Putting The Pieces Together: GB Behind The Scenes 2025

Season 15 is now well behind us, and at last here is a long-overdue behind the scenes look at my events and characters from that year and how it all came together, as well as what got left out or changed from initial plans.

Getting Jiggy With It was born from a bit of a malaise I developed late in Season 14, where I was losing interest in traditional "go fight the bad guy" plots and wanted to do something different. My original plan was to do a plot with no serious antagonists. This wasn't the first time I'd considered such an idea (you may recall The Cabinet Of Curiosities had an initial similar goal), and I went into it expecting not to succeed. One thing I often find myself doing when it comes to RP is setting a goal knowing I will fail, but the idea was not an absolute adherence so much as it was restraint. For instance, some years I'll try hard not to add new characters to RP on a whim, so that when some inevitably get through my defenses, they're characters I really care about or that have a clear role to play in a story. This was the same way - I wasn't surprised when a couple of genuine antagonists popped up in the plot, but I kept the scope small and restricted, and we ended up defeating the closest thing the plot had to a Big Bad about halfway through, with most of the plot's other battles being against petty villains that weren't very threatening (Venom Brigade), a large animal of neutral alignment (Monsterverse Tiamat), and an honorable duel against a hero (Foetodon).

The idea of making a plot about Jiggies came from replaying the Banjo-Kazooie N64 duology on Switch Online's N64 app. I played BK near the start of 2024 and BT much later in the year after it came out on the app. Both games hold up well today, in my opinion, though admittedly the addition of savestates smooths off a lot of potential frustration and BT running without lag on the Switch helps it a lot. Both games deliver some wonderfully memorable worlds and characters, and as I've done in the past with franchises I hold in high regard like Streets Of Rage, Octopath Traveler, Sonic, and Pokemon, I wanted to do a plot that evokes the feeling of playing the game that inspired it, without just being a retread. I got the idea for a series of events where I essentially make a miniature BK level and let the Kobbers loose to go scoop up all the collectibles. I think it was a good idea, but it took some work to get the format right.

If looked at after the fact, the first two events of the plot are fine, but I didn't feel fine in the moment (particularly the first one). By offering so many little challenges at once and needing to reply to each one in turn, I'd overwhelmed myself. I finished the first event feeling poorly about not just my plot, but RP in general, and in fact was feeling so down on myself that terrible thoughts had begun pushing into my head of wanting to abandon plots entirely, or even outright quit RP. It wasn't because of anything anyone did. I was just bored of the same old same old, and yet struggling to find anything to replace it with. It wasn't a good feeling. Fortunately, by the time we got into June, my mood regarding RP began to improve, and Brawl Season helped me get back in gear. By the time we got to the Horus plot-within-a-plot arc, I was fully back to being excited to show you guys what I could do.

Let's go over the plot's cast first and see where that discussion takes us.

Binah

If you read my blogpost breaking down my 2023 plot, The Cabinet Of Curiosities, then you may remember Binah being featured there. She was slated to appear as the owner of Biosyn, InGen's rival from the Jurassic Park franchise. Biosyn will finally be getting the spotlight in the coming season under the ownership of Beatrice, as I had ultimately come up with a different role for Binah to take - she'd be the head of Monarch. While the Biosyn plan for Binah was to build her up as a potential antagonist only to reveal she was friendly all along, here I spent barely any time pretending Binah was potentially troublesome before it was obvious she was a protagonist, partly because of the role change and partly because I'd already spilled the beans on not wanting to use her as a villain by saying as much in that blog. In contrast, as you've already seen from my earlier writings, in this new plan for the company, Biosyn is bad news.

I first sold this plot as "Annalynn's hunting for Jiggies!" but Binah ended up just as involved, if not moreso. It made sense considering she was the one spearheading the operation in the first place. Her role as Monarch's team mom wasn't quite intentional but ended up feeling very appropriate. She's almost an Iliesh-like figure with her combination of intelligence, maturity, and affection. I also rarely tie specific ages to my characters to keep them in a sort of Comic Book Time bubble where nobody has to get old no matter how many seasons pass, but I did officially canonize Binah as being in her late forties as a show of solidarity to Katharina, who's a couple years older. In demand.

I'm still working out what exactly Binah's combat abilities are. She can create lines of chains from her sleeves, sort of a like a more extreme version of Dolby's classic tape tendrils, but can she do more than that? We'll hopefully find out this year, as I plan for Binah to do more fighting this time around.

