It'd serve as an RPG itself, but the labor is prohibitive; a comic or visual novel is just as problem-laden, as I'm not in the right place for hiring somebody anymore (and partnerships are... I'd as soon not go down that road again any time soon). A Twine game or a prose novel, then, but it's a fundamentally visual idea, so I don't know if those media can support what I'd try to do. Even the scraps and inklings I have thus far are enough to let me know that much.
It's a story of where the heroes go after it's all over. I call it "The Singing Mountain," after this one:
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I had this image a while back of a man sitting on a bus, going to a place for RPG heroes whose story was long over; the bus went over a bridge, arriving at The Singing Mountain, named for the song, and the sidequest, that was removed from Chrono Trigger. It would be about secret heroes and about people who had given up or had trouble moving on, or were just trying to make lives in the wreckage. I didn't have a plot past the man climbing the mountain, but the character ideas started to come on fairly quickly. They'd be mostly analogues, obviously - this is why I thought an RPG was the obvious venue, because it's that audience that would eat it up. But my intention wasn't to make a self-congratulatory reference-fest for gamers, so much as it was to tell a story, in the way I'd attempted with Project: Ballad, another tale of RPG stuff where the references were 100% not the point.
I'll admit that I originally thought to make the POV character a man because there was an aspect of autobiography to it, a "putting oneself out to pasture" bit of self-pity, trying to figure out what to make of all the study I've done into a niche field about which I have very mixed feelings - as a short story, it would have had a few scenes where the protagonist watches someone who was obviously Kendra Price of P:B leave all this mess behind. I'm not sure it necessarily needs to be a man, for a wider audience - if it were a game, rather than a told story, I'd almost certainly not make them one.
I knew that the first stop would be a donut shop at the base of the mountain, and that the protagonist would hitch a ride on a truck going further up, and I imagined a sort of nod to "Five Easy Pieces." I also figured that at some point high up the mountain, the blue crystal pyramid from Chrono Trigger would reveal an elevator leading down into the mountain itself... Lost secrets of the past.
I would imagine that some of the story (gameplay?) would involve convincing some of the lost heroes to reclaim their titles by joining the protagonist on a journey to whatever secrets may lie within the mountain. One such task would involve reuniting a gang that had split up, "The Butterfly Gang," named for the knife, but obviously that's also a Persona thing.
I also know that a number of locations to visit on the Singing Mountain would be places that I never got to bring the characters in Project: Ballad - not even in concept art, long far-off locations that never got their due.
I don't know; it's a very "Kingdom Come" way of storytelling, to come up with a bunch of visual designs based on things and slowly put together a story out of them, but then "Earth-X" is one of the best things Marvel ever let escape, so who am I to judge the process, right?
In between other things on this site, I want to work through my process with this idea, which may come to nothing. It's a dozen pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle right now, but there's something in it that draws me, and I wonder if there might not be a real object to be found in it.
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