Concept Art and Beta Elements

Concept art and beta elements of media are big interests of mine, so to my delight these characters have quite a bit!

Unfortunately, concept art of characters from Sunny Park and Lapistoria has never been made available. If one day they do become available, expect a MASSIVE rework of this page. For most of these characters, this page will be referring to things said in character comments and miscellaneous sources. However, there is one character on this site who does have concept art available.

Pop'n Music 16 Party and 17 THE MOVIE Art Book:

That's right, it's Elenoa time. All pictures are taken from my copy of this book. Unfortunately, the photo quality is not great since I have a phone from 2014. Elenoa's character comments don't discuss past designs, but this won't be the end for her. She has six pieces of concept art in this book, so let's dive in!

Starting off, we have a design with black hair and a vest. Since all of the concept designs have two guns, it was probably something established right at the start.

This concept has a cool short hairdo and pants. The outfit kind of reminds me of Sarah Connor's in Terminator 2.

She's next to a design that would become Bit. Interestingly, they would show up on a card together years later during Sunny Park's run.

Here is a concept where she has long hair. Out of the concept art, this one has my favorite outfit. This is the only piece of concept art that wasn't posted on the Pop'n Wiki. So when the artbook arrived, it was a fun surprise.

Out of all the concept art, this is closest to her final design. It's almost identitcal to the 2P color palette, aside from a blue dress and white belt instead of the purple used in the final.

There's a sketch of ALT with her as well. Hopefully, she's not evil in the future.

I've saved these two for last because they're the most interesting to me. Technically speaking, it's one design with two color ways. She has her bob from her final design and a bodysuit with cut outs. One is primarily blue and white.

However, the second is black and white with gray hair. The addition of what almost looks like a labcoat combined with the color palette reminds me of Weiss. Chihi designed every human character on this site (although Weiss's animations were done by Mayo), so pieces of this concept could have survived through him and Black.

Character and Song Comments:

This section will go chronologically, so let's start with Black's Sunny Park character comments. Three concepts for Black were mentioned: A doctor from the future who saves prisoners, a sniper doctor who shoots a vaccine gun, and a boy who will break down if he doesn't listen to loud music and was raised in a sterile room. The final one is the closest to Black, even if the music part doesn't seem to have been carried over.

The doctor who shoots a vaccine gun concept would see the light of day in the next game. Weiss's character comments confirm he is based off of that idea, albeit reworked for Lapistoria. I wonder how closely he resembles the concepts from Sunny Park.

Speaking of Black, different outfit colors were considered for Lapistoria. However, it's hard to change a color palette when it's in the character's name.

A significant portion of Jadeite's character comments discuss ideas that didn't go through. The three concepts listed for him are a cheerful playboy, half dragon, and the one they landed on: a serious principal. He was also planned to have an artistic feel to him, but that was also scrapped.

In his case, the song comments may also qualify. PON talks about an image he had in mind in regards to the last piano segment. In it, Jadeite's lapis is destroyed after the Tsugidoka defeats him. It's ambigious if this happened or not, since his lapis is never referred to again. Even when a black lapis was needed to stop Jade, it wasn't his that was used.

Jade's character comments do not discuss cut concepts. It does say his head crystals were inspired by iO, though! Likewise, Lapis's also doesn't refer to any old ideas.

Micellaneous:

Saving the most mysterious for last. On Remywiki, the early banners found in the JAEPO location test build have been uploaded. Most of them resemble the final versions, with the biggest difference being the prototype Lapistoria art style. However, one of these uploaded stands out among the rest. It was for a song that didn't show up in the loctest.

It was an early version of Senjou no Update's banner, but with Weiss as the character instead. Unlike the rest of the banners, his early art is in a different pose entirely. It's unclear if Weiss was the original character for this song or if he was a placeholder for Elenoa. This does show his design was ready before the game's art style was finalized. Alongside Toa and Rars, he was likely one of the earliest new characters.