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The "social media updates" thread - now with 99% less drama

Well, it all just reinforces the belief that Umbrella's story mode will be rather dark.
The question is, how dark will it be?
I'm alright with a dark story mode, just give me the Egrets with actual lines.
 
I'm actually willing to bet that Umbrella's story mode won't involve the Skull Heart at all. They're gonna save that for the True Ending.
 
Corridor89 said:
store.steampowered.com

Skullgirls: Umbrella on Steam

Excuuuse me, Princess! Introducing the one and only UMBRELLA! This DLC includes Umbrella, her new stage, 29 palettes, character tutorials/trials, and full Story Mode!
store.steampowered.com store.steampowered.com



I wonder what more we can learn of the Renoir family after Parasoul's story and SGM story. I wonder if Franz isn't as dead as we are lead to believe. Or perhaps Umbrella's ties to the Skull Heart are a bit deeper than we know...
IIRC Franz isn't "dead"-- he survived Nancy's attack and managed to shut down the Anti-Skullgirl Labs before vanishing off the face of the earth.
 
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missingno said:
I'm actually willing to bet that Umbrella's story mode won't involve the Skull Heart at all. They're gonna save that for the True Ending.
That would be interesting. But weird.
Finally, we can say that the comics about Umbrella's ice-cream-centric story mode were prophetic.

Brawlitup99 said:
IIRC Franz isn't "dead"-- he survived Nancy's attack and managed to shut down the Anti-Skullgirl Labs before vanishing off the face of the earth.
Not really. That's what we have in the canon information thread:
Chrono_Tata said:
It is not known whether King Franz is still alive or not - either he's dead or he's gone and will come back later, "whichever is cooler"
And I have no idea where the information about shutting the Labs down (in that particular context) came from.
 
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Holy Goose said:
Well, it all just reinforces the belief that Umbrella's story mode will be rather dark.
The question is, how dark will it be?
I'm alright with a dark story mode, just give me the Egrets with actual lines.
Maybe it'll end with a wish on the skullheart, which hasn't happened in a story mode since the base roster.
 
Holy Goose said:
And I have no idea where the information about shutting the Labs down (in that particular context) came from.
From the official website: https://skullgirls.com/world/

"After losing his wife to the Skull Heart and the Grand War, King Renoir found himself with a stronger conscience. Despite the continuing need for the Labs in the fight against the Skullgirls, the King moved to decommission their experiments. Once he himself disappeared, however, it was restarted in secret and the lack of official oversight has allowed the Labs’ scientists to perform increasingly questionable experiments."


Corridor89 said:
I wonder what more we can learn of the Renoir family after Parasoul's story and SGM story. I wonder if Franz isn't as dead as we are lead to believe. Or perhaps Umbrella's ties to the Skull Heart are a bit deeper than we know...
I mean if you look at the actual wording:

"Umbrella learns the grim reality of the Renoir Royal Family..."

It doesn't necessarily mean that we, the audience, will learn new things about the Renoirs. Umbrella has led a pretty sheltered life and I don't think she has been told the full reality of her father's role in the Grand War, her mother turning into the Skullgirl (as seen in Para's SGM origin story), or Canopy Kingdom's atrocities and oppression of some of its citizens.

I think her story will involve her actually venturing out into the world and meeting people and characters that will tell her things that would make her face the reality of her family's legacy. There will probably be some lore drops that will be new to us, but there are a lot of things we know about the Renoirs that Umbrella doesn't know yet.


Brawlitup99 said:
IIRC Franz isn't "dead"-- he survived Nancy's attack and managed to shut down the Anti-Skullgirl Labs before vanishing off the face of the earth.
While he did survive the fight against Nancy, and came back long enough to shut down the Labs, it's unclear if he has since died after he disappeared. I'm one of the people leaning towards him still being alive, but it's really not confirmed and Alex did specifically say that it's (supposed to be) ambiguous, so we'll just have to wait to see.
 
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Chrono_Tata said:
From the official website: https://skullgirls.com/world/

"After losing his wife to the Skull Heart and the Grand War, King Renoir found himself with a stronger conscience. Despite the continuing need for the Labs in the fight against the Skullgirls, the King moved to decommission their experiments. Once he himself disappeared, however, it was restarted in secret and the lack of official oversight has allowed the Labs’ scientists to perform increasingly questionable experiments."
Wow, I should visit the official site more often.