Annalynn

Alongside Binah and Doug, Annalynn was one of the three faces of Jiggy Plot, and the one that was most planned for that spot. In fact, Annalynn was the very first character I conceived of for Argo! She'd been on my radar for a while because of how cute she is, so as soon as a setting that seemed tailor-made for her was confirmed, so was Annalynn. She's a pretty straightforward character for the most part, a friendly "generic Kobber adventuring girl" kind of character, but those are ZFRP's bread and butter, you know? Good to have around. She does have some depth through her family connection to the Glerr family, which I thought of since Ann Glerr and Annalynn look so similar and I decided it would be funny if Annalynn was a Glerr family member who refused to join the family business and instead went off to the desert to hunt for gems and rocks instead of fish. In a different story this would probably be a well of conflict to delve into, but Annalynn kind of already had that story happen offscreen before we met her. There was doubtless some friction between her and her family due to her life choices, but they've probably made up by now and her parents accept who she is. Ann cares for her little sister too, even if distance makes it difficult to show it.

Doug

In classic ZFRP fashion, I took a filler monster that has about ten seconds of screentime across two movies and elevated him into a memorable character with some devoted fans. Doug ended up being the true star of the plot - while Binah and Annalynn were the faces of it and led the Jiggy hunt, Doug was the reason any of this was happening, and he took center stage for the plot's finale as we found out the truth about his father and their family legacy.

Part of my reasoning for using Doug is similar to why Draco chose to use Anguirus - these are cool kaiju, but they are relatively ordinary and don't have a lot of crazy abilities. They're a clear tier below juggernauts like Biollante, King Ghidorah, and of course Godzilla himself, making them easier to use in RP. Kumonga was much the same. But Doug still faced the issue of being too large to reasonably interact with others, so I came up with the idea to shrink him. His alligator-sized form is a lot more flexible and can go pretty much anywhere. Now that the plot's over, he can size-shift to suit the occasion and has gained a beam attack, so he's a lot more dangerous in a fight than he used to be, but still pretty reasonable by kaiju standards and still on the smaller side for them, being about 100 feet long.

At one point shortly before the season began, I had considered RPing as a dog. Specifically I was looking at Barkley, from Cassette Beasts. One of my family's two dogs passed away in May, however, turning the thought of RPing a dog into something too sad to want to pursue, and I had been wavering on the idea before then anyway. I mention this here because, ultimately, Doug ended up being my 'dog', with a lot of his mannerisms very doggish but his reptilian nature acting as a degree of separation that kept me from tying it too closely to real life.

(Also: If Barkley had made it to RP, I was going to do a one-day Barkley Plot. It would have involved Gentle Giants dog food, but planning did not progress further than "yes, include the Chatzy joke, very good".)

I obviously have to credit Tapu Lele for a lot of Doug's success. I knew going into this plot that my ultimate goal was to get people to care about Doug, this stupid fat lizard who showed up for two seconds in Godzilla Vs Kong and became memetic in the fandom because he looked so goofy. But I wanted to make him into a character, a real character with depth and a backstory, and accomplish all of that without giving him the ability to read, write, or speak. Tapu Lele immediately flinging herself at Doug and treating him not as a god, or a pet, but a friend, went a long way towards achieving this goal well before the finale, and she brought her pals the Weather Elementals along for the ride. Now Doug has a whole bunch of friends, and he couldn't be happier. Doug/Lele is one of my favorite platonic relationships in RP history alongside Dolby/Maria and Attami/Miyoi, and it's a delight seeing the two bounce off one another.

Ori

While she didn't achieve Castti levels of "oh my god I must RP this character", when I got to know Ori in Octopath Traveler 2, I was convinced she needed to come to ZFRP. She was able to wait for the new setting, unlike Castti, and I tied her to Annalynn for a couple of reasons. There was the "sisters of established characters" angle, but also Ori and Annalynn just seemed like they'd get along - a couple of cheerful brunettes who love exploring and discovering things.

But why is Ori Piyori's sister? Well, turns out they share a voice actor! When I played Octopath 2, I was gobsmacked when I heard Piyori's voice coming out of Ori. It is the exact same voice, the VA did nothing different at all, which is pretty funny. The fact that their names are so similar made it even funnier, and I knew I simply had to make them sisters. This unfortunately hasn't really been explored at all in RP yet. I've lamented before how I failed to come up with any interesting scenes of the two sister duos interacting, and while Annalynn has the excuse of Ann Glerr not being in Argo, Piyori and Ori have been living in the same city since last May but have yet to even acknowledge each others' presence. I feel like this is a huge missed opportunity on my part, but when I tried to think of how they could interact last year, I kept coming up empty. Rest assured they've done plenty of fun sisterly bonding things offscreen.

