Air Balloon Quest Accident

Sorry guys, it's been another slow month of a very slow and struggled working process, all the plans I had for September got screwed up again for the sake of just one big commission sequence project. I guess it would be less anxiety inducing if I were posting each part one by one the way I usually do with all my sequences instead of giving no updates for almost entire month but the process went different than usual so I thought it would be better to post it all together and sadly it took me an eternity to finish.

Despite it having less alts than I usually do and despite I expected the digital shading to speed up the process since I don't have to painstakingly shade big simple spherical shapes with thousand pencil strokes anymore, it still turned out to be a very time consuming project, mainly due to all the clothes and background detail. I love things authentic and detailed and I love how outfits highlight character's unique individuality but man, this sequence felt like it will just never end.

Now about the subject because I doubt that anybody here will recognize this character or the game he is from.
I got my Game Boy Advance when I was 12 and one of the best games I ever played on it which also became one of my most favorite games in general was Lunar Legend, for me it was a game like no other and I think it's one of the main reasons I became such a big jrpg fan. However, I wasn't aware that this game was just a butchered port of a much much greater game called Lunar: Silver Star Story that came out in 1996 on PS1 as a remaster of a 1992 Sega CD game Lunar: The Silver Star. Only now, 15 years later, I decided to try out the real thing and I was flabbergasted to say the least. Being used mainly to 8-16bit retro gaming and a bit of GBA and Nintendo DS, the concept of a regular JRPG game with SNES level of spritework having proper voiced dialogues and whole 45 minutes worth of full motion cutscenes drawn with a quality of a big budget anime movie was completely new for me and, even though the story of Lunar Legend is no different and I already knew all the plot twists of the PS1 game in advance, playing it was a completely new unforgettable experience. It's wild this game series is so obscure compared to Final Fantasy because I think Lunar series is better than Final Fantasy in many aspects.

I beat this game in August along with Lunar 2: Eternal Blue and it reminded me that I actually had a bit of a crush on one of the game's characters as a kid and now when I'm slowly growing attached to more and more human characters including my childhood heroes I realized that my love for this guy from Lunar didn't go away and I'm actually willing to contribute to it in some horny art.

The character's name is Kyle (Killy is his name in a Japanese version), he is your typical barbarian/thief goofball of a classic fantasy character, strong, masculine, crass, silly, careless and heavily addicted to alcohol and women. A perfect man in other words!

However, despite it all sounds pretty cliche for a fantasy genre, there's certain more "original" things about Kyle's personality you usually don't see in innocent rpg games like this one. Kyle is constantly referenced as having a latent weakness for crossdressing, who could imagine, of all possible characters in a game. It all starts with him dressing as a woman to trick one of the protagonists into capturing him (which is also shown in one of the animated cutscenes) and then this embarrassing moment of his life gets mentioned multiple times, one of the villains literally calls him a "crossdressing foe", then you can find a dress in one location and Kyle asks if he can squeeze into it, then awkwardly pretends it to be just a joke and so on. Not that I'm into crossdressing, obviously, but just the fact of the character being a latent pervert which real nature heavily contradicts his looks means a lot to me. More than that, the game also makes a hint that Kyle is also into eating dirty socks which makes his portrait even better for me.
Just in general, this seemingly innocent and pretty standard fantasy game has a ton of hidden lewd adult jokes. Just try to be patient with talking to every NPC in a game and you might make some really surprising discoveries hidden in dialogues.

I mean, there's a mention of a "little bulge", seriously? And this game is rated Teen.

It's not only dialogues, one of the enemies is called NIPPLE YANKER and to make things even more random and confusing it has nothing to do with enemy's appearance. I played many rpg games and I never saw anything that tightly packed with lewd innuendos. I'd share more but Patreon is not very good with image formatting so in order to not clutter the post too much I just added the folder with screenshots in a first archive so you can see all the Kyle related jokes I managed to find.

And the game goes beyond just text, it also has a plenty of visual fan service as well. First, there's bromides, mildly suggestive hidden collectible full-screen pictures of the game's female characters that you can find by talking to certain NPCs at certain time. But it's all females so who cares. The real interesting thing is that Lunar: Silver Star Story has two hot spring shrines where you can see animated cutscenes if you have a bar of soap (which is surprisingly a very rare item that exists only for this sole purpose), one hot spring is male-only and the other one is female-only. Respectively, one shows all male team members bathing naked and the other one shows all female members.

And, well, they didn't hold back with it, showing Kyle's bare ass and stuff. Now this is really something new for a fantasy rpg genre.
(Also good to know for the sake of being canon-accurate that Kyle has scars on his back)

Funnily enough, even original Sega CD game had these hot spring scenes but obviously they were a bit less explicit and since it's Sega CD they chose to make it as pixel art. Still fun to see Kyle being all nude with Nall (the white dragon cat) being used as a convenient censor bar.

All this extra spiciness on top of the game itself being almost as good and epic as Final Fantasy VI, if not better, really fueled my desire to do something with my childhood crush. I decided to discuss it with my friend I did the recent Tarzan commission sequence for and he felt very motivated to make something good with Kyle, fully sharing my attraction to him.

Luckily, this game had one particular scene with a perfect potential for living out our inflation fantasies. It's partially mentioned in dialogues I wrote for the sequence but I still need to clarify it.