Chrono_Tata said:
doesn't necessarily mean that we, the audience, will learn new things about the Renoirs. Umbrella has led a pretty sheltered life and I don't think she has been told the full reality of her father's role in the Grand War, her mother turning into the Skullgirl (as seen in Para's SGM origin story, or Canopy Kingdom's atrocities and oppression of some of its citizens.
Exactly.
It's not about the audience finding out, it's about Umbrella's reaction after finding out.

Also, isn't it anything, but stated, that even Parasoul doesn't know fully about her father's misdeeds? Her reaction to Panzerfaust's story in SGM seems to make it pretty clear.

Chrono_Tata said:
There will probably be some lore drops that will be new to us, but there are a lot of things we know about the Renoirs that Umbrella doesn't know yet.
That seems to be the point.
It's too much of a "Chekhov's Gun" to ignore it.
 
Holy Goose said:
Exactly.
It's not about the audience finding out, it's about Umbrella's reaction after finding out.

Also, isn't it anything, but stated, that even Parasoul doesn't know fully about her father's misdeeds? Her reaction to Panzerfaust's story in SGM seems to make it pretty clear.
Yeah exactly. Parasoul herself was (kinda still is) pretty sheltered from the full reality of things and Umbrella is even more ignorant.

I'm not even sure if Franz himself even knew the full extent of what was being done inside the Labs or in his country. Dude was probably too preoccupied with waging the war and he probably just let his subordinates do whatever. Maybe after the war, he was actually confronted with what was really happening, and that might have been part of the reasons why he grew a conscience and did what he did.

Holy Goose said:
That seems to be the point.
It's too much of a "Chekhov's Gun" to ignore it.
Yeah, having playable Franz with the Death umbrella further down the line seems to be too cool to pass up. Alex did say "whichever is cooler" after all.
 
Chrono_Tata said:
I'm not even sure if Franz himself even knew the full extent of what was being done inside the Labs or in his country. Dude was probably too preoccupied with waging the war and he probably just let his subordinates do whatever. Maybe after the war, he was actually confronted with what was really happening, and that might have been part of the reasons why he grew a conscience and did what he did.
Seems very plausible.
After all, leaving somebody like Brain Drain in charge and without supervision is a recipe for disaster (and he surely wasn't the only one like that; there could be people in charge of the Labs even worse in that regard).

Chrono_Tata said:
Yeah, having playable Franz with the Death umbrella further down the line seems to be too cool to pass up. Alex did say "whichever is cooler" after all.
Maybe, the Conquest umbrella?
Actually, that's a really interesting idea.
But it looks that Franz is not an active player anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe, the upcoming story mode will explain it. I hope so.
 
Holy Goose said:
Seems very plausible.
After all, leaving somebody like Brain Drain in charge and without supervision is a recipe for disaster (and he surely wasn't the only one like that; there could be people in charge of the Labs even worse in that regard).
The top person in charge of the Labs is Dr. Geiger. We've never met him but the fact he runs the entire Labs and is head of Lab 0, I'd imagine he's far from being very morally upstanding guy.

Holy Goose said:
Maybe, the Conquest umbrella?
Actually, that's a really interesting idea.
But it looks that Franz is not an active player anymore, for whatever reason. Maybe, the upcoming story mode will explain it. I hope so.
It was said that Eroberung isn't something that can be used very often. As we saw in Para's Origin Story, it's pretty much the equivalent of a nuke. Even if Franz still has the Conquest umbrella, I doubt he would use it as his main weapon if he ever becomes playable. For a Level 5 super, maybe.

But yeah I definitely don't see him appearing in this part of the story. I think the mystery of his disappearance will be explained all the way in Part 2 or 3, regardless of whether he's still alive or not.
 
Chrono_Tata said:
There will probably be some lore drops that will be new to us, but there are a lot of things we know about the Renoirs that Umbrella doesn't know yet.
Right... Which is why I am curious as to what more Umbrella's story can also teach us, the audience. Obviously, Umbrella will eventually learn all the awful things Franz did for his war effort and what Nancy was compelled to do, but what will be interesting in Umbrella's story mode when it releases is how that information is presented to us/Umbrella in addition to any new info the players might learn.
 