Loremaster

Loremaster has found a nice new niche as Binah's number two. I took some of the focus off of her in 2025 because she got so much attention in 2024, but she slots in nicely as Binah's sidekick and has evolved to be a good partner to bounce off of her.

While I don't plan on doing any more plots centered around The Backrooms (Devil May Care did a solid job of solving their main mystery), I remain enamored with the concept of a massive liminal space facility full of mysteries and strange items, and so The Backrooms is likely to keep popping up again here and there as a backdrop for something or other. I've actually thought about using them for something fun and harmless in our next setting - a poolhouse using the Poolrooms, for people to relax in. I think it'd be nice to show the effects of Loremaster's research and the positive effects from completing Devil May Care as people begin taming and making use of The Backrooms in a way that, for once, doesn't go wrong.

Sumireko

The biggest nerd of them all! Bringing back the legendary GB character Sumireko Usami was never going to be a huge deal despite (or because of) her many past accomplishments. I love Sumi dearly, and Season 15 marked ten years since her debut, so having her join Monarch was a fun way to tip the hat to her, but she'll likely remain largely secondary in Monarch's ranks just because she's had SO many moments over the years that it feels more prudent to let other, newer characters get the focus while Sumi helps things along in the background.

I also brought her back because Draco did something similar with Zeldoten, having her return in a modest role to fill in for the retiring Lucy DeMonde. These two are still hopelessly in love with one another.

The Venom Brigade

When I put Annalynn into RP, it seemed like a no-brainer to use these guys too. They were easy adds to the plot - the perfect sort of "harmless" antagonists I could use as an opposing force trying to grab Jiggies before the Kobbers could. I didn't consider them real villains. They have such small, petty goals and mostly tried to avoid directly fighting the Kobbers. They still took a couple swings at the protagonists, though, which is why they got beat up in the end.

I teased in my profiles that Mike might have his own agenda, but nothing came of it. This was just going to be a reference to the actual Annalynn game, in which Mike is upset that he doesn't own a hat and was going to steal someone else's hat, perhaps Sumireko's. (There's a secret bonus you can unlock that puts funny hats on the Venom Brigade during gameplay, but Mike is left unchanged and doesn't get anything.)

Plukk and the Shadow Wizard Money Gang

An impulsive addition to the plot to serve as a parody of a villain reveal for my November teaser, the SWMG leaned even harder than the Venom Brigade into the 'harmless villain' role. These guys never fought us at all, though Nabiki tried to trick us into thinking they did. Their main purpose was to help move Jiggies around and act as NPCs to win Jiggies from, though they ended up coming in handy during the Horus arc when I needed a scapegoat.

The characters I chose for the roles were a harmless way to do a GB trademark I've been wanting to start to tone down due to probably overusing it: the calling-back of old villains. My Whalestrand plots featured Tiamat in 2023 and a veritable Who's Who of GB villains making one more curtain call in 2024, so I'm trying to avoid dragging any more of the truly evil baddies of my past stories back out onto the stage, at least for a while. Here, though, I thought it would be funny to make a couple small-time Curse guys into Third Chance denizens. Ultimately it was Rouge and Impact who got the nod, but a lot of other characters were considered as SWMG members.

One concept I had going into this season was to have Gina Lestrade return, now working as a detective and 'going straight', no longer wanting to be a rough-and-tumble Valkyrie any more. She would have led the investigation into the Horus Arc's trial and would have had Patty Wagon's spot as a neutral witness during court. However, her old friends Daz and Nattie would have followed her to Argo and joined up with the SWMG, hoping to eventually pull off some cool stunt to bring her back to them. Daz in particular would have been a major face of the SWMG, perhaps even getting the red robe, and would have appeared as a large and bulky winged figure because she'd have Snapdragon clinging to her back underneath the robe with his wings poking out to make herself seem more intimidating.

A lot of other "not really evil, but not a Kobber either" kinds of characters were also considered for the SWMG. Originally the group would have had more members each in their own colored robe, thus giving a chance for more of these guys to show up, but I ultimately opted to keep the group small. Aside from Daz and Nattie, the cut SWMG members include Russi Clover, Tammy and Geedis, Codd Branford, a random Excite Biker, Stealth Fat Guy, a very confused Sponia, Patman Post, and The Imageshack Frog. A real murderer's row of classic, iconic, beloved GB characters. Several of these characters, particularly Sponia and Patman Post, were also considered to act as jurors for Lobco's trial, as well as the roaming Jigglypuff I RPed in Whalestrand, Charlotte the pirate from First Fantasy, and Shifty Whodunnit.

