Source: Famitsu
Siren: Blood Curse: Archives Archives 28~36
Good evening. This is Clockwork Toyoda. Thank you for visiting.
This blog aims to bring you the charms of Siren: Blood Curse. Today is part four of the archives, dealing with items 28 to 36.
Archive No.28 - 8mm Film
Toyama: This wasn't actually filmed on 8mm film, but we wanted to put every possible kind of media into the archives...
Toyoda: A record, cassette tape, video tape, voice recorder, mobile phone... I see. If you include the archives from No.46 and beyond, you have all of the storage mediums.
Toyama: For a behind-the-scenes story, the colour of Amana's hood here and the one she wears during the episode are different. In the episode it's black, and in this archive it's red. Kind of like it was originally red, and as time went by it turned black...
Toyoda: Looking at the finer details again.
Toyama: Uh, sorry. When we were doing the recording for the archive items we hadn't totally set on a colour for it yet (laughs). We made the hood reversible between red and black, later deciding that black was better, so made the one in the episode black.
Archive No.29 - Canned Fortune
Toyama: I wrote the description for this archive myself. It's a parody of a certain manga that started off themed on an exam but midway through became about boxing (laughs).
Toyoda: Did you write the bits about previous lives too?
Toyama: Sato and I came up with those together. The drawings were done by the head archive designer.
Toyoda: The contents are quite straightforward, huh?
Toyama: What you get is selected from four possibilities at random when you pick it up - mother and mitrochondria are probably the better ones...
Toyoda: People can't be handles or black holes after all (laughs).
Archive No.30 - Sacred Painting "Ouroboros"
Toyama: This was drawn by the head of shibito designs. Uhh, there's not much else to say about it (laughs).
Toyoda: I'm going to go ahead and ask - why did you choose to represent it with the kanji meaning "empty, mother, lord"?
Toyama: We decided to base the characters on their phonetic readings rather than meaning, like Christians being oppressed by the government and hiding their religion.
Archive No.31 - Atlantis First Issue
Toyama: This is the archive we've made most during the series. I wonder how many times we've done it now (laughs).
Toyoda: The good old mystery-solving magazine. So it was first published in July 1976.
Toyama: It's an issue that hasn't really appeared in the series so far. By the way, in Siren there is the July 1976 first edition special and the July 2003 special issue, and in Siren 2 there's the August (year unknown) special. We actually had these made by a real magazine cover designer, so they look just like the real thing - or rather, they are the real thing (laughs).
Archive No.32 - JOYLiNK Ultra Network King
Toyoda: This is another of the archives you went way too far on. To be able to play mini-games over a network... and three different types of them.
Toyama: You can play three kinds: Tsuchinoko, Skyfish and Jackalopeman. The concept was a thoughtless localisation (laughs). At first I just kind of tossed out the idea that I wanted to make about three games with a UMA motif, but it was quite plain and wasn't all that interesting...
Toyoda: So you changed it to a western game that a Japanese company was forced to localise...
Toyama: I don't think there was any other choice (laughs). There's even an article on Howard Wright's blog about a Japanese company screwing up the localisation of an American game.
Toyoda: There's also the packaging for "One-Eyed Dragon" on his blog.
Toyama: There's actually a poster of One-Eyed Dragon on the wall in the spare room on the second floor of the Ito house, and the male model starring in it is the pointlessly muscly CG designer. Sato talked about one day making "a game out of those useless muscles" and in the end made it happen (laughs).
Archive No.33 - Seigo Saiga's Picture Diary
Toyama: This was drawn by a designer called Yamaguchi, but we changed the colouring to blues and reds...
Toyoda: Hmm, I don't really understand (laughs).
Toyama: I guess you could call it wanting to use coloured pencils the way a child would think to use them. Like writing in blues because their new mother and father are scary...
Toyoda: About the newspaper clipping displayed under further info...
Toyama: Up until now we've been publishing entire newspapers, things like the Misumi Daily Gazette, but now that it's in HD you can read everything. So we changed to a clipping (laughs).
Archive No.34 - Howard Wright's Mobile Phone
Toyama: If you select "save images", the photos taken by Howard until he arrived at Hanuda Village will be saved to a photo folder on your PlayStation 3 menu. We worked quite hard on this archive. There were no previous examples of photos being added via a game before, so there were quite a few disagreements over it. We had to ask around a lot...
Toyoda: There are 21 pictures, right?
Toyama: The data is saved as JPGs, so the time and date they were taken and the maker's name show up, but overwriting that was really troublesome. It shows the time and date and detailed information, right down to the camera model...
Toyoda: And the camera's name is...
Toyama: It's a petagon model camera from an aerial camera-maker called PG333XO (laughs). Actually, for some reason I was the one who ended up having to do all of the overwriting, and the photos we used were taken by me. The concept for the photos was starting out normal, but gradually getting scarier.
Archive No.35 - Oil Lighter
Toyama: This lighter is featured in Episode 0 too.
Toyoda: Did you decide to have "NT" carved into it from the start?
Toyama: We did. It's the "NT" of "New Translation", but...
Toyoda: In Episode 0...
Toyama: If you watch Episode 0 you'll know whose initials they are, so make sure you go take a look.
Archive No.36 - Mitamura Family Album
Toyama: We borrowed the album from Seiji Hattori, who plays Saiga, and used the photos of him as a young child as they were.
Toyoda: Huh? His own album?
Toyama: Yeah. If we got it dirty or lost it it would be terrible, so we really took care of it. Just one of the photos we used was a family photo of the head designer (laughs). Oh, speaking of whom, we took this photo trying to reproduce the conditions of the abandoned house where this archive is obtained...
Toyoda: You mean it falling from the roof and landing on the stove?
Toyama: We took a photo of it in that state... but apparently you can't tell that at all from the finished archive (laughs).
Toyoda: Ahahahaha! I wouldn't have a clue (laughs).
Good Evening from the Development Team
This is Ryanna, who plays Bella, during post-recording. She is actually half Japanese, her father being an American and her mother being Japanese, so during filming we used a gold spray on her hair. After filming was done she left Japan and should currently be living in America, so her mother said she mustn't forget her kanji when she goes there, and had her studying it, which left quite an impression on me. She was using a certain game system. (Toyama)