito", but the name is sadly all that's there. We can't even be sure if Kito was a unique character or not since those same game files list "Rarg" as a separate creature and that's almost certainly just a prototype for Gormag. The same goes for the "mysterious" flying lynx that showed up in NextGen magazine and a little silhouette in the instruction manual; some people point to that being one of the six cut characters and even a member of the bad guy roster, but it's pretty obvious it's just the heroic Yomar earlier in development. That same magazine mentions a "strange creature that looks like a cross between a pegasus and a scorpion", though I'd wager that must've been Miraur.

 

More tantalizing to me is this nameless, tentacle-trailing entity seen only in a single screenshot. It looks to be an utterly colossal jellyfish, even bigger than the player's mount, and has something long and dark attached to it. A leash, perhaps? Maybe this creature could only hover and drift in the wind and had to be dragged around on a leash to participate in combat.

There are also a few sketches of regular (if oversized) animals with Leonardo da Vinci style makeshift wings attached, including a gorilla, a rhinoceros, and even a flying ferret! These are known to be early concepts for the Virtwyn (good guy) faction, indicating that their eventual theme of classic Western mythology had not yet been decided on. I'm glad this direction was abandoned; it's fun for how wacky of an idea it is and might've made a good single character design, but an entire faction built around this idea could've got old very fast.

 

There are also a couple of non-playable creatures that we know existed as far back as Ozzy's Black Skies, but don't have pictures of. One was a fire-breathing basilisk. It was a ground unit, joined by a plethora of other things we didn't get to see like archers, zombies, ballistae, and catapults that hurled heaps of corpses at you. Also on the ground was a type of giant killer plant that must have had hands, or at least very dexterous vines, because it attacked by throwing "boulders, cannonballs and cows". I would have loved to see that!

Gillbourne

The only truly unique cut creature that we have both a name and a face for, Gillbourne was a giant, presumably predatory, and probably genetically modified fish that belonged to the mutant-loving Chrysalis faction. Primarily a mix of goldfish and anglerfish, its orange, stripey scales also brings to mind koi and clownfish, giving it a very unique look. It would've been easy to just paint this thing black and call it a day, but I appreciate that the team went with a more unconventional approach!

The fact that these Gillbourne are shown emerging from water really piques my curiosity, but I'm choosing not to read too much into it; from what I can tell even the earliest versions of Black Skies let players dive underwater to put out fires and wash off poison. This was probably just someone having fun with screenshots, but the idea of air-to-sea mounts is an interesting one.

Early versions of Gillbourne, Sidd, and Oculus.

The artists seemed to still be in the process of deciding on where Gillbourne's rider should've sat and what type of armaments it would have, but clearly it was going to outfitted with some kind of heavy weaponry, similar to their other creature, Krumm. Playable creatures in Savage Skies all have two attacks, by the way, so I wonder if that lure on Gillbourne's head might've done something too.

Proto-Warloth

This is a design that shows up a LOT. Developer interviews strongly suggest that this is the giant bat Warloth, or at least the creature that would eventually become him; if it ever went by any name other than that, I don't know about it. It's a completely and totally different creature design though, barely even a bat, with an extremely stylized body shape, forked tongue, and serpentine tail. Its outline is drawn extra-sketchily, almost like runes, and its interior is basically featureless, which to me implies that it might not even be a physical creature, but rather some kind of living shadow conjured by black magic. I believe this is further evidenced by its appearance in screenshots, where it looks pitch-black and undetailed no matter what lighting it's in. Normally I'd write something like that off as this being a placeholder model used in tests, but from what I gather this creature almost made it into the final game and was changed mostly because of logistics issues with its vertical body shape. It appears twice in the game's manual, once in silhouette, then again as background art (on the Warloth page, even).

Proto-Gormags 

This unsettling bony freak is Rarg, supposedly one of the six characters cut from the semi-final roster; some sources even say it was planned to be in the Xbox and PC versions of the game if they had released. Personally I'm skeptical, since this shares some pretty damning similarities to Gormag. Both are hodgepodge skeletons assembled from random bits and pieces, with tattered wings, round heads, and a mouth comprised of a short upper jaw with two canine teeth and an oversized lower jaw with one single fang. The main difference is that Gormag has more of a spider-type body, buuut...