Plukk joining Monarch was a spur-of-the-moment idea and I didn't expect it to amount to much besides giving Monarch another warm body to bolster the group and show how it was growing. I was surprised when it turned out Plukk slotted absolutely perfectly into HP's Dry Country plot. It's a common backstory for "good guy" or "antihero" thieves to have grown up in hardship and found themselves forced to take other people's things in order to survive, and so Plukk ended up extremely sympathetic towards the overworked, underpaid, and trod-upon people of Hyllene, investing her strongly in seeing some measure of justice take place there and fleshing out her character quite nicely in the process.

So what was up with The Red-Headed League? This group originated in a Sherlock Holmes story, and I became familiar with it due to its' appearance in The Great Ace Attorney, which is packed with Holmes references. In the end it was mostly just a joke, really. Originally it was going to tie into the plot better as a setup for the serious crimes that happened later that led to Nabiki Tendo's framejob of someone (not Lobco, originally!). It mostly got severed from everything else, so in the end the Red-Headed League was little more than me having fun with my longstanding passion for cute girls with red hair. It was also a little bit of revenge for the Holmes and TGAA Red-Headed Leagues both being males-only. How dare.

Scowl

HE'S BAAAAAAD, SOOOO BAAAAAAD. Scowl being such a tryhard made him absolutely perfect as a goofy, largely ineffectual antagonist to help drive the plot forward while the true bad guy worked in the shadows. I took notice of him the first time JRM mentioned him in Chatzy, but it wasn't until later, when he came up again due to JRM playing the Happily Ever After SNES game, that I locked in on using Scowl in RP. He was very useful for giving us a "main bad guy" to focus on before Lobco's arrest signified a darker, more serious turn in the proceedings. I love that he lined up with the Vile Villain Vainglory so that he could cast votes in it (and lend support to his idol, Skowl).

He was a perfect target for the classic Draco Insult Barrage. He's still salty at Tara Skew to this day.

Horus Corp

Ankha finally gets her due! I'd considered Ankha for RP for years, and she cameoed as a parasite during the CW/Seychelles brain parasite plot, which gave me a chance to play around with her a little without committing. At last I came up with a good use for her as Stella's sitcom arch-nemesis. Ankha was never going to be truly evil, of course, but I did like the idea of sneaking a genuine villain into the company, and that's how I hit upon Nabiki Tendo. But she'll get her own section.

Much like Hoshii Holdings, the characters I added to Horus Corp were mostly a hodgepodge bunch of "oh, that would be a good character for RP" type characters, all of which could slot into a corporate setting well enough. Ankha's gang leans more heavily towards machines and industry than Stella's - while Stella's group is full of girls in suits or uniforms like Nina, Kate, and Komi, Ankha's gang tends more strongly towards inventors and workers like Technikki, Alexa, and Koleda. It was just how things worked out, thanks to two games I played in spring of 2025 (MySims and Mario And Luigi Brothership) that thrust Alexa and Technikki at me and pretty much demanded I make them RP canon.

Lobco was of course the breakout star of the group. Initially conceived as Ankha's equivalent to Stella's Kate, I ended up elevating her to being Ankha's equal at the top of the company, though since Ankha is the public face of Horus it does still feel like she's above Lobco in rank. Lobco was helped out a lot by getting a Cassette Beast to use - she didn't seem like much of a fighter beforehand, but when I played Cassette Beasts, Lobstacle became my favorite and of course it fit perfectly as a power-up for Lobco. Pairing her with PS5 was completely unplanned - JRM told me it was pretty much just a whim that made him use her to interact with Lobco during that fateful train challenge, and while I was initially not convinced I wanted to do the pairing, a bit of time to let it simmer got me on board, and I grew to adore the two of them together. I think they've both been good influences on one another. Felicia has helped Lobco be more outspoken and courageous, while Lobco has gotten Felicia to relax a bit more and approach problems from new angles.

Technikki was originally going to use her inventions from Brothership as her main weapons in RP, and I think they may have gotten mentioned somewhere still, but in practice her main contributions to Horus were the Cassette Beasts and Sharpcask. Sharpcask's design appealed to me and making him a ridable mech for Technikki seemed like an easy way to play him as a heroic character instead of the villain he is in Brothership. Sharpcask, like many machines I use in RP, tended to get mangled. Perhaps Nikki ought to bring in another mech for 2026...

Alexa just wasn't even fair. Not only is she adorable, but when I found out that her main gimmick in MySims is a passion for robot combat, I couldn't possibly pass up such a good excuse to bring combat robotics into RP once again. RC Rampage was a fun "fite" to write and I might do it again this year for more KOB Day entertainment. I've been on the front lines pushing KOB Day as a legit holiday for us for years now, and holidays lack oomph if you don't do anything special when they come around!