Corridor89 said:
Right... Which is why I am curious as to what more Umbrella's story can also teach us, the audience. Obviously, Umbrella will eventually learn all the awful things Franz did for his war effort and what Nancy was compelled to do, but what will be interesting in Umbrella's story mode when it releases is how that information is presented to us/Umbrella in addition to any new info the players might learn.
On that note I'd certainly like to know more about what life was like in Canopy, or New Meridian in particular, during war time under Franz's rule. I think we have got glimpses of it but some more fleshed out accounts from the characters Umbrella might meet would be interesting. I think a particularly underdeveloped aspect of the lore which a lot of players seem to overlook is that Canopy Kingdom has been practically a fascist state ruled by an absolute monarchy, and its government are certainly not good people - probably no better than the Medici who, on the other hand, has been clearly established as the bad guys since the start.
 
I guess that depends on whether or not you prefer monarchic-fascism to slavery, human trafficking and full-blown gang warfare.
Of course, since the Medici were at the height of their power under Franz's reign, one wonders just how controlling he could have realistically been.

Maybe Dahlia's eventual story would be a good opportunity to showcase the differences between the Renoirs and Medici. She was allegedly sane at one point, so perhaps she'll have some insight into what it was like to be a citizen of the Canopy Kingdom from before she became an ASG soldier.
 
Chrono_Tata said:
The top person in charge of the Labs is Dr. Geiger. We've never met him but the fact he runs the entire Labs and is head of Lab 0, I'd imagine he's far from being very morally upstanding guy.
Yeah, the sheer fact that he runs this place is already enough to make the conclusions. Through we don't know about this guy a lot.

I'm sort of sure that Black Dahlia's story mode would be pretty informative about the Labs and Geiger.

Chrono_Tata said:
Even if Franz still has the Conquest umbrella, I doubt he would use it as his main weapon if he ever becomes playable. For a Level 5 super, maybe.
And we have no idea if Nancy's umbrella survived the confrontation with Eroberung. Probably not, judging by what it did to her in particular.
 
Corridor89 said:
I guess that depends on whether or not you prefer monarchic-fascism to slavery, human trafficking and full-blown gang warfare.
Of course, since the Medici were at the height of their power under Franz's reign, one wonders just how controlling he could have realistically been.
Not that I prefer either lol since they were both pretty bad. With regard to gang warfare though, like you said the Medici are at the height of power in New Meridian so there probably aren't that many conflicts with rival gangs and they are probably able to keep the peace in their city (with the occasional bursts of violence like the Contiello massacre). With what was going on in the rest of the continent during the Grand War, New Meridian was probably a safe haven in comparison at least in term of their proximity to the battles.

But yeah, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I think it makes sense that Franz was not really that controlling of the country himself, since his attention was probably focused on the war, but probably a lot of bad things had been done by the people he put in charge, and as the absolute monarch he was definitely responsible for that, if not directly then by negligence. At the very least this is part of the dark legacy of the Renoirs that the princesses need to confront.

Corridor89 said:
Maybe Dahlia's eventual story would be a good opportunity to showcase the differences between the Renoirs and Medici. She was allegedly sane at one point, so perhaps she'll have some insight into what it was like to be a citizen of the Canopy Kingdom from before she became an ASG soldier.

Holy Goose said:
Yeah, the sheer fact that he runs this place is already enough to make the conclusions. Through we don't know about this guy a lot.

I'm sort of sure that Black Dahlia's story mode would be pretty informative about the Labs and Geiger.
Yeah I think Dahlia's story should help fill in more details about a lot of things so that's exciting.

Holy Goose said:
And we have no idea if Nancy's umbrella survived the confrontation with Eroberung. Probably not, judging by what it did to her in particular.
The umbrella wasn't in direct line-of-fire of Eroberung so I think it's pretty likely that it survived along with Franz. Would not be "cool" for it to get lost before we really see what it does. :p
 
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Not really social media, but probably over-analysis nonetheless.
The level of detail put into Brain Drain's talksprites in Umbrella's story makes me think the developers/animators were definitely bouncing around some ideas for how he would look in motion -- presumably to the end of being a playable character.
 
