The Story of Reycralibur (The Reycralibur Requiem Project)
Chapter 2
No matter how much I tried, I couldn't escape the thought of going back to Smashcralibur and doing it right. It didn't help that my low income meant I was perpetually left behind the rest of the Smash Bros machinima community as far as recent installments go. I struggled to afford a better capture card after my Dazzle bit the dust and by the time I began filming in Smash Bros for Wii U the next installment, Ulitmate, would be announced less than a year later.
Going back to 2011, my non-machinima content was nothing but garbage. Literally, I had nothing better to do with my free time than to go back to the original Super Smash Bros game and reboot Smashcralibur with the intention of finishing the series for good. I had all but lost the original files from the past two incarnations, so I had nothing to lose when started filming the series from scratch and rewrote the entire story to exclude everything Nintendo-related. This was the beginning of Revision 3.
In the newly-retitled Reycralibur, the central story remains: Neo, Skyru, and Ridi travel around the world to rebuild the eponymous "Miracle Beam". This time around, it wasn't just them and the 13th looking for the sword. The search for Reycralibur was a worldwide treasure hunt that everyone from bounty hunters to mercenaries searching for the sword parts. As with any cliché story like this, the amnesiac Skyru who fell from the sky was the key to finding all three pieces. The blue girl with a silly name was being pursued by The 13th for just that purpose. Neo, a chivalrous man who wants to become a knight, decides to help her out of the goodness of his heart.
You see how I described the main premise the series just now? Even now, writing a story like this is not my strongest suit. I decided to take the self-deprecating route by having the characters point out the faulty writing over the course of the series. In fact, my whole approach to writing the series was to envision every action or drama show as a comedy that never took itself too seriously. You could be watching a dramatic scene only for the tone to suddenly shift to comedy. I struggled to keep up the light tone as long as I could, but my mind gave up by the end of episode 7. If that episode felt like I stopped giving a shit, it's because I did.
For all the outside influences, Reycralibur had much more in common with the Crysis video game series. You came for the exosuits, open-world gameplay, and beautiful graphics; you left because you couldn't be asked to care about the actual plot. But can you seriously recall any other machinima series done in the original Smash Bros game that utilized as many mods as I did? My tool kit expanded as the series progressed, going from texture hacks in episode 1, to a controllable camera in episode 4, to animation swaps by the end of the series. I was always browsing the web looking for more SSB64 mods and codes to expand the base game and, in turn, enhance the visuals and effects of the series.
Considering the bad compression, poor use of capture software, and a lack of experience filming in the original game, you better believe I took what I can get.
The trouble with having all these texture hacks was that I had to use multiple versions of the Project 64 emulator. Outside of Super Smash Bros Brawl Duel Force, which was the main texture pack I was using throughout the series, I collected a bunch of different texture packs from the likes of CastelmanxD, a fellow Smash machinimator on YouTube, and from forums such as Emudigital and Emudesc. These were not easy to find and I needed to buy multiple portable hard drives just so I could save disk space. This was before I discovered, or was able to afford, cloud hosting.
That, and many other factors, lead to the eventual downfall of the series.
TO BE CONTINUED