...this design also appears in concept art alongside another skeleton monster that is. Perhaps just as damningly, this version of Rarg doesn't emphasize the two eyesockets as much as it does the cycloptic-looking nasal passage in the front. It's not hard to imagine how these two designs could've been mashed together and refined to form Gormag. I believe they're all basically the same creature, just in different stages of development.

Still, I would like to take a second to talk about how pleasingly bizarre these two are! I mean, neither is as strong as the final design, but they're both fun in their own way.

"Rarg" is definitely scarier than Gormag, with its sightless gaze, long fangs, and fiendish hands, but it's also kind of funny. Putting the wings all the way at the very back end couldn't possibly have been the most efficient option and makes me wonder if the necromancer who built this one was drunk. Figuring out how to make it fly convincingly was probably what did this version in. The construction of the head is fascinating, though, assembled from what looks to be a giant alligator and a Gomphothere, of all things! The two jaws are such radically different lengths that the reptile part ends a full neck length behind the back of the skull. This thing would've animated really weirdly!

The other Proto-Gormag is less confusing and grotesque, but no less creative and even more alien. Its spider-like form also calls to mind a squid, and more importantly is a giant humanoid hand! In place of an arm it has a long, scorpion-like tail, the business end of which is very ornate and head-like... it also houses a suspiciously magical-looking sphere which I would bet is what brought it to life.

Super Hero

Here's a less serious one! In the finished game there's a cheat mode you can activate called "Super Hero" which boosts all your stats to make you invincible, but at one point in development it was actually going to replace your creature with a literal comic book style super hero! Allegedly this was another of those features that was going to survive in the Xbox/PC version of the game, but that of course never made it to fruition. I can't find any record of how this generic mystery hero would've played, but I'll bet he had laser eye-beams.

Jet Fighter 

A creature replacer that did make it into the final game is the Jet Fighter! Like the Super Hero, it's a toggle you can turn on and off in the cheats menu. Now, I'm not exactly a vehicle guy, but I think it's probably safe to assume that this sci-fi looking thing with space shuttle type textures and machine guns bolted to its wingtips is not based on a real fighter jet. Given the history of the game I actually wonder if it might've been made with leftover assets from Red Fury. An homage, at least? An excuse to make a vehicle after having to abandon their vehicular combat game?

 

Facing Hell: the Virtwyn Monsters

Onto the real meat and potatoes of this buffet, the trio of factions!

First up are the Virtwyn, the group whose story is billed as Savage Skies Easy Mode. Not an unfitting choice, since the best words to describe these guys are simple and safe. The Virtwyn are good guys who fight bad guys, and they love justice and bravery and ride around on noble steeds like winged horses and eagles, wearing golden armor and praying for peace and everything else you would expect. They're completely and totally inoffensive. Just Good Guy brand Good Guys doing Good Guy things! Very traditional, very uncontroversial. They strengthen the other two groups by providing contrast and provide a much-needed hero player option, but they're probably the faction I'll gush about the least.

ROC

The first creature players get to ride in Savage Skies is Roc: truly a Virtwyn creature if I've ever seen one. He is a bird. A very handsome and regal bird, but still, a just bird. I suspect the decision to put a "wise and noble" eagle into this faction had a lot to do with J.R.R. Tolkien, but the legend he's based on comes from Middle Eastern mythology. Mentioned repeatedly in The Arabian Nights by heroes as famous as Sinbad and Aladdin, the Roc was a grand and fearsome predator that wasn't known from any detailed description, but simply by its astonishing size: it roosted on mountain tops, dropped boulders upon ships, and fed live elephants to its young... so it is a little funny that this version is the smallest creature on his team. Actually he's one of the smallest creatures in the whole game and ihis whole playstyle and personality seem to be built around being "diminutive". Ha!

It is fun hearing how the Virtwyn faction co-opted this monster of myth, though; as we'll see a few times in this post, sometimes Savage Skies' most fascinating ideas only get to appear in text! In-game Roc is merely a combat mount just like all the rest, but it's stated in the instruction manual that he used to be an honorary archaeologist. I shit you not. Apparently, Roc had been raised by the Virtwyn faction's scholars, not their military, and had been taught to recognize and even retrieve man-made artifacts! He spent his days before the war traveling with a caravan, scanning vast countrysides for potential dig-sites, gingerly scooping up relics too heavy for human hands, and (I have to assume) getting lots and lots of head scratches and treats from his human handlers.

What do they feed this thing, capybaras?!

