Welcome to the seventh post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
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Okay, confession time. The anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena has been a load-bearing part of my brain since I first saw it as a teenager. And even though it never actually came up in the show itself, there is a part of the opening sequence where the characters ride pegasi around an upside-down floating castle, and that’s most of where this class came from.
No I’m not kidding, I’m that obsessed.
I suppose it’s not just Utena. In Fire Emblem games, I love Pegasus Knights, too. A knight on a flying steed is just too wonderful an image, isn’t it? The sweep of the wind, the freedom of the open sky, the unclouded sun on a figure of nobility and gentleness? How dreamy.
So, early in the process, I wanted to make that beautiful image part of my game. Instead of a pegasus, however, I wanted the creature to be wilder, so I put wings on an elk. (I’m Canadian, as I keep repeating, so I gotta do Canadian stuff.) An elk felt closer to the wilderness, and especially the boreal forest, another place I associate with the wind and the clean air. I grew up in a boreal forest biome, so it’s one of my favorites.
Also, elk are some of the few ungulates who have antlers regardless of sex! So, your Cloud Elk is crowned with impressive antlers no matter what else you decide about them, which I thought was a fun bit of versatility for people who know these things about wildlife. Yet another way to make the characters feel closer to nature.
Making a bond with a wild animal felt like Snow White to me, so I decided to focus on that feeling. Windswept Cavaliers are not universally princess-like or anything, but I wanted the player to feel like a character who could befriend creatures and people with kindness. That’s why Windswept Tomyris is the love goddess of the old world, so she can pass on the gift of love to those who visit her.
Of course, the real Tomyris of our world was a warrior hero, a Scythian queen famous for leading some of the world’s best mounted archers into battle. I named the Deilith in her honor to pay homage to a then-unsung figure. (This was long before she got a movie made about her!) If you want to save the world, or just the ones you love, from the sky, then maybe the path of the mounted archer is for you!