Let's flip through the Mary Skelter Visual Collection & Story Guidebook!

Mary Skelter is one of my favorite game series of all time, and one of my favorite aspects of it is its art and character design.

Mary Skelter was always intended to be a relatively darker series, and i think the art from the first game does a good job at exemplifying that with the emphasis on black and pink, and blood splatter being a recurring motif.
the second game is themed around the butterfly effect, so it utilizes a light blue to contrast with the first game's bright pink to give the impression that something is "wrong".

the lead artist and character designer for Mary Skelter is Kei Nanameda. they originally seemed to just be the monster/creature designer at Compile Heart, but they now seem to be a mainstay at the company and does the lead character design for several of their other series, including:

Death end re;Quest,

Mugen Souls,

and Trillion: God of Darkness, among others.

their art sometimes takes on a more "rough" or "sketchy" look, if i had to describe it one way, which i'm a huge fan of. these are some of my favorite works of theirs, and is why i love looking at their concept art.

about a week ago at the time of me writing this, i finally got my hands on the Mary Skelter Visual Collection & Story Guidebook, which is essentially the japanese artbook for the first Mary Skelter game, though it also has an interview with Kei Nanameda, character bios, guides and maps for the game itself, and even the two light novels that act as a prequel for the game's story.

america got its own artbook that came with the limited edition for the game. i don't have that, but i thankfully have some pictures i stole from the Mary Skelter amino, so i can still compare between the two. i wanted to make a blog going through this artbook and sharing some of the concept art from it, because i think this series is really cool, and i want to share it with others.

well, first off, i was very surprised at this artbook coming in such pristine condition; it even has the little banner sleeve at the bottom. the entire cover is a giant sleeve that you can pull off, actually.

this is what the book itself looks like under the sleeve.

opening up the book, you get a better look at the cover art.

there's a lot of promotional art in this book that i don't think you can find anywhere else, not easily at least.

this, however, is just the concept art for the game. it would end up being used in the game itself as the background for the title screen.

this emphasizes the sense of scale of the Jail Tower. i notice that the concept art for the first two Death end re;Quest games also reuse the same concept, coincidentally enough.

this one looks familiar, doesn't it?
starring the game's main heroine, Alice, this is the game's key visual, and would end up being used for the game's boxart.

you could say this piece in specific represents the entire first game in general, it's used so much in promotional material, there's a frame in the game's opening animation that references it...
they must've been really proud of this piece.

now we're starting to get into promotional art and stuff that must've only been used for advertising and the like. in other words, the stuff i haven't seen, or have only seen sparingly. the one on the right would end up being used as the boxart for the game's limited edition, as well as the reverse cover for the english version of the game. the one on the left i'd never seen before now!

and this one's incredibly interesting! it says something like "postercard" at the bottom, but it looks like an early version of the boxart. the color red is emphasized much more here, the blood here is red instead of pink, and the moon is red instead of white.

another bit of promotional art it looks like, this time there's Red Riding Hood hanging on the side. there was a number of promotional art made in a similar vein to this, but this one specifically i'd actually never seen before!

the next few pages in the artbook are a collection of event CGs from the game itself. not very interesting to me, since i've already played the game, but here're some of them:

this book was incredibly difficult to hold open so you're just going to see my hand in some of the shots

more promotional art. these were posted to twitter during the days leading up to Mary Skelter's japanese release.

here's something that's a bit more interesting: a collection of all of the Nightmare designs. Nanameda originally designed the enemies in games before being put onto character design, so it's cool that in this series, he gets to do both.

if you've ever played any of the Etrian Odyssey games, the Nightmares in Mary Skelter are like the FOEs in that. Mary Skelter is themed around storybooks and fairytales, so all of the designs have references to those.

early designs and details that aren't really seen in the game itself are mixed in here:

the City Streets Nightmare (based on the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland), if you look at the top, went through a few revisions. i really like the one on the top-right and wish it was in the final game.

the Downtown Nightmare (based on the Fairy Godmother's Pumpkin Carriage in Cinderella) also went through a slight revision, though it never occurred to me that it was meant to be a giant pumpkin until i saw this. the final game uses the design on the left, so it doesn't resemble a pumpkin carriage all too much...

