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[VGMP] Sega Hard Girls 7 - Final Episode References
Rory Joscelyne • Apr 05, 2022
VGMP: SEGA References from Episodes 12 and 13
You've returned to see how this crazy ride ends, huh?
How many more
references can they shoehorn into a single production? Is there anything we've been unable to recognise hiding in the series?
PART 1
- Character References
PART 2
- Atrium References
PART 3
- Classroom References
PART 4
- Episodes 1 to 4
PART 5
- Episodes 5 to 8
PART 6
- Episodes 9 to 11
PART 7
- Episodes 12 and 13
PART 8
- Episode 14/The OVA Movie
Well hold on to your seats, because Episode 12 is crammed with references, and the entrance to Black Asobin World has me stumped on several.
When the girls enter Black Asobin World this barrage
of references is there to greet you. It's like a full-on assault of the senses, and as I've said above some of these have me completely stumped. We're going to ignore all the stuff you can see through the gate, as we have a closeup for that where the camera pans in. So we're just going to talk about all the references in front of the gate and towering above it.
Starting from Left to Right;
TOP-LEFT:
Green Giant (unknown), Alien Ship (unknown), Blackbeard Ship (Skies of Arcadia)
MID-LEFT: Souther (Streets of Rage), Abedede (Streets of Rage), Bongo (Streets of Rage), Red Dragon (Golden Axe), Floating Snowman (unknown)
BOTTOM-LEFT: Death Adder (Golden Axe)
TOP-RIGHT: Wood Block (Fantasy Zone), Angry Sun (unknown), Blue Ninja (Shinobi - Mark III), Onihime & Yasha/Mona & Lisa (Streets of Rage), Ship (unknown)
MID-RIGHT: Coin (unknown), Green Giant (unknown), Blue Dragon (Golden Axe), Valuan Battleship (Skies of Arcadia), Red Alien Tank (unknown)
BOTTOM-RIGHT: Knight (Golden Axe III)
And so the camera enters the gate and we get a closer snapshot of things in here. Any help identifying these references would be much appreciated.
TOP-LEFT: Red Dragon (Golden Axe), Purple Creature (unknown), Bahn (Fighting Vipers), Yellow Thing with Hands (Fantasy Zone), Yatsurao (Shinobi [2002])
MID-LEFT: Kizami (Shinobi [2002]), Fantasy Zone (Space Harrier), Yellow and Blue Ship (Fantasy Zone)
BOTTOM-LEFT: Green Dwarf (Golden Axe)
TOP-RIGHT: Blue & Pink Enemy (Fantasy Zone), Coin (unknown), Valuan Spaceship (Skies of Arcadia)
MID-RIGHT: Fantasy Zone (Space Harrier), Pink & Yellow Enemy (Fantasy Zone), Moritsune (Shinobi [2002])
BOTTOM-RIGHT: Blue Dwarf (Golden Axe), Aztec Device (unknown)
Once they enter Black Asobin World and begin to climb the tower, they come face to face with Neji from Roommania #203 (I've covered the game in a previous article). However he's been corrupted by Black Asobin and as such is preparing to fight them in Virtua Fighter as Black Neji.
And this is where the show decides to use dramatic tension to bring in some of the humour - and several new game references!
The action freezes in a dramatic action pose and then that
tune kicks in - SOR Super Mix from Streets of Rage 2. The image cuts to a still of the tower as a text scroll explains the battle ahead, reminiscent of the intro to Streets of Rage 2. However the text (as you can read here) is full of jokes of its own, and then there's the visual references in images 1 to 3 of games not
covered in Sega Hard Girls before!
Image 1 is of Virtua Cop, from the first level at WHARF AM2 - albeit these images are higher resolution renders of that environment as the text is cleaner and more legible than it is in the original game. Virtua Cop (1994) is an arcade light gun game, as such you don't usually see a player character on the screen outside of cutscenes. Here they've superimposed Saturn aiming a pistol at the villain in the game. The pistol she's using is the Sega Saturn Stunner light gun, which was black with yellow trigger and side button. This light gun was only released in Japan, when it came out overseas it was either a bright red or blue.