As creative, charming, and well thought out as that is, Roc's design is only passable. He's not a 1:1 copy of any real eagle, hawk, or falcon and has a pleasing enough color palette and silhouette, but there's nothing fantastical about him besides his (weirdly underplayed) size. The greatest compliment I could give him is, I think, probably a misinterpretation on my part...

See, for the longest time I've thought Roc might be based on African birds of prey, which besides being a fun change of pace would also be very fitting since his mythological namesake was said to hail from Madagascar. This Roc does have pretty long legs, plus a feathery head crest and a red face like the famously glam secretary bird, and the bateleur is an African eagle that also has a red face, plus a banded wingspan with markings similar to Roc's. Realistically though, I know that's all just coincidence. The manual art shows pretty clearly that the red splotches on his face are just a falconry hood.

See: Roc's alternate skin. Squint and you can see the reins!

As for his long legs, those probably just got added because real eagles don't look that graceful on the ground. His feathery crest could have come from any number of other birds, like the harpy eagle, changeable hawk eagle, or even a common pet cockatoo. Oh well. I tried, Roc!

YOMAR

Despite having an at least slightly more fantastical creature type than Roc, Yomar is somehow even more forgettable. I've genuinely forgotten that this mount exists more than once. I think the problem is threefold:

*He's not connected to any specific myth (so there's no amount of character pre-built into him)

*His concept isn't all that exotic or fantastical (he's a cat, but with wings)

*His design isn't as well executed as some others (neither the 2D manual artist nor the 3D modeler seemed terribly comfortable rendering a cat; I'm not good with cats either, so I sympathize!)

(I'll have nicer things to say about this roster soon, I swear!) 

But! I'll say this for him: at least he's not a lion with a big bushy mane and eagle wings. I feel like that would've been THE most obvious and generic thing the team possibly could've done for a Virtwyn flying cat. Yomar here only has the tail of a lion and is otherwise mostly lynx- Iberian lynx, if I'm not mistaken. It's quite the sharp looking cat, and one that gets way less play in fantasy, too, which is weird because it's honestly kind of the perfect fit. With those beard-like ruffs and ear tufts that invoke dragon horns, lynxes have a distinctly fantastical "wise old man" look that few other games besides Skyrim have ever taken advantage of. It's a great choice for this design. Personally, I just wish there'd been a little more to it. Another mythological tie, most likely- maybe he could've been a manticore or a chimera? Oooh, or a sphinx! You don't see a lot of serious attempts at sphinx designs these days, and it would fit with the Virtwyn's ideals. Plus, it could be a girl! Can you believe there aren't any female monsters in this game?!

Anyway, Yomar has a bluish silver look too, but aside from some intriguingly subtle hints of red it's not really any more eye catching than his default appearance. A more distinct pattern could've elevated it, but I don't think this model is big enough to accommodate that level of detail. That's not a knock against Yomar, though; almost none of the alternate looks in this game are as strong as their default counterparts. Even the game's most gorgeous and well rendered monsters tend to have pretty boring alternates... but hey, it's still cool that they're there! A PS2 game with a roster this big didn't HAVE to have any skins. I'm glad somebody went to the trouble to create them!

One last thing I'll say about Yomar is that it's interesting how his wings are fully covered in fur, even on the underside. It's a teeny weeny little detail that doesn't really matter, per say, but I appreciate how that makes him different from real flying mammals (bats). There's a whole gaggle of other flying mammals on the villain team's roster and none of them have this specific feature. It's uniquely Yomar's!

 

BARG

Alright, we've been off to a slow start, I know, but things are starting to heat up now. Barg is not the greatest dragon design of all time, but he is a dragon, so that bumps him up to the front of the Virtwyn pack in my opinion: not just because I think dragons are cool, but because they're instantly recognizable and intrinsically fantastical and unreal. There's no mistaking this for an average, everyday animal that happens to be winged or bigger than usual. Barge is a mythological monster. That's a good start!

We also see more of Barg, which helps him stay alive in my memory. He's not a mascot or anything like that, but you'll see his concept art a lot if you play the game and he is the star of the game's opening cinematic; at one point, he was even planned to have console exclusive color schemes (the Xbox version was, of course, green). So there's more familiarity with Barg than there is some of the other monsters and he might have been one of iRock's favorites. That's at least something to latch onto.