Hansel (based on Hansel and Gretel) actually did change a bit during development, but it's not shown off here. the giant stomach-tongue on the left is actually not a detail you see in the final game, though!

the Station Grounds Nightmare (based on the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood) seems to have gone through the most revisions, the two rough sketches on the bottom both look fairly different from the final design they went with at the top.
i also didn't notice the fact that its tail turns into a pair of shears in its second form, since you never really see the Nightmares from behind.

and the last nightmare design i feel like going over, the Living God Tower itself. it doesn't look like it went through too many revisions, but it's nice to have it here in the artbook, since i didn't really get a chance to sit and look at it in the game and appreciate some of the details.

here's a collection of all the backgrounds and concept art for each area in the game. most of these appear as-is in the game itself, but the bottom-right has a few early concepts for some areas!

i really like the asylum look that the early concept art for the Jail has (or it might just be the first dungeon, i can't really tell). 
every horror game that's based on Alice in Wonderland just has asylums, i guess.

it's said in interviews that it took them a while to finally decide on theming the game around western fairy tales, and once they did, a lot of other concepts were changed to fit around that, so i find it interesting that even when they were going back and forth with the idea of basing the game around japanese fairytales, the idea of a escaping a prison/asylum based on Alice in Wonderland was just always a motif they were planning on going with.
apparently, very early on in the game's development, the game was internally referred to as Genocide Pink.

speaking of early concepts:

this page is awesome! every early concept, idea, and character design! i'm a bit sad that it's all confined to this one page, i would've liked to see if there were more of them, or what the intention behind a lot of these designs were...

let's go through these pages a bit more thoroughly.

here's what looks like a very early version of the key art next to a very early character design.

early concept art for Massacre mode, i think?

a bunch of very early character designs. evidently, somebody must've really liked this one, since aspects of these designs would later be reused in three separate characters in the final game.

some more early area designs, looks like Siren Head's at the top there for some reason.
i really like the American Mcgee's Alice-esque Jail/Asylum design you see in a lot of these early concepts for the jail, i kind of wish they stuck with it.

onto the next page, and here are even more early character designs.

i'd imagine Kaguya-hime was one of the earliest characters they decided on including, alongside Alice, if they were originally planning on basing the series around japanese fairytales, so it's cool to see what's clearly an early version of Kaguya at the top-left, there.
i find all the miscellaneous character designs really interesting! they must've really had to pick and choose which fairytales they wanted to represent.

one of the early concepts from when the game was still being called Genocide Pink was the idea of fairytale elements being quite literally fused with horror elements, with this thought process being reflected in the main character designs. this idea was later abandoned, but we have a small glimpse into that with the bottom set of designs in the second picture.

the early designs for the Marchens were also designed with this mentality, and i actually really prefer these Marchen designs to what they ended up going with in the final game.

some early art for what would become the Purification minigame. i find the thought of Nanameda having to choose which positions to have the girls in for the minigame amusing.

and finally, here's what looks like a bunch of early ideas for the key art and title screen.
clearly, Nanameda must've really liked the one on the bottom-left.

i kind of wish they did a bit more with the two on the right, since i find the poses and composition in those two to be really cool.

the next section of the book has the Character Bios, as well as beta designs (if the character has those) and commentary from the artist. i would really like to read these, but there's a very small problem in that i can't read kanji at all.

the first page has the main protagonist, Jack, based on the story of Jack and the Giant Beanstalk. in contrast to the Blood Maidens (all of the female party members in the games), Jack is a Blood Youth. he doesn't get powers like the girls do, but his blood is apparently a soothing agent for the girls, as ingesting his blood restores their sanity during battle, and having it rubbed into their skin does the same during purification. to make using his blood more convenient, he's given the Mary Gun, a water gun that's surgically infused into his arm at all times. since he's constantly losing blood during battles, he suffers from chronic anemia, which i like to imagine is why his hair takes on that pale-ish color. escaping from the living nightmare that is the Jail becomes a tangible goal once Jack joins the party; he does genuinely wants to help everyone succeed, but he also just really wants climb up it for some reason.

interestingly, Jack seems to have gone through several revisions. i think his final design works a lot better than most of the designs here, since his hair color gives off the impression that he's kind of sickly, though the one design with gray hair i also don't really mind.

the next page features Alice, based on Alice Liddel from Alice in Wonderland, and the main heroine of the game. she and Jack are childhood friends, and even shared the same jail cell up until they were both freed at the beginning of the game. she's relatively serious, you could say she plays the straight man among the rest of the Blood Maidens who're all very animated in comparison, but Jack is always at the forefront of her mind, and the two try to keep each other safe whenever possible. she'd probably go insane if anything happened to Jack, but that'd never happen...

...would it?

her dream is to escape from the Jail, and throw a tea party to celebrate.

