#balzarr

Design

As the first quadrupedal character, PRG had some difficulty with designing Balzarr. They took heavy inspiration from the manticore, and tried to strike a balance between a more animalistic design and a more mythical beast one. Here’s some concept art. Design 6 feels very monster hunter.

There’s also the elephant in the room and the biggest source of inspiration, Goldar from power rangers.

This dlc is basically a fake power rangers character pack, even being called the Mighty dlc like the mighty morphing power rangers. But some of you might be wondering “Well why not get the rights to power rangers? PRG already got rights to Ultraman and Godzilla characters.” and the thing is that they probably originally wanted to do that. But Power Rangers as an I.P. is split between multiple different companies, meaning getting the rights to it would be too expensive for the small indi studio. And even if they did then it wouldn’t be available to half the world due to licensing agreements, like how the Ultraman character pack isn’t available in Japan or mainland China.

Even still, I’m glad we finally rounded out kaiju related tokusatsu references in the game. We can finally add Power Rangers alongside Godzilla, Ultraman, and mech anime references. The only real big pillar of tokusatsu left to reference is Kamen Rider, but I don’t think that’s likely since it isn’t part of the kaiju genre (watch me be wrong in like a year).

Lore

“When thou wish upon a shooting star, beware, lest it be the Demon Star. For when its fiery trail crosses thy sight, doom shall follow with darkest might.” so goes the ancient tale that refers to Balzarr, indicating that he might be an alien and has been to earth before. He’s most recently touched down in 2021 and has since rampaged across the globe. The Global Titan Defense Initiative has had trouble dealing with the gold plated lion as he’s so fast that he outpaces their most advanced targeting systems. Since his first modern day sighting Balzarr has been ransacking every Giga Crystal storage facility across the globe.