Keeping in mind the specifics of Barg's design, however, is a little bit trickier... his in-game model and manual art are practically two different designs, and even the CG version in the intro isn't exactly the same as either. Intricacies like the style and number of horns on his head, how many fingers he has, what color his fire breath is, and whether or not his breastplate is bedazzled all seem to be up in the air. He's deep crimson in the intro, but in-game that's just an alternate look and gold is his default. I kind of wish it were the reverse (he does look good in red), but his special attacks are all named after gold, so I get it.

Physically, Barg is usually depicted as being teapot shaped, delicate, and dinosaur-like. His design doesn't borrow traits from any one dino in particular, though, so he's more of a nondescript long-snouted predator thing. More than anything he reminds me of those really early depictions of Baryonyx from the 1990s, back before most paleoartists knew what shape that dinosaur's head was supposed to be and where its little "horn" went. Actually, there's this one The Lost World toy......

What stands out most to me most, both for better and for worse, is just how imposing Barg isn't. You'd think a dragon would look really fierce and deadly, but Barg is a runty, dumpy little guy. He's a little roly-poly in the middle, he has tiny arms and a noodle neck, and his silhouette is less "vicious sky dinosaur" and more "kangaroo goose". He doesn't have any kind of weapon or traditional arrowhead tip at the end of his tail, he isn't spiky or frilly or armored, and his horns are little more than short bone spurs. By traditional modern standards he should be considered underwhelming, and he is, but that's exactly why this design is so successful!

As you progress through each of Savage Skies' campaigns you'll see that every new mount introduced is bigger and stronger than the last, and Barg here is only the third creature in the first campaign. It wouldn't make sense for him to have the regal aura of Monster Hunter's Rathalos or the slinking menace of Reign of Fire's bull wyvern. Barg is much humbler than that, merely an introduction to the concept of a dragon, not the zenith of it. His design hints at the existence of more exotic mounts but still feels appropriate for the beginning of the game. That's good character design!

FREBAND

 

We still have a few more normies to get through before we get there, though. Freband is another bird. Not inspired by a myth, not uniquely colored or mixed with something else, just... a bird. A great horned owl, larger than average and simplified to be readable when rendered through PS2 era graphics, but that's about it. You could be generous and call him stylized, or cynical and call him a caricature. Either way, there's not a lot for me to talk!

Freband's in-game color is the old Virtwyn standby, matte gold. That's factory default in these parts: of the eight monsters at the Virtwyn faction's disposal, seven are almost exactly this same color. To be fair, all the factions have color coded bestiaries: Virtwyn creatures are gold, Chrysalis are green, and Pariah are gray. The difference is the Chrysalis creatures tend to have more highlights and secondary colors to mix things up, and Pariah creatures are gross and arcane, so they're more about texture than color. Virtwyn's flyers tend to be simpler, though, so they tend to feel more plain and samey. It's not a Freband issue specifically, but it's still not doing him any favors.

His alternate color is brown, like the great horned owls he's based on. Fitting, but not exciting, especially since his model's not big and detailed enough to fit in all the real bird's patterning.

On that note I'll cut this guy some slack, because if I had to guess, I'd say budgetary and hardware constraints probably put this character at an unfair disadvantage to begin with. Owls are some of the cutest and most comedic birds out there, but the amount of extra animation needed to convey all that personality was probably never in the cards. No peculiar mannerisms or memetic expressions here, poor Freband can only afford a few spare hoots. Let's not hold it against him, it's not his fault!

The most special thing about Freband as a character also wasn't seen in-game. According to his lore in the instruction manual he's an extremely exceptional individual. Giant owls of his breed are normally roost guardians who protect royal castles and royal castles only because they're just too slow and cumbersome to be of use on a battlefield, but either by training or genetics Freband has become so freakishly agile that the Virtwyn military have deemed him to be the one and only exception. So, cleared to leave the duties traditionally assigned to his species and encouraged to fight the war on his own terms, he's... given a mission to guard a royal castle with a flock of other giant owls who all move exactly the same way he does.

ROHN

So far Barg has been the Virtwyn flyer I've had the most positive things to say about, but that's about to change! Not only do I like Rohn better, but I like him better than all the other Virtwyn flyers, too! This is my favorite of the good guy cast by far, a claim that might be surprising to you if all you've seen is the above art. That isn't to say the black and white illustration in the manual isn't wonderfully rendered, or that it isn't accurate, or even that the in-game model is some flawless masterpiece that pushes the boundaries of what the PS2 could do, but what I AM saying is that this a design that works much, much better with motion and color. 