Koleda was originally planned as her own character before I came up with Horus Corp. Remember X Demolition's random appearance in 2024 against Paddy? They were meant to foreshadow Koleda, as they would be working under her. I hesitated, however, since I didn't want to commit to Koleda so far in advance. She was nearly scrapped, but I eventually realized she was perfect as a red herring for the Horus arc. A rough-around-the-edges grumpy girl who didn't like Stella and was upset that Horus and Hoshii were reconciling? She was clearly suspicious! And it worked - both JRM and Chao said after Nabiki was revealed to be the culprit that they had suspected Koleda instead. Still proud of that one. Finally got redemption after too-obvious reveals like Watchlin being evil and Gust being Silence's almost-murderer.

Nabiki Tendo

The most evil character in the plot. Nabiki was always going to be a problem from the moment she debuted, but in my initial, minimal-battling version of the plot, she was just a white-collar criminal framing Binah for the theft of some Jiggies, that would be defeated in court without a proper boss fight. I later thought to add Cassette Beasts to the plot, and giving Nabiki one to use made her into a threat we could face physically as well, and so the stakes rose accordingly.

Why Nabiki Tendo? A few reasons. First, she's a very deep cut from my past. I came across Nabiki for the first time over 25 years ago when I found some fan content online involving her. I found her repellent due to her greedy nature, and when I remembered her out of the blue one day and looked her up to learn more about her, I found she was even worse than I remembered. In Ranma 1/2, she does such lovely things as blackmail her friends to extort them for money, steal money from her family's personal savings, lie about wanting to take over the family business when in fact she's ready to sell it the moment it's hers, take and sell nude photos of Ranma without permission, swindle schoolchildren out of pocket change, exploit her boyfriends until they're broke before dumping them because they ran out of money (and then blackmail them by threatening to publicly share their love letters unless they give her even more money), and offer up Ranma to the Yakuza to pay off her debts to them. Ranma 1/2 is a comedy series so all of this is played for laughs, but I see no comedy in such horrible cruelty and decided right then and there that this awful little shit was going to get exactly what she deserved.

Another reason I picked Nabiki for the plot was how well she fit into the Hoshii/Horus archetype of a random cute anime girl joining up with a big corporation. Osaka, Minori, Mikoto, Tomo... There is an entire subcategory of this type of character in Hoshii Holdings, so she fit in perfectly at Horus. What's more, Nabiki worked perfectly as a contrasting foil to Kate Hicks. She looks a lot like Kate, with her brown bob. They both held high positions in their respective companies, as direct underlings to one of the top brass. And the secret foreshadowing - Kate began as an antagonist. She was a Salvager. But unlike Kate, who had a sympathetic reason for her crime, was trying to protect her boss, and was remorseful, Nabiki has entirely selfish motives, was actively framing her boss, and then doubled down and tried to kill everybody, then doubled down again and insisted she was innocent when she was tried for her crimes. All in service of making defeating her even more fun!

I'm happy with her "animations" used during the court sequence and upon both of her defeats. I was trying hard to channel the Ace Attorney spirit, and I could easily imagine in my head how she looked on the stand as she argued, flailed, and lost.

Eustace and Ryutaro

The prosecution! Eustace's arrival in RP was a long time coming - years ago, Harpy was briefly smitten with him and considered using him in RP, but it was an offseason fling and she lost interest before the next season could start. I finally got him in there - he was perfect as a goofy opponent that clearly wasn't running the show. If you're wondering about the whole "Sebastian Debeste" thing, that's his name in the unofficial Ace Attorney Investigations 2 fan translation. When AAI2 finally got an official English translation years later, his name was instead "Eustace Winner". I was originally going to use the Sebastian name and play it straight, but I decided to accept official canon and call him Eustace so that people late to the AAI2 party who didn't play the fan translation got the correct name for the little goober. Using his fan name as a joke was perfect, though.

(On this note, I'll also point out that way back in the Kuwahawi years I RPed as another AAI2 character. The official translation wasn't out at the time, so she used the fan name, Karin Jenson. She has since received the official name of "Florence Niedler". If we ever see her again I'll probably make some kind of reference to the new name but she will likely remain Karin in RP and not suddenly decide to get a name change.)

In earlier versions of the plot, the trial was more complicated. At one point, my plan was for a two-phase trial. In the first phase, the defendant would be Stella or Binah, and Eustace would put up a pathetic case against them. The defense would successfully save Stella or Binah, only for the evidence to end up pointing the finger at Lobco instead. And this would have been exactly Nabiki's plan all along. She would have been instrumental in getting Eustace on the case in the first place, and finding out that she deliberately hired a crappy lawyer in order to frame Lobco would have been part of how we took her down. I liked this idea because it made Nabiki seem more intelligent and dangerous, but ultimately I decided to simplify proceedings by only having one trial day.

