One of the reasons why we have decided to wait until June in order reveal more about our next project is the fact that, among dinosaur enthusiasts, June is also known as Jurassic June. It’s a month to celebrate the Jurassic Park franchise and really just dinosaurs in general.
Before we revealed the actual title, I used to refer to GENBA no Kizuna as our “dino project”. An admittedly rather misleading term. When you look at the teaser page, you will see that it is another murder mystery that “tells the story of four rookie investigators, trying to solve their first murder case and learning how to effectively work as a team“.
So now you might wonder, what does this have to do with dinosaurs? Well…
Similar to how Halloween was the main design theme in SHINRAI – Broken Beyond Despair, and was reflected through the character designs as well as the location and atmopshere, you could say that “dinosaurs” are the core design theme for GENBA no Kizuna. To give you an idea what I mean by that, here’s a design sketch of another new character for it:
So what does this guy actually have to do with dinosaurs? Well, he’s thematically designed after a certain species. Velociraptor to be precise. Or at the very least, the classical depiction of a Velociraptor in the Jurassic Park franchise, which originally gave them brown skin with black tiger stripes. His name is also a reference to one of the more well-known features of a Velociraptor: their sickle-shaped toe claws.
三日月 (mikazuki) consists of the kanji for ‘3’, ‘day’ and ‘moon’ and was originally used to refer to a crescent moon. It can also be used to describe objects that possess the shape of a crescent moon, however. In other words, a sickle-like shape.
九郎 (kurou) is an actual Japanese name. While the first kanji is the one for the numerical value ‘9’, ‘rou’ is an old-fashioned way to end a boy’s name (like Tarou, for example), and was also used to indicate the birth order. So if Ichirou is the first son of a family, then Kurou would be the ninth son.
The main reason why I have picked this name, however, is the fact that it sounds identical to the way the English word “claw” is written in katakana. So yeah, his name is basically just a pun on the term “sickle claw”.
Aside from Kurou, the entire circle of suspects in GENBA no Kizuna is designed with a dinosaur theme in mind.
The reason for that lies in their interests and the location where the murder takes place. Originally, I wanted it to be a dinosaur museum, but it’s shifted into a slightly different direction ever since. I will shed some more light on that next week, as a final conclusion to Jurassic June, so please look forward to that!
Until then, please enjoy the rest of your weekend and take care! :3