The first thing you'll notice when you play as Rohn is that he just looks good. All the other Virtwyn creatures have more or less the same palette and I've already expressed my complaint that that gets a bit dull and samey looking, but Rohn is the exception... I guess because he's one of the game's only ice themed monsters and they felt they had to reflect that in his color scheme? He's mostly stark white and the closest thing to "Virtwyn Gold" on him are these big pastel patches of yellow on his flight membranes, beautifully accented by a sparsely applied blue. It's a striking look!

His animations are good, too. None of the beasts in this game are poorly animated (a lot of care went into studying the motion and mechanics of how real animals fly), but Rohn stands out to me as one of their most successful ventures. Even with such a low-poly model you can still feel the power behind his wing strokes. It's very convincing, the way the motion starts up high at his shoulders and then comes sweeping down in these long, graceful strokes. It's a familiar sight if you've ever seen a large bat or bird of prey in slow-motion and lends a palpable, naturalistic beauty to this inherently unrealistic beast.

Actually, It reminds me of the realistic wing animations from the PS2 Reign of Fire game... which was also published by BAM! Entertainment around that time. Hmmm. Maybe I should do a post about that game some day, too?

Anyway, obviously I think this is a well put-together dragon design if I'm compared it to anything Reign of Fire! A lot of pop culture dragons have wings that are either laughably undersized, too narrow where they attach to the body, or both, but Rohn's got a convincingly broad and deep wingspan with flight membranes that stretch all the way back to the base of his tail. There's even a secondary patch of webbing on his tail vane, like a big kite that trails behind, and you can see in his animations how he leverages that to catch the wind and quickly change directions. Really top notch stuff!

Speaking of the tail, I just wanna take one second to give a shout-out to whoever designed it. It was already cool enough that they turned the traditional "arrow-tipped" dragon tail into a biologically feasible steering rudder, but the tripod type thagomizer in the middle? Chef's kiss. What a genius addition. With the sides of the tail vane flapping in the wind it makes it look like Rohn is part stringray, a very weird and unexpected choice for a dragon but not at all unfitting for a creature that's meant to look elegant and streamlined as it glides through the airstream. It's also practical: the top two barbs obviously deter other flies from nipping at his tail, but the bottom one acts as a kickstand to prop his delicate flight membranes off the ground when he lands! Sure, it would've made even more sense to flip the spikes upside-down and have the pair at the bottom, but oh well. I'm just impressed someone thought to put something there at all!

Rohn's whole design is full of interesting design choices. Like Barg, he's also a theropod-type biped instead of the far more common two-legged wyvern or four-legged "flying lizard" archetypes. That alone is something to remember, but what really surprises me is the general kind of theropod he's modeled after. Usually when modern creature designers take inspiration from meat eating dinosaurs they go straight to the super-giant predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, and you would think that if they wanted to go smaller their obvious next best pick would be some kind of raptor, but no, if Rohn resembles anything it's a Coelophysis! I can confidently say I have never seen another dragon design take that route.

Oh, and just in case you thought the length of his neck in that last screenshot had something to do with perspective, here's another one! Rohn's neck is long. Like, long long! Multiple bodylengths long! So long that it completely changes his posture. A real dinosaur (or dinosaur-like creature, at least) would be more horizontal than this, but with that much extra weight in the front it's only logical that Rohn had to adopt a more arch-like shape; his tail and body are angled upward to account for his head and neck drooping low. Again: it just feels like somebody somewhere put a lot of thought into this design.

In a game that depends completely on its artists' ability to make impossible flying creatures look believable, Rohn still manages to stand out as one of their most majestic and biologically sound creations.

And the cherry on top?

Rohn also has what is easily the coolest looking skin in the game. I mean just look at this! Holy cow! Is that a freaking nebula?! It looks like his wings are a portal into outer space! That is SO cool! It's gorgeous!

 

PEGASUS

Now, I won't have nearly as many things to geek out over with our boy Pegasus here, but he's still a solid design. I mean, it's kind of hard to mess up a pegasus, no? It's just a horse with bird wings. Super simple. Early screenshots show that the devs did consider some amount of experimentation, like these larger and less traditional wings, but in the end they stuck to the tried and true blueprint. So, really the only thing that could've gone wrong was the animation. Luckily iRock had the sense to follow in Ray Harryhausen's footsteps and made their Pegasus run through the air as he flew, rather than just dangling his legs behind him. You ever see a pegasus that did that? It looks really weird. Horses are just supposed to run when they fly, it's like... the law!