As for Ryutaro, that's a classic case of "throw in the cute girl from recent vidya". Ryutaro is a bit of a unique one, though. In her source game, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, Ryutaro... doesn't exist. A female character named Susato assumes the role of 'Ryutaro Naruhodo' when a defense attorney is needed for a case to help out her close friend who's been accused of murder. In addition, Susato pretends to be male while in disguise. For most of TGAA's runtime, I found Susato very difficult to like, but this sequence is a highlight of the character and I think she's at her best when she puts on her Ryutaro disguise, so in ZFRP, Susato is just Ryutaro all the time and is openly female.

Urumi Ushizaki

The cow! Urumi is pretty much just me wanting my own Nyx, as well as crossing another Touhou off the list. It's no secret I adored Brine's big lazy demon girl, and I realized Urumi worked well in a similar niche. Add in her love of fishing and she's pretty much Nyx crossed with Big The Cat, a big sleepy girl who takes life slow and easy. Urumi originally had a slightly stronger presence in the plot as a recurring source of Jiggies, but she still had two, at least. Her connection to Sacabampasis was purely because I found that picture of a Sacabambaspis with Urumi's head. If you're wondering why that picture exists, it seems that Urumi is tied to prehistoric fish because she likes to fish in the Sanzou River, which you may recall as being the Japanese equivalent of the River Styx, a river between life and death. Extinct fish are said to swim in this river, and so there are pictures of Urumi catching or otherwise hanging out with prehistoric aquatic critters.

I've considered giving Urumi a more notable role in 2026. It may depend on if a plot happens and I'm like "I should throw the cow at it". Sometimes you just never know.

Master Jiggywiggy/Foetodon

Our real final boss, the man himself, Doug's dad! The idea to make Foetodon Jiggywiggy came a little after first deciding to use Jiggywiggy. Originally they would be separate. However, I realized this was a great way to explain Jiggywiggy's presence and give Foetodon a stronger tie to the plot.

Foetodon was originally pretty different. My first concept for him was as a sterner, less likable character who was displeased with Doug's goofy demeanor and unconventional tactics, even though he was getting results. Here, Annalynn would have a strong character moment with Doug as she shouted at Foetodon about how there's merit in stepping away from family tradition to forge your own path forward, if you don't feel like yourself when you choose to follow the tradition. It would have played stronger into Annalynn's own past as someone who refused family tradition.

I considered writing out the battle between Foetodon and Titanus Scylla in a flashback, but ultimately was unable to get going on it, so it was instead foreshadowed with Folie's art before Foetodon himself told us about it.

I didn't realize until I was prewriting the finale that only my characters had met Jiggywiggy before his big reveal, which made it feel a little awkward that everyone's characters were just suddenly supposed to care about this random dude with a Jiggy for a head. Whoops! Thanks for rolling with it.

Next, I'll dig into my "ZFRP Notes" document for 2025 and see what unused and altered content I can uncover for you.

The big one is that the train fight was originally significantly different. The initial concept wasn't tied to the trial. This was actually the very first event idea I had for Argo back in 2024 when we were first planning the setting. I wanted to do a "Great Train Robbery", but with the Kobbers as the bandits who hijack the train, because the train was being used by bad guys. The bad guys in question weren't solidly defined at first, and this train heist was an event looking for a plot for a while. I'd even considered it as just a standalone thing, and it would have happened at the very start of the season as my first event. Later it got connections to Chao's Trainplot as well as Jiggy Plot and eventually served as the kickoff for the Horus arc.

The original name for the location of the train event was Grifter Gulch. In the final version of the event, all of the Jiggies we pick up from Chuffy were simply packed together in a box, and they were mostly only there so that we could catch the robbery happening via the Crystal Jiggy. Before that, though, this was a legit Jiggy hunt with some Jiggies to pick up in side tasks while recapturing the train. I had a set of five, from back when I was initially trying to do five Jiggies in every Jiggyplot event. There would have been a Jiggy hiding inside Chuffy's storage, one for rescuing Chuffy from the bandits that stole it (who were actually The Venom Brigade in the second-to-last version of this event), one snagged by a fleeing Shadow Wizard Money Gang member who acted as a third-party thief, one acquired by shooting at targets that the train raced by, and one more that my notes simply call "End Of The Line". I think this was a case of the old classic "oh no, the tracks run out!" and we have to stop the train, but there's a Jiggy perched on the very edge of the rails overlooking a cliff or something and someone had to go out and snatch it.