Image 2 is of the Sega Hard Girls racing in either Hang-On (1985) or Super Hang-On (1987). I have to say the sprites made for this look excellent and I would absolutely love
to have a version of Hang On with cool character designs like this (you usually just look at the back of a generic motorcycle racer).
Image 3 shows the girls in Alex Kidd in Miracle World (1986), and they absolutely dwarf the poor guy! I don't know what the girls would do to help in this game, but it's a cool crossover nonetheless.
The narrative certainly wouldn't make it past Western censors, with Saturn again being the butt of the joke - mentioning one of her boobs falling out during a fight. A bit unnecessary, but the extremity of it (and Dreamcast's breakdown) add to the comic payoff of Mega Drive's personal story being boring.
When the girls reach the top, they are confronted by an empty limitless room with a Tron-like grid for a floor and a starfield visible through it. This environment is actually a common advert design Sega used during their Master System era of the mid-80s - we saw one in a previous article that was used as a poster in the Sehagaga Academy atrium.
The only object in this void is a Space Harrier arcade cabinet. The girls have to play it to defeat Black Asobin, but the only one left with a coin is Saturn - meaning she has to enter the game and hope Dreamcast and Mega Drive can fly her safely. There's not much more to say about the arcade cabinet other than how amazingly well detailed it is.
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Here are four images of Saturn running through Space Harrier. I have to say the spritework here is also very well done (on Saturn). It's not long before the game starts throwing previously seen random enemies from other franchises into the game - as you can see by the B.Bros being in Image 3.
The final image of this set shows Saturn shouting at the girls for her already having lost a life, and how well the "screen" is pulled off in the Sega Hard Girls engine.
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Towards the end we get more of the CGI Saturn appearing in the game world. Many of these shots are horrid, as an effect has been applied that makes it look like there's a framerate mismatch - so you end up with a ghostly trail behind anything that animates.
However they do turn this effect off once Black Asobin has been caught (and he promptly turns back into Center-Sensei).
So we now begin Episode 13, the actual last episode (besides the bonus Hang-On special). The girls have all passed their trials and it's graduation day. The first thing the girls must do is sing the company's anthem - the famous Sega choir.
"SEGA!"
Center Sensei then takes the girls through all the worlds and adventures they have been through over the course of the series. However the filmmakers couldn't help but add in a joke here - half of the adventures Dreamcast and Mega Drive are recalling never happened in the show! When Saturn calls it out, the others tell her to just go along with it to graduate.
I can't tell if this joke was put in for anything other than humour. It's possible episodes on these franchises were planned but weren't affordable in the budget, or
that they serve as a form of teaser for fans if the series ever came back for a Season 2. Sadly it did not.
So the first false adventure is Crazy Taxi, accompanied by a really cool artwork of the Sega Hard Girls escaping the cops in a yellow cab. While this is cool, at no point in Crazy Taxi do you need to outrun the cops - you get away with driving like a lunatic all day long. It does add to the sensation of speed in the image though.
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The next franchise is a Japanese exclusive arcade game from 2004 - Love and Berry: Dress Up and Dance!
Another collectible card game, you swipe your cards and build your own customisable outfits (180 different cards existed in 2006) and get rated (and given new cards) depending on the success rate of your new outfit.
This was an insanely popular Arcade game for girls, being outfitted across department stores and children's play areas. It was so popular that a CGI movie was produced in 2007 called "Love and Berry: Dress Up and Dance - Magic of Happiness". It also saw a port to the Nintendo DS called "Love and Berry DS", with a peripheral that could read the barcodes on the playing cards.
I've included an official soundtrack cover art for the game so you can see how closely the SHG's outfits resemble those of the characters in the game. Dreamcast's outfit is a reproduction of Love's, Mega Drive takes the role of Berry. While it's more unique, Saturn's outfit (and the drawing of her face) more closely match that of Miesha - a character that joined the main cast in the DS games in 2008.