Now, one thing I have to give Pegasus credit for is, despite him being about as cookie cutter as any creature could possibly be, he's still one of the more vibrant Virtwyn flyers. Goldish, yes, but with some variance at least! A lot of his white-looking highlights are unfortunately just low-poly steel armor, but he does have handsome ivory-tinged bands running across his wings, and his coat isn't just one shade either. I'm not sure what breed that's based on, though... an Andalusian? Lusitano? Fjord horse? Akhal-teke? I dunno; I'm a dinosaur guy, not a horse guy!

Pegasus' alternate look mirrors the convention of making his armor the same color as his wing stripes. That's a valid choice, but what kind of weirdo metal is dark pink? Did the Virtwyn paint it that way? Black and pink is a pretty great combination, though- I kind of wish they leaned into it more and got rid of the gray bits. It's kind of an ugly skin... definitely better in concept than execution.

While we're looking at that screenshot (the manual art is good for this too), something I want to draw your attention to is his head. Pegasus has a helmet with lots of short little metal spikes on it, but he doesn't have a horn, like a unicorn. That's completely normal, but this game will make it weird. How?

...Just hang onto that thought. We'll get there later!

One last thing for now, though. In the instruction manual it's stated that only royals used to be allowed on pegasuses (pegasi?), but now anyone can ride these giant flying horses regardless of their social standing. That's great, but little blurbs like that are starting to conflict with the picture the game's intro painted about Fraewyn. I mean, for a supposedly perfect, idealized utopian nation where everyone lives kumbaya together there's an awful lot of classism and political red tape getting hinted at... was that old King really as great as everyone says? Are the Virtwyn truly fighting to keep his legacy alive like they say, or are they quietly making changes to smooth out all the cracks no one wanted to talk about? What's going to happen if the King comes back? Would they even going to be allies anymore...?

ZELIT

With that conundrum in mind let's carry on to the end of our Virtwyn journey. Well... toward the end, anyway. See, each of the three factions has an "ultimate" creature that's saved for their very last mission, something extra powerful and hard to kill that's larger than everything else. The thing is, these ultimate monsters are arguably more like the penultimate monsters, because each faction also has a secret monster that has to be unlocked! So while Zelit here is the last Virtwyn monster most players would've seen when playing through the game for the first time, there is one more to see after this, so hang tight!

First and foremost, I have to address that this is another case of concept art and in-game models not perfectly aligning, which seems to be a theme with these dragons. It was pretty subtle with Rohn, but Zelit is like Barg in that his manual art almost looks like a totally different creature. 2D Zelit has pretty thin legs for his size but enormous wings and very expansive flight membranes, prominent scales, dangling chin tendrils, and a long, wide snout that's squarish at the end. He almost has a hadrosaur thing going on with that face- that or a komodo-horse hybrid.

Curiously, he's depicted here with pure white eyes, even though all the other monsters so far have had obvious pupils. He is said to be very old, so... is he blind? With a name like Zelit (zealot) I can't help but think that's the intention: that this is a creature so righteous and in-tune with the divine that it's still able to "see" the world around it after old age has blinded it. That's a trope I've seen more than a few times with monks and other holy men, but never a dragon!

It's fascinating to me that the ultimate monster of such a paladin-coded faction is a western style dragon. I mean, I could've brought this up for Barg and Rohn too, to be fair, but it's especially poignant here.

The classic symbolism most people are familiar with is that dragons are bad, that they oppose the righteous (knights, kings, saints) and destroy the future (livestock, crops, young women). It's a view that has its roots in medieval Christianity, BUT the funny thing is that if you go back far enough there are actually examples of Christian dragons (or at least dragon-like things) in exactly the opposite role! The highest order of angels in God's attendance, the Seraphim, are sometimes described in the Old Testament as-- get ready for this-- fiery, winged serpents.

BE NOT AFRAID.