The only way to reach Red Dragon's cave was by air and so the main characters had to build a hot air balloon, the only person who could do it in this primitive medieval era is Shira, an inventor living in Iluk which is pretty much a village fully inhabited by inventors, each busy with their own crazy stuff, including growing ginormous fruits and vegetables in a big jungle-like garden. Shira makes a balloon but to inflate it and make it fly he needed a Fluffy Bug, these creatures live among other vile monsters in a vegetable garden and look like pink round pieces of cotton with eyes, they're very rare and look identical to much less rare Puffy Bugs except these are blue. So, you go on a small quest of catching this fluffy bug and notably Kyle is the one who actually catches it in the end. It's not really explained how does this bug actually inflate an air balloon but it does it almost instantly.

I mean, just look at it, I simply couldn't help but think "What if it was someone's body?" and obviously by someone I mean Kyle. Since Kyle is a pretty silly guy and these fluffy bugs look like cotton candy it was very easy to come up with a simple idea of him eating these so valuable yet so hard to catch things and then suffering the horrible consequences while his friends have no other option but just use his body instead of a hot air balloon. Also later in a game they will require a bigger flying vehicle and build an actual airship. Well, we thought in this situation they just can keep using Kyle instead, he is their companion after all and there's no way to change him back anyway haha.

Btw, another funny coincidence is how Jessica says in the end they could have used the contents of Kyle's head to inflate Myght's balloon (the airship they build after crashing Shira's balloon). I know it's just a form of speech referring to Kyle being silly and having an empty head but c'mon, it's a character and inflation being put in one sentence, it's enough to make the horny cogs of my imagination spinning and make me say "You see, they gave me an excuse to do this."
So, I approached the idea with all seriousness and decided to make it a proper sequence which progresses greatly from nothing to extreme.

As you can see, it's kinda a 3.5 part sequence since part 3 with his clothes bursting is very similar to part 2, almost like a very elaborate alternative version with every detail being a bit different except the background, obviously, which thankfully I didn't have to draw twice because it took me SO MUCH time to finish.
Part 1 is just a tame beginning with very little kinkiness and yet it's still a very elaborate piece which took me a while to finish with all the clothes detail and such. At least I didn't have to draw a background for this one and could just reuse the background from the part 2.

Another problem of this background is that I usually allow myself to take some shortcuts and not draw the parts of the background which are covered by the characters anyway but I was hoping to make a popping alt which meant that the background should be fully visible through the skin scraps and also use this particular middle fragment as a part 1 background, so there was no other way but to draw the background fully.

Drawing everything fully in digital is still a new experience for me, even after making few artworks in that technique I admit it still felt a bit awkward and I wasn't sure that it will turn out right but it felt pretty good and I think it would look worse and took even more time if drawn in pencil.
Speaking of digital shading feeling better, now I think I feel less afraid of working with precise tiny details that would be impossible to do so carefully with a pencil. It means that now when I'm not constricted by inconveniences of a paper sheet it's much easier to draw tiny heads and limbs and make characters on inflation/fat art look MUCH larger. You can pretty much see it in the last part of this sequence which is probably the biggest and most epic looking blimp body I ever drew so far but obviously now it's gonna be new normal for me.
As a result, it turned into a pretty astounding sequence, probably one of the most imposing I ever did. However, it doesn't have really that many alts since first part is tame and the next two are very similar so I can't say that this chunk of content is worthy to say "I spent my entire month on this" and I feel ashamed to end the month like this. With all seriousness, it could easily take me two times less days to finish since digital shading made the process easier in many ways, if only I could stay focused and work more efficiently but honestly it's still a big problem for me. The progress on this work was moving very slowly with everything distracting me. Every day I was thinking "Alright, I have very little left to do, today it's gonna be finally over" but ending up working just for a couple hours so of course it wasn't over and it happened again and again and again. So, I'm sorry if in the end this sequence doesn't feel worth the wait, I'm disappointed myself that I spent my entire month on this and didn't fulfill any other ideas I was craving to do but at least it's a good sequence I made, I enjoyed it a lot and I hope you enjoy it too.

Speaking of alts, there's a lot of good stuff, mainly a lot of fart and popping themed you can find in attached archives, I experimented with translucent body idea again when editing the last part and I think it turned out really well, also really liked the edit where Kyle's head gets sunken into his body just like his hands too, there's something very hot about how humiliating it looks to see the character so completely useless and immobilized due to him succumbing to his own desires, not only unable to use his hands or legs but even his head, unable to see, hear, talk and barely even resembling a human being at all, just a giant skin ball of air (or whatever you prefer to imagine inside)

That's pretty much all I wanted to share. I understand that it's not a furry character and probably nobody knows this game at all but I think every good character equally deserves good fan art no matter how obscure and unpopular they are and nobody should be ashamed of drawing a character that nobody cares about. Hopefully my artwork can help to make Kyle at least a bit more loved and known as well as the game itself the same way my commissioner got hyped up after me just telling about the character despite he never heard about Lunar game series before.
I'm still planning to return to him again one day, being a hunk he has a good potential for hyper muscle and hyper cock ideas and his alcohol addiction makes a way for good beer bloating art but it all will be done only someday in future, for now I have to focus on other ideas with other characters, especially furry.