Alice went through a few revisions.
in interviews, Nanameda said that they really tried to avoid making the characters look too similar to the more well-known interpretations of these fairytales, and i feel like you can see this struggle with every character in the game, but Alice exemplifies this to me the most, ditching the blonde hair (and bunny-ear headband) to make her look more distinct, but i don't really like that change too much, since now it's not really easy to tell that she's based on the storybook, you just kind of have to take the game's word for it.

some characters get it better and worse than others, like Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty both look like they could be alternate interpretations of their respective fairytales, but then you have characters like Gretel and Cinderella where it just genuinely looks like they didn't know what else to draw.

every character also a page spread with all of the different alternate outfits you can get in the game, with some outfits actually having different revisions. these aren't too interesting imo though, so i'll skip most of these...

the english artbook thankfully translates the artist's notes, and an interesting concept that got abandoned at some point during development was Massacre mode being something you could control remotely apparently. i'd imagine it'd be similar to the Boost state in Etrian Odyssey, where you could just turn that on and off whenever. in the final game, once the gauge fills up, the character transforms on her own, with the player either having to totally prevent it by licking the character and resetting their gauge to zero, or just having to go along with it.

i'll post closeups of each character's bio and artist's commentary, in case anyone who can read japanese just so happens to scroll by, and...maybe...kinda...i dunno, if it's not too troublesome...translate it, a little?

Red Riding Hood (or, Akazukin), based on the story of Little Red Riding Hood, is on the next page.
she was the first Blood Maiden found, long before the events of the game start proper, making her the de facto "big sister" of the group. she's headstrong and a bit of a tomboy; she's very reliable during battles, but she'll occasionally let her anger get the best of her and charge in headfirst without thinking...

she also really doesn't like to be seen without her red hood. it means the world to her.

i don't usually like when characters look too bulky, which her final design leans a bit too close too for me...
i quite like her early design on the far right. it looks much more like a light jacket.
her weapon originally being giant fists fits her personality more, but i'm ultimately happy they went with the shears, for reasons i feel like are obvious.

her profile and commentary:

Thumbelina (or, Oyayubi-hime), based on the story of the same name, is on the next page.
Despite being as small as a child (or perhaps a thumb?), she's actually the oldest among her two blood-related sisters. she has really bad tsundere tendencies, but is very caring and protective of her two little sisters.

this is around where the characters stop having as many revisions, sadly.

her profile and commentary:

Snow White (or, Shirayuki-hime), based on the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, is next.
The middle sister, between Thumbelina and Sleeping Beauty. she's somewhat clumsy and awkward, and very horribly self-conscious of her appearance, to the point where it manifests as extreme eisoptrophobia.

her profile and commentary:

Snow White is one of two characters who didn't go through any revisions at all, the other being Gretel, so there's absolutely no beta designs for her, but interestingly, one of her alternate outfits went through a couple of revisions!

what the hell was up with the kitty sweater that gave Nanameda so much trouble?

Sleeping Beauty (or, Nemuri-hime), based on the story of the same name, is next.
the youngest of the three triplets, and always really tired. she sleeps often, dreaming of a prince who'll come and wake her from this nightmare.

her profile and commentary:

Sleeping Beauty went through a couple of very drastic revisions, her early designs look so radically different from what she ended up becoming.
i like her final design a lot, though i feel like any of these designs would've worked as long as they kept the thorns and the brooch.
that said, something about her final design strikes as...oddly proportioned. i can't quite put my finger on it. she never looks quite right to me. it could just be that she looks super different in the second game and i'm just used to that.

Kaguya-hime, from the Taketori Monogatari/Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, is next.
an incredibly lazy girl who really doesn't like putting in more effort than she needs to, to the point where she very rarely stands on her own, as she uses her floating chair, the Bamboo One, to do it for her. this is reflected in gameplay by her being much more adept at attacking enemies from a distance in the back row.

Kaguya did go through a few revisions, but they were earlier in the book.

though, now that i look a bit closer, it looks like at some point they were considering having her on her feet during battles, since in one of the rough arts, her weapon is a giant fan. i kind of wish they stuck with that, since it fits more with her aesthetic. maybe they could've given her several smaller fans to throw around?

her profile and commentary:

Rapunzel, from the story of the same name, is next.
towards the end of the game, the party is told a rumor about a mysterious golden hairball wandering around the Waterfall area. nobody knows if it's a Marchen, a Nightmare, or some kind of monster, but upon getting there, it ends up being a lost child: the newly-born Rapunzel, the youngest out of the entire cast, and having only known life inside of the dungeon, horribly socially maladjusted. she prides herself on her long, beautiful, golden hair, as she thinks it'll attract a prince who'll make babies with her (her words, not mine).

her profile and commentary:

Rapunzel is probably my favorite character to talk about when it comes to her early designs and revisions.

somebody on the staff, either someone at Compile Heart or maybe even Nanameda themself, just kept going "make her younger." with each revision. i find this incredibly amusing. and it resulted in probably the cutest blood maiden with the squishiest cheeks.
another thing i noticed about Nanameda, they seem to like to make their characters a little pudgy when they can.

