FAILED PROJECT FRIDAY: My ill-fated BURNING FORCE retrogame webcomic pitch! (Patreon)

So! Back in 2012, I was briefly talking to the fine folks at Udon about contributing something for the various webcomic series they were working up as part of Bandai's ShiftyLook initiative. Per the linked wiki entry:

ShiftyLook was a subsidiary of Bandai Namco Holdings that was focused on revitalizing older Namco franchises, with their first step being video game webcomics based on the company's various franchises. The subsidiary later offered webtoons, anime, playable games, music, message boards, and graphic novels as well. ShiftyLook regularly held substantial exhibitions at large US comics conventions, having a major booth presences and holding large giveaways of promotional merchandise.

ShiftyLook shut down on September 30, 2014.

Among the Namco properties that were open at the time for exploration was the game Burning Force, about which I knew naught:

But the premise of cute girl on a Megazone 23-ish airbike seemed promising enough:

...so I worked up a synopsis for a "season's worth" of webcomic content, which I theoretically would've written but not drawn. Ah, but by the time I finished and submitted the pitch, Shiftylook's comic program was (AFAIK) in the process of contracting before its later shutdown, so the proposal was Dead On Arrival. (Oh, well.)

Without further ado, here's my pitch for:

Burning Force: Season One

Concept: All-out SF action, mecha mayhem and badass stuntwork at a relentless, unstoppable pace. The first season is effectively one long, wildly hyperkinetic action sequence in 26 parts, running a quick-witted and resourceful heroine through a ruthless, ever-worsening gantlet of cliffhanging challenges.

The story kicks off with a bang, joining obstinately plucky fighter cadet Hiromi Tengenji as she deftly but desperately pilots her armed airbike "Sign Duck 10-B" through a firestorm of hostile, swarming mecha. During five days without sleep, she's blasted a swath of destruction halfway around an alien-occupied globe, and now races toward a rendezvous point for offworld extraction, only 500km distant. Ah, but suddenly poor Hiromi is plagued by a statistically anomalous cascade of freakish mishaps, bizarre hardware malfunctions and impossible alien challenges, which push her gritted-teeth optimism and problem-solving skills to the limit. The Big Reveal: Our heroine is actually embroiled in a hellish VR simulation, a training mission of such ridiculously escalating difficulty that no cadet has ever passed its grueling, deliberately impassable endurance test. No cadet before Hiromi Frickin' Tengenji, that is…

Protagonist: Alone against endless hordes of implacable mecha foes, a badly sleep-deprived Hiromi nonetheless affects comically unflagging positivity as she gasps running narration into her flight-recorder software. Outrageously upbeat and determined, she chooses to view every uncanny mishap the simulation throws at her as "a good challenge—no, a great challenge!" Clever and inventive as she might be, though, her deliberately buoyant attitude begins faltering near the season's end; can our exhausted heroine pull off one last ingenious feat, beat the simulation, and achieve full Space Fighter status? (Yes!)

Strip # Story Material

01-02: We open in the midst of high-speed action, establishing the alien-world setting and enemy-mecha armada that Hiromi and Sign Duck are racing and blasting their way through. Tired but unflinchingly, irresistibly optimistic, our heroine delivers flight-recorder commentary clarifying that she's finally, blessedly near the end of her five-day ordeal—or is she? (Nope.)

03-04: A bad situation rapidly grows worse when all of Sign Duck's software abruptly—and suspiciously—begins to crap out, with holodisplay text (humorously) deteriorating into nonsense gibberish, and the complex HUD overlays in Hiromi's visor devolving into neon children's scrawls. Worse yet, our heroine's painstakingly hand-programmed autopilot software crashes, adding a plot complication that will recur throughout the story. Even Hiromi's high-tech flight suit has malfunctioned—the armor membrane's opacity has glitched out, translucently exposing much more of her skin than she's entirely comfortable with. (Yeahp, this is yet another stress inducement from the ever-worsening simulation.)

05-08: A human-sized mecha jumps aboard the airbike, setting off a desperate hand-to-(robot-)hand battle on, around and under the wildly careening Sign Duck. Hiromi destroys her foe with a clever airbike maneuver, but salvages a handy bit of hardware from its wreckage: the mecha's CPU brain and flailing spinal column. "I spy opportunity!" she chimes delightedly.

09-12: Sign Duck's main laser inexplicably fails, leaving Hiromi to fight her way to the next power-up drop point using only a handheld blaster. But when the airbike captures that power-up—a spherical, airborne supply drone—the new hardware fails to auto-install, forcing Hiromi to swing down under the bike in mid-flight and manually install the upgrade, all the while steering the (autopilotless) Duck with one ankle. "Great challenge," she chirps, a bit testily.

13-16: Racing through a hail of missile fire, Hiromi nonetheless seizes the chance to pin the salvaged mecha CPU atop the bike's dashboard and hastily begins working to convert it into "hackware" for future usage (with tools deployed from her high-tech armor)—even as the brain's tentacular spinal column tries to strangle her. Truly freaky phenomena interrupts her, though: The missiles and mecha flashing by suddenly begin heckling Hiromi in English(!), berating our bemused heroine with oddly specific messages of negativity and failure clearly derived from her past experiences, from Earth Academy all the way back to kindergarten. Belatedly, she realizes that five days without sleep have left her vulnerable to an alien Psy Ops transmission mentioned in her mission briefing; cut to a flashback of virtual chibi briefer "Miss Kyoko" covering this danger. (We also notice that Hiromi barely heard the briefing at all, given how intensely and single-mindedly she was psyching herself up at the time.) Then, cut to Hiromi blasting the Psy Ops transmitter, gleefully triumphing over a lifetime of negativity…

17-20: A hulking mecha anchors itself to Sign Duck by an uncuttable cable grapnel, badly slowing the laboring airbike down. Hiromi must run down the cable, destroy the dragging mecha, then haul herself back along the detached cable before the pilotless bike slams headlong into a cliff.

21-24: Desperation: Hiromi calculates that she'll never make the rendezvous point in time, even at Sign Duck's maximum speed. Thinking fast, she shreds an airborne mecha gunship with upgraded cross-laser fire, anchors the airbike to one of the gunship's giant, detached engines (using the mecha grapnel cable), then seizes control of it with her scavenged mecha-brain "hackware". Cue the sonic boom as Hiromi blasts off for the extraction zone—bleating a final affirmation while the windblast ragdolls her—and arrives just as the dropship is taking off.

25-26: Big Reveal, as we discover that poor Hiromi was enmeshed in an interactive VR simulation all along; our heroine is taken aback when she's mobbed by astonished and amazed tech personnel. (Cut to a shot of virtual chibi "Miss Kyoko" celebrating onscreen.) The sim she just defeated was literally not meant to be passed, like Star Trek's theoretically unwinnable "Kobayashi Maru scenario"; it was designed purely as a stress test, to see how long a cadet could last under impossible odds. Now, Hiromi has proven her unprecedented mettle beyond any doubt, and fully qualifies as a Space Fighter; time for the game's ending "hat ceremony"!

One of the techs tells her, "Uh, we can restore the opacity of your armor membrane, y'know..." Hiromi just grins, strikes a saucy pose with her seemingly bared thighs, and laughs, "Not just yet, okay? I'm too busy feeling completely and utterly awesome right now."

<End of Proposal>

The work I sunk into the pitch wasn't entirely a loss, as I ended up using a few of the SF-skewing action riffs in some Knight Rider stories I wrote a few years later. Yay?

NEXT TIME ON THIS HERE PATREON: No idea, TBH, but something should be coming up in the next M/W/F slot. Let's find out together, shall we?