Moving on to his in-game design, you'll see there are some fairly major differences on the final character model. He's still hornless and bulky, but his barbel beard is gone, his face is longer and narrower, and the sharp spikes on his head now have rounded tips. He feels even more lizardy here than he does in the art, though surprisingly his skin texture has changed to be less lizard-like, with small, fine scales like a dinosaur. The attachment points for his wings are waaaay narrower than they were before, which does dock him some points for airworthiness, but I wonder if that's the point? Zelit is very slow and unwieldy, not at all the accomplished, comfortable, and acrobatic kind of flyer that Barg and Rohn are, and honestly looks a lot more natural on the ground. Maybe he's only just barely capable of flight and has to brute force it with supernatural strength and an oversized wingspan?

Another change with this version? This Zelit is YOKED. Gawdamn! Look at those biceps! Those quads!

iRock's got that lizard juiced! 

All joking aside he really DOES remind me of Godzilla, at least on vibes. He's just so... immense! Compared to something like Yomar or Barg or Pegasus he just looks like he'd be unkillable. There's this visceral physicality to him that few of the other game's monsters possess. You see him pull up and think "if Roc is an F-16, that guy is a Boeing 747". He doesn't have horns or frills or a pointy tail yet he's still the most imposing dragon on the roster.

Zelit's secondary skin is a kingly purple highlighted by faint streaks of steely blue... good idea, but it sounds a lot more colorful than it really is! Probably just needed to bump up the saturation on this one, though I think retaining even a little of that default gold would've elevated this look significantly. The skin might be a nod to early development, back when "Dark Zelit" used to be the default look. Old screenshots from the Ozzy era show he used to be a reddish purple so dark it was practically black, with no secondary coloring but a moray eel-like fin on his neck. Personally I'd have preferred it if they'd just recycled this look completely (it creates a fun contrast with the light gold look) but maybe the devs were concerned it'd make him look too much like one of the bad guy creatures.

GRIFFON

Finishing the Virtwyn campaign unlocks Griffon, the true final member of the hero team roster. For him I'll be jumping straight to the screenshots, as I'll do again when we get to the other two secret monsters, since unlockable characters are only represented by question marks in the manual. Y'know, because it's such a mystery what a monster with the name Griffon might look like...?

Honestly, though... it pains me to say it, but this guy was a letdown. Younger me was totally stoked when he saw his name pop up as a secret character. I love griffins (I dressed up as one for Halloween once as a kid!), and growing up they always seemed to get less recognition than dragons; a lot of the people around me hadn't even heard of them. So I was REALLY hoping Savage Skies was gearing up to wow me with another one of its killer designs and do this under-loved mythical beast some justice!

Unfortunately, Griffon isn't "spectacular" so much as he is just "adequate". I mean, he is exactly what was advertised, don't get me wrong. He's immediately recognizable as a griffin and that's the number one thing that matters. He just isn't a particularly impressive looking exemplar. His musculature isn't nearly as well thought out as Best Boy Rohn's and he's a bit too long in the face... almost looks more like a seagull than a bald eagle. He's also plain.Very conservative. There aren't any fun flourishes or decorative bits to add personality to him and the artists who designed him didn't do anything to put their own unique spin on it. Hell, they didn't even bother to make his entire model unique- those are Pegasus' wings!

(That's totally reasonable, by the way: making games is extremely hard and these devs had 24 beasts to build... ya gotta cut corners somewhere! It just doesn't do anything to prop up this specific fella, is all.)

The secret monsters also have secret skins unlocked by doing secret missions: in each campaign there's a portal hidden in a random level which will teleport you to an extra assignment. Completing that specific mission 100% is the only way to unlock your secret character's second skin- even the cheat codes won't do it!

So, is it worth it? Ehhhh... kind of? I do think this version looks better than the default, but it's another one of those alternates like Pegasus' and Zelit's that adds a secondary color without much intent. Like, it's cool that he isn't the same bluish off-white all over, but the brownish parts aren't arranged particularly... I dunno, artfully? They're not used to highlight any particular body part or serve a purpose or create a pattern, they just splattered across the front. You could say it's naturalistic mottling or the color of his underside, but I think that's a stretch.

Anyway, it doesn't look bad (it's more color than the base design had), I just wish a little more time could've been spent on strengthening this design. But, don't worry! I know it sounds like we're ending on a low note, and we kind of are, but the good news is this is the last low note you're gonna experience here!

...Unless you count skins, cuz yeah, those just aren't this game's specialty. BUT! The designs themselves?

Hohohoooo boy. We are so done doing boring and safe. Part Two is about to get WEIRD.