Gretel, from the story of Hansel and Gretel, is next.
towards the end of the game, the party is told a rumor about a lost girl wandering a labyrinth with a Nightmare. once they arrive at a house made of sickly, melting sweets, they run into the Nightmare of the area; it's intelligent and can speak, and calls itself Hansel. controlling the Nightmare is a small and incredibly intelligent girl with glasses and a wicked sweet tooth, who introduces herself as a nightmare named Gretel.
after introducing herself, she then tells the party to die for her.

her profile and commentary:

i guess as an apology for her not having a single beta design, they just included the portrait of her in lingerie as consolation.

if you look closely, though, you can see an early Hansel there!
i guess the concept with Gretel was always "a girl and a nightmare", but they hadn't quite decided on what the direction for Hansel would be.

Cinderella, from the story of the same name, is next.
as the second Blood Maiden who was found, she's the next oldest overall after Red Riding Hood. she's incredibly prim and proper, conducting herself as a proper lady and princess should. she also hates leaving things messy, so when the Blood Team isn't out exploring the Jail, she can be found feverishly cleaning every inch of the Dawn. 

her profile and commentary:

Cinderella didn't go through too many changes either, though i find the one design where she originally had blonde/orange hair interesting.

and, finally, the last Blood Maiden, Hameln, based on the story of the Pied Piper, is the last blood maiden in this section of the book.
as she was stuck in the Underground Cavern for her entire life, and potentially throughout the entire game if the player never finds her, she's also not very socially adjusted. the only company she's ever had were the Marchens who obey her every command when she plays her piccolo, and the old picturebooks from a time long forgotten that depict concepts she doesn't quite understand, such as "friends" and "relationships".
due to her life of solitude and control over the Marchens, she seems to think that she's the Demon King, though that's probably just something she got from one of those picturebooks she has...

her profile and commentary:

it didn't occur to me until just now, but Hameln kind of did fufill that early concept they had of more demonic influences fusing with fairytales, as Hameln's design, in both her normal form and her transformations, all have demonic elements to them.
though it kind of comes at the cost of losing the connection with her fairytale. i genuinely didn't know she was supposed to be based on the Pied Piper until i looked it up (why did they name her after the city the story takes place in, and not just "Pied Piper"?)

here are her beta designs. i think the white really suits her! i kind of wish they went with either of those three, maybe the one on the far right strikes the best balance between the final design and the other beta designs.

that concludes the section with all of the main party members of the game! i'm...mildly disappointed that there wasn't as much beta art for them as i was hoping, i imagine once they decided on the concept, coming up with everything else was relatively straightforward. piecing together what the thought processes must've been when designing the characters was really fun and interesting, though! makes me wish i knew even more about the game's development.

before i move on, there's the giant interview with Kei Nanameda, the game's director, and some other guy i don't recognize!

i can't read it, but i'll post it here. i'm sure it'll be of some use to someone.

from here on, the artbook focuses less on early/beta concepts.
this page showcases a bunch of NPCs you come across in the game, and character portraits that show up only sparingly, like younger versions of Jack and Alice.

then it transitions into a full game guide!

and, finally, the last couple of sections are dedicated to the two prequel light novels: 

Mary Skelter (the novel shares the same name as the game...)
this prequel novel essentially gives you the backstory for the world the game takes place in, as well as the girls' individual backstories.

and Where the Light Resides.
this prequel novel is about a group of characters you run into during the game. they end up playing a much bigger role later on.

...and that concludes this little tour of the Mary Skelter artbook!

i do wish there was more early/concept art and more artist's commentary and an english version would've been nice, Iffy but i'm ultimately happy that it exists and that it was fairly easy to get, for one
but also i'm happy i have it, and that i was able to look through it for myself, and share it. art's something i struggle with, so i guess i like to look at art i like in the hopes of one day being able to draw something like it.
i'm also happy to have more Mary Skelter stuff in my collection. it feels like physical stuff for series that i like is hard to come by, so having this and all three games feels nice.

this blog took me the entire day to write, and i'm not quite how to end it, so