One Jiggy hunting event got scrapped, but we didn't miss anything of substance because I merged it with other events. This would have been a mechanical area named Rusty Engine. In my notes, this location sported six Jiggies. To quote my notes verbatim:

-Traveling Through Steam Tubes
-Past The Crushers
-Gear Tower Climb
-Hurry Up! Locked Door Hallway
-Scalding Water Pool
-Robot Combat prize (SWMG)

Most of these Jiggies were moved to the Mystic Cave event to make it bigger, some with alterations to make them work better in the Mystic Cave environment. The Robot Combat Jiggy was the event's boss battle, a Battlebots-style duel. The Kobbers would have to take control of weak underdog "junkyard" bots like Rusty and Sumpthing to pull off a win against a sleeker machine driven by a Shadow Wizard. This got expanded into RC Rampage.

Also in my notes is a plot that got scrapped entirely! It was based off of a bigger, more financially secure and powerful Monarch that was more like the Monsterverse version. Binah would take us on a globetrotting adventure to deal with troubles surrounding various kaiju. Doug was here, along with Scylla and Tiamat as well as return appearances for Battra, the Warbats, and possibly Rodan. We also would have seen some other Monsterverse creatures such as Behemoth (Godzilla: King Of The Monsters), Drownviper (Godzilla X Kong The New Empire), and the Ion Dragon (Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters). Another monster considered for this plot was Crustaceous Rex, a strange monster from the 1998 Godzilla animated series. Lastly, to introduce Monarch, the plot teaser posted either in November or on my blog during the offseason would feature Titanus Abiyoyo.

I feel certain Abiyoyo has come up somewhere in my last 15 years of rambling about things with you guys. This children's book has stuck with me ever since the fateful day my elementary school class witnessed it on TV during a Reading Rainbow episode. Who all remembers when you'd get to watch TV at school via a big wheeled cart with a CRT perched on top that traveled from class to class to show the kids episodes of Reading Rainbow and Bill Nye? It was a common millennial thing, I'm sure. Anyway, Abiyoyo tells the story of a father and son who are notorious in their village for being annoying. The son owns a ukulele and plays it incessantly, and the father owns a magic wand that allows him to make objects disappear. After too many lengthy unwanted ukulele concerts and disappearing-object pranks, the village ostracizes both father and son. But then one day Abiyoyo comes to town, a grumpy giant who will eat anything in his path. What made me remember this book so well was that they really sold the dread of Abiyoyo in the Reading Rainbow version of the story. The townspeople flee in utter panic, making it very clear that if you do not get out of the way, Abiyoyo WILL devour you. We get multiple two-page spreads detailing Abiyoyo's slow, inevitable approach, and his appearance is obscured in shadow for a while. There's a great shot of him framed against the dawning sun (seen above), a looming dread on the horizon, and then he gets closer and closer with each turn of the page. We even see him snatch up livestock and devour it. Of course it's nothing particularly horrifying, it's still just a kids' book after all, but the buildup is expertly done, as is the voiceover from the narrator, particularly the sudden loud "YOWP!" he uses to signify Abiyoyo's attack on the livestock, which has lived in my head rent-free for about thirty years now. Then we finally see Abiyoyo and it takes a bit of the edge off, but he's still a pretty intimidating-looking fella with sharp teeth and craggy features as if he was carved from stone. Of course, the father and son make use of their talents to defeat Abiyoyo and prevent him from attacking anyone else, so we get a happy ending where the town accepts them and forgives their annoying quirks, and I was quite surprised when I found out the book got a sequel years later that furthered the story in an interesting way.

But to get back to the point, Abiyoyo would have shown up as the first Titan that we see Monarch dealing with, mostly just as self-fanservice since he doesn't have any interesting powers. I don't know if we would have seen the father-and-son duo as well. Will we ever see Abiyoyo do anything in RP? It's not impossible, I do still like the idea of chucking him in for a brief moment as a "filler antagonist" used to introduce someone else...

To touch on some other scrapped characters and changed plans, I've got a few more for you.

Clee-0, from Cassette Beasts! Originally planned as a second Horus Corp antagonist because I thought Nabiki might need an accomplice. Clee-0 was likely to be more sympathetic, though, and may have even been hacked by Nabiki to be forced to obey her. I let M Sheep have her instead so she still ended up part of Horus, and it's probably pretty funny to most of you that a character has a better fate because ownership flipped from me to Sheep. You'd really think it'd be the other way around every single time, wouldn't you?

Grace Howard, from Zenless Zone Zero! Mostly an artifact of when Koleda was going to be more important and have Ankha's role as a major new CEO character. Harpy had originally pitched Grace at me thinking I'd like her, and she was right, but I didn't latch on hard enough to want her in RP (especially since Piper is pretty similar) and Koleda clicked with me more and had an easier niche to fill.

