BA7 Research Asura's Wrath

Asura’s Wrath the official complete works (Capcom) (artbook)

Asura’s Wrath is an action-based game that heavily features interactive cinematic cutscenes made in Japan. It is inspired by Buddhist mythology and integrates Buddhist themes and characters into the game, along side this it also has strong elements of science fiction, which is a strange combination that works surprisingly well. Asura’s wrath stands out because of it’s distinctive art style that, and has been heavily influenced by Japanese action anime, as there was a short animation to go with the game including extra parts of the story line. Also by looking at the storyboards for scenes in the game it could very much be mistaken for a Manga comic or storyboards for an anime episode.

(Page 166) These pages are early designs for the characters, this particular page showing early designs for Asura the main character. You can clearly see that the artist has explored a range of different design ideas and wasn’t afraid to try them all regardless of what the end result would be. This has taught me that it doesn’t matter how many rough designs you come up with, they are all useful in that you can take bits you prefer on one design and join them with another. It shows that you should get all your ideas down first and then start to work into them more. This is a stage of designing characters that I think I might have neglected in previous projects.

(Bottom left, faces) This images shows experimentation with Asura’s head, there are several variations of headdresses and hats that have all been layered on top of the same image. Using this method it would have been much quicker and easier than re-drawing the image every time.

A lot of the images on this page have had basic colour put on them, the stage that these designs are at would be the perfect time to start playing around with colours and it shows on these pages.

(Chapter 3 pages 062 onwards.) These pages have breakdowns of the different parts to the character as well as clothing and layers etc. These are the final designs for the main character but shown in parts. There are many different images on these pages all showing different things about him. The bottom left images show a detailed breakdown of Asura’s arms, which are an important part of his design, the artist has shown he has thought bout how they would work physically and not just what it looks like aesthetically. Such numerous and detailed drawings will make the Modeller’s job a lot easier when it comes to making this character in 3D.

Throughout all of the designs one of the key and prominent features of the artwork is the line work. The line are very prominent and defined helping to show the details of the drawings through the colouring, such as the detailed marking on the characters skin or clothing.