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I Would Die For You (aka Feel The Magic XY/XX or Project Rub) makes a last minute return here. The only suspect part of this is that Mega Drive's face has been "blacked up", and not in the stylistic silhouette way in fitting with the game series. A shiny dark brown appearance isn't something I recall ever coming up in the game, so it's a bit of a suspect choice. Perhaps there was a plotline to the "episode" (that doesn't exist) which would have explained this.
I've included a screenshot of Project Rub so you can see how well Dreamcast and Saturn fit the art style.
A load of hints in Episode 1 - where Saturn's description of her perfect man was essentially describing Segata Sanshiro - has something of a pay off here. Sadly it's not an appearance or even animated return of the legend himself, but at least we get a visual acknowledgement of the man.
For those not clued in, Segata Sanshiro is a hero
of video game marketing and a major reason for the success of the Sega Saturn in Japan. While the console came in dead last against the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation internationally, the Saturn sat a very
comfortable second in Japan (not so far behind Playstation). Part of this was because Sega of Japan continued to release stellar titles on the system that never got released abroad, but also partly due to the commercial powerhouse of Segata Sanshiro.
First of all his name is a parody of judo fighter Sugata Sanshiro from Akira Kurosawa's 1943 movie "Sanshiro Sugata" (Bear in mind the Japanese language often places the family name first). However Segata Sanshiro, said slightly differently as "Sega Saturn Shiro", literally translates to "Play Sega Saturn". When you combine this with the CD single release of Segata Sanshiro's theme song "Sega Satan, shiro!" He eventually got a Sega Saturn game "Segata Sanshiro Shinken Yugi" made about him.
His "narrative" across the adverts was as a lone martial artist who assaults children who aren't playing Sega Saturn - including wrecking nightclubs, making other judo fighters explode and throwing football players like missiles from the stands to headbutt a ball and prevent a goal. I've included a video below that goes through all of the man's exploits and you'll soon see why this marketing campaign rocked Japan so hard.
His final advert for Sega was around the Dreamcast launch, where he bravely sacrificed his life to save Sega from a rocket sent over by an evil villain (which looks a little like a cartoonish stand in for Sony). Though it appeared at the time of the Dreamcast, it was actually a promotional advert for his Sega Saturn game.
Center-Sensei reveals to the girls that graduation means leaving the world of Sehagaga and becoming the new Sega hardware - bringing joy to millions. This is meant to be a beautiful ending, but it does give the impression of a cult. With Center-Sensei as leader, the girls essentially end their lives to go forth and do good in the next life.
It also puts a very final end to the series, which would be an odd thing to do if they were hoping for a second season at any point. This lack of foresight does affect the placement of the bonus episode too, put we'll come to that in the next article.
The girls then each go into the void and are transported into the world of their specific gaming generations, becoming the real hardware from the previous image.
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Some artwork for the consoles once the girls finish their transformations. Sadly we don't get a closeup on the Dreamcast.
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We get a last look at some of the cast we've had along the way.
IMAGE 1: Akira (Virtua Fighter), Ulala (Space Channel 5), Neji (Roommania #203), Jeffry (Virtua Fighter)
IMAGE 2:
Puyos (Puyo Pop), Kage (Virtua Fighter), Lau Chan (Virtua Fighter), Wolf (Virtua Fighter)
IMAGE 3: Spaceman, Dancers, Morolians (Space Channel 5), Rappy (Phantasy Star Online 2), Eggman (Sonic the Hedgehog), Sakura (Sakura Wars)
And that's everything in the main series! We finally got there.
But it's not quite Game Over yet. There's the special Hang-On episode (Episode 14/The OVA) yet to come.
Thank you for tuning in thus far, we have way
more to come across many different series too!
Please check back regularly for updates, and do follow our podcast including our episode on Sega Hard Girls at
www.vgmovie.co.uk.
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