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missingno said:
I just wanna know what games the arcade has. Maybe there's an old Nesica 2E cab.
Also not directly related to social media update but now that we have the Boardwalk stage, we have the "final" design of the arcade:

arcade.png


Looks like they walked back a bit on the more modern arcade machine designs and went with more "analogue" machines. Apart from the Sagan claw machine, the videogame cabinet from the draft is replaced with a Beowulf-themed arm wrestling machine, and we also see some sort of Cirque des Cartes-themed.... I wanna say pinball machine? And another heart-themed machine that I'm not savvy enough about vintage arcade to figure out.

So yeah this is more in-line with what we were told previously about videogames so that makes sense.
 
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Would it be sacrilegious in-universe for there to be an Aeon version of an old Fortune Teller Machine, I wonder.
 
Corridor89 said:
Would it be sacrilegious in-universe for there to be an Aeon version of an old Fortune Teller Machine, I wonder.
Hah yeah. Would be a cool idea but I doubt Canopy Kingdom is progressive enough to have someone do that without getting in trouble.
 
The one thing I could comment about the new portrait is that again she has the angry eye + smiling mouth expression, which is consistent with my theory that she has a mask under her veil, which is why she always has the same expression in all her pictures.
 
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Chrono_Tata said:
The one thing I could comment about the new portrait is that again she has the angry eye + smiling mouth expression, which is consistent with my theory that she has a mask under her veil, which is why she always has the same expression in all her pictures.
I would think that from a design perspective that would make her too similar to Taliesin.
Then again, skullgirls's has like 5 characters who have an eye missing or obscured.
EDIT: And come to think of it, Dahlia herself is one of those characters who is drawn with a single eye a lot of the time. Hmmm.
 
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Corridor89 said:
I would think that from a design perspective that would make her too similar to Taliesin.
Then again, skullgirls's has like 5 characters who have an eye missing or obscured.
EDIT: And come to think of it, Dahlia herself is one of those characters who is drawn with a single eye a lot of the time. Hmmm.
Lol yeah reusing tropes is definitely a Skullgirls Special.

Dahlia shown with single eye is just a stylistic thing though I'm pretty sure (e.g. the obscuring effect of her veil is hiding one eye). Pretty sure her face/mask under the veil has 2 eyes.
 
is that an octoling
 
The forums aren't letting me post images, but Cellsai posted this recently in a discord (I think, I don't use discord, so I don't know)
That's the weird place that SG has always been in though. Everyone involved in SG wants to and has grand hopes for eventually releasing a proper True Story.
Dumping a lot of the cool story moments into text files or forum posts undercuts that potential cool future story thing that everyone wants to do.
 
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Corridor89 said:
The forums aren't letting me post images, but Cellsai posted this recently in a discord (I think, I don't use discord, so I don't know)
Yeah all the image attachments are broken at the moment. I have already reported it so hopefully someone will take a look at it eventually.

But yeah I can certainly understand that sentiment. As someone looking from the outside and with the release of SG story contents being so sparse, we want to find out as many hints as possible in order to fuel informed discussion and speculation. For the devs though they want to actually keep the details as much under wraps as possible. Finding out too many details especially the ones that are key to the plots are akin to reading spoilers which, well, spoils the experience for when the details are organically revealed in the story.

However; I think get a semi-regular drip feed of interesting details helps to keep the community engaged, so it's definitely a balancing act between the two.
 
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Maybe we can over-analyze what they are NOT showing? It has been months since Future Club streamed. Their usual Wednesday shows have been reruns. What's up? In descending order of likeliness:

A. They are in a crunch to finalize Umbrella
B. Unexpected issues (e.g. technical, staffing, etc.) has derailed plans
C. They are rushing to finish Black Dahlia before EVO
D. The Skull Heart is real and some one made a wish on it

Chrono_Tata said:
Yo I hope this is canon
I hope so too! I think they try to be canon. I recall an artist who made a Squigly shirt design years ago wrote about how amusing it was they could contact the devs and ask strange questions like "does Squigly still have a tongue?" and get a serious ruling.