Marge, from Vectorman! A very silly one, this is just a really obscure miniboss that stuck in my head ever since I first played Vectorman nearly thirty years ago (did I discover Marge or Abiyoyo first? Who knows...). I was going to use a different name for it since every time I see the name "Marge" I think of Homer's wife, and I wasn't going to be able to use Vectorman's Marge without her ruining it. My planned new name for the robot was 'Garm', which uses most of the same letters so it felt like it fit okay. I grabbed the name from an obscure Battlebot that may or may not have been named after the mythological wolf. Garm was originally planned as a partner for Angelica, but she didn't need it since she had the Octopath 2 Inventor inventions and Tootsie to hold her own in a fight. I also considered having Garm be an ally of Piper, but she had her Battlebots and rental weapons already. Garm might have also been an ally of Annalynn to help her mine for stuff, but that too wasn't needed as Annalynn had too many other connections to need a robot buddy. Garm's last chance at relevance was attaching to a Horus Corp member like Koleda or Technikki, but they too had their own weapons already, and so Garm ended up scrapped as none of my characters needed his services. I definitely would've wanted to play Garm differently from my previous chicken walker robot, Skeiron. I think Garm would have been largely silent instead of making shitty puns all the time. Maybe I could have given it Marge's voice...

My 2025 RP originally had a much stronger lean into Sonic Frontiers. I planned on tying several of the Guardian minibosses to the Jiggies via having them be mysterious ancient technology that uses Jiggies as power sources. The Sumo was planned to appear as an introductory opponent during a solo post or blogpost that faces off with Monarch, and may have escaped the battle to be encountered a second time during RP proper. The Strider was also considered for a role as a big bad boss fight, as was the Squid (who got to show up in RP thanks to Draco's garbage event!) The last of the four Guardians I considered using was the Shark, who would pop in while we were fighting something else (probably on someone else's event rather than my own) and help us out. After the fight, the Shark would have revealed it was a new form of Leviathan (and therefore unrelated to all the other Guardians in RP), who had mastered a sand-swimming shark just to join us in Argo. If my roster had been a bit smaller I might have pulled the trigger on this, but ultimately I opted not to shoehorn the Maneater into a setting where she really doesn't belong. She'll have to wait a bit longer for us to go somewhere more damp for her comfort.

The initial concept for Nabiki's big bad Cassette Beast was one of the bosses from the actual game, but I decided to take a more original approach and create my own boss in the same sort of "surreal eldritch horror" style of Cassette Beasts without just ripping one directly. The above image is from an intermediate period where I considered using Pyramidas, a Power Rangers Zord, as the Cassette Beast before getting to work and drawing my own original design. An early concept for Heru-Ur crossed it with a volcano, so that in addition to all those other powers, the pyramid would also be erupting gouts of lava onto the Kobbers. I scrapped that power, but it still put up a hell of a fight before we could take it down!

Considered using an Orthworm somewhere. It probably would have been a Titan Pokemon, and may or may not have gotten Monarch's attention. Ultimately didn't appear, alas.

Not a scrapped character, but a scrapped direction. Something that was scrapped while it was happening, no less. As people may recall from the bewildered reactions of Chao and myself during the collab that introduced Folie... she wasn't supposed to be a good girl! Folie is cute and all, big Adeleine vibes and all that, but she is truly monstrous in her source material (Bravely Default II) and both Chao and I were all set to comeuppance the hell out of her, but Petra and Mauve's unique personalities and unexpected approaches to solving problems left me wondering if perhaps Folie ought to be spared, and so I walked back her horrible qualities by saying afterward that she was putting up a provocative front and was actually largely harmless. Now I've got this weird artist with no powers wandering around in the underground and don't know what to do with her, but I think she has a chance at relevance this year with some of the plots you guys are planning.

And... I think that about does it! This blogpost took a long time to get assembled, with the first half being created slowly over the course of several months before I got in gear and did the second half pretty quickly, so I could have missed or forgotten something worth talking about, but I've gone through my folders, checked my notes, and shuffled my papers, so I think I've said all I needed to say for now. My upcoming plot is going to be a return to something much more conventional, just a half-dozen events of punching things, but I needed this weird break from the usual to help get in a better headspace for RP. I hope you're looking forward to what I'm cooking up next for my latest "take the stuff I played/watched last year and mash it all together" plot! It's got lots of Jurassic World and Octopath Traveler in it. Two great tastes that taste great together? Maybe??? I don't know, we'll find out together!