Chuggaaconroy

It’s another year done. Thank you for spending it with me! This year felt new for many reasons, I still can’t believe we took our live show on tour to a few cities around the US. I never thought I’d see the show up on a marquee, and that’s all thanks to your interest. I’m happy our charity event, TRG Colosseum became a regular thing and not just a one-off. I thank everyone who was a part of that and for having as little drama with each other as we do! As for videos, I feel like this year ascended as it went on.

I can say Yoshi’s Woolly World, while fun, was the least exciting of the four series completed this year and it feels like your response for it matched as being the least loud too. I felt like Phantom Hourglass was a wild card, every part of the game varied in quality so much that it was just fun to talk about. It could give genuinely one of the coolest moments in Zelda history followed by a bizarre idea that didn’t remotely work. It was an important game to many childhoods and is strangely one of the highest selling Zelda games, so I really wanted to give it a spotlight. I like it too, even if I don’t love it.

I think Chrono Trigger turned out better than those two and was one of the most enjoyable series to make in the history of the channel! I largely have to thank those who worked with me on it. Motion Dan was a new visual designer who came on about a year ago now, Chrono Trigger being his first big undertaking and he did excellent. Sab Irene’s song, Family Jules’s performance as Gato we’re both really big moments I was excited to show people. The release of the 13th episode was such a happy moment for me, both due to what it meant for the series and their hard work to make it what it was. Their work made it better than the video in my imagination.

Super Mario Galaxy 2. Hoo. That happened after so many years and is done now. It was somewhat of a tall order to make that, since I knew the earlier Mario L Ps on the channel were important to longtime viewers. I wanted to make something that would fit in with what I’m doing now, but also be what longtime viewers waited to see. With it being so long since those old videos, I went back to see what people’s favorite videos from those old series were and noticed it was often when showing weird tricks like skipping over The Goopy Inferno in Super Mario Sunshine, so I set out to try to make every Galaxy play out like that video, researching until every video would have one thing like it. It was so lovely seeing your posts trying out things I talked about, and meeting speed runners who detailed this information! They made it all possible to make the videos I wanted to make. Let’s make it sooner than nine more years for the follow up! Hold me to that.

The last part of the year was spent making most of the overdue bonus videos a reality, something I’d like to keep doing. In talking about that, it leads me to the first thing I want to say looking into 2020. Yes, the third Okami bonus video will be a bit longer before I can complete it. It’s turning out huge and I want it to include everything it should, so hold on a bit longer and it’ll come. Aside from that, I have a confession. Part of the reason the bonus videos happened was because the next series ran into a very troubled production right before its intended release. I didn’t know how long it would take to resolve, or how I would resolve it. I didn’t want to potentially have nothing come out for a long, long time, so I worked on the bonus videos while mulling over what I needed to. It’s why Galaxy 2 didn’t include any direct hint to a new series at the end, and instead pointed to the Okami Bonus Videos happening. The hint for something long overdue meant nothing else besides that.

These last two weeks were honestly some of the most stressful times in recent memory due to a lot of things going wrong outside my control and having to make some hard decisions, which ended in throwing away finished work because it just wasn’t coming together. It’s hard to explain what I’m talking about, so I’ll tell the story some other time. Either way, yucky stuff was going on, but it’s thankfully gotten better as of the last day and a new series will be headed your way in early 2020. If you’d like one hint, this will be a new spin-off series for the channel.

I’d like to drop one last detail that I’m very happy with, the record for most production work per episode of a series will be broken before the end of the year. I don’t know when that project will release, but it’s far along and feels real now. I really love the game and community that I’m doing this for, and it feels nice to see it taking shape. Really, thanks for allowing me to do this for another year and for making this the best community to make videos in. Here’s to new frontiers in 2020! See you at Magfest! Oh, and I’m sure I have to thank Masae Anela for something, so yay.