Kinda distressing to see it "confirmed" that Big Band's can is mostly empty for instrument weapon storage and he's less than a torso and head in an iron lung.
 
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BallotBoxer said:
Maybe we can over-analyze what they are NOT showing? It has been months since Future Club streamed. Their usual Wednesday shows have been reruns. What's up? In descending order of likeliness:

A. They are in a crunch to finalize Umbrella
B. Unexpected issues (e.g. technical, staffing, etc.) has derailed plans
C. They are rushing to finish Black Dahlia before EVO
D. The Skull Heart is real and some one made a wish on it


I hope so too! I think they try to be canon. I recall an artist who made a Squigly shirt design years ago wrote about how amusing it was they could contact the devs and ask strange questions like "does Squigly still have a tongue?" and get a serious ruling.

Kinda distressing to see it "confirmed" that Big Band's can is mostly empty for instrument weapon storage and he's less than a torso and head in an iron lung.
I think it might just be that Dahlia was far earlier in development when she was announced compared to Umbrella and she was mostly only announced so early because she was leaked.

I can’t think of why else they’d go so long with out any info about her. They haven’t show anything regarding Dahlia in the months since they announced her, not even what her in-game sprite looks like or a post regarding how she’d play
 
I think part of it was that the streaming schedule was probably quite difficult to maintain for the artists. For the first couple of streams, we got to see them do the art live. A few streams later, they were basically showing replays of previously done work and doing other works in the background and/or chatting with us. By the last few streams, the artists weren't even streaming at all but we had community managers restreaming the videos instead.

Back in the Lab Zero days we didn't really have stream schedules and the artists basically just streamed whenever they were free. While it could be hard to catch due to the random times, I think that was probably better overall for both the viewers and the artists. I wish they would go back to doing it like that.

BallotBoxer said:
I hope so too! I think they try to be canon. I recall an artist who made a Squigly shirt design years ago wrote about how amusing it was they could contact the devs and ask strange questions like "does Squigly still have a tongue?" and get a serious ruling.

Kinda distressing to see it "confirmed" that Big Band's can is mostly empty for instrument weapon storage and he's less than a torso and head in an iron lung.
I don't think it was explicitly confirmed but I recognise the work of the artist who did this design, and (if it is who I think it is) they have worked on the game before. But yeah, there was a previous shirt, the X-ray one, where the designer actually did tell us that the design was lore-passed by Alex and the design could be taken as "canon" at least based on information determined at the time (the shirt actually had an older interim design of Robo-Fortune that wasn't accurate in the end). Would be cool if it were publicly confirmed if this shirt's design was given a pass by the lore team or not.

Bankenstein8 said:
I think it might just be that Dahlia was far earlier in development when she was announced compared to Umbrella and she was mostly only announced so early because she was leaked.

I can’t think of why else they’d go so long with out any info about her. They haven’t show anything regarding Dahlia in the months since they announced her, not even what her in-game sprite looks like or a post regarding how she’d play
I believe Dahlia was announced much earlier than they intended because of the leak. That's probably why there has been a larger gap between the initial announcement and more info. I believe this is independent from the reason(s) why the art streams haven't restarted since the holidays though.
 
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Not too much else to talk about lately so I'm putting this one out, but does anyone recognise any of the circled characters if they have appeared in any of the previous stages? I'm fairly certain they are new but maybe I'm just forgetting some.

https://imgur.com/a/p11oqOp
 
I mean to post about this earlier, 'cuz my eyebrows raised upon reading this line:

VO Point.png


And sure enough, here we go!

https://twitter.com/x/status/1506794304718655495
Crying Cat.png

Chrono_Tata said:
Not too much else to talk about lately so I'm putting this one out, but does anyone recognise any of the circled characters if they have appeared in any of the previous stages? I'm fairly certain they are new but maybe I'm just forgetting some.

I can't say I recognize the others, but I think the kid in the arcade is the same one in Maplecrest.

Kid 1.png
Kid 2.png

Edit: As of the latest update, a lot of the Maplecrest kids are at The Boardwalk, lol.
 
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one of the last bits of new content before Umbrella's official release

yea. i could see boss umbrella showing up. They're showing her soo much love.
 
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