In its very early years, the video game industry was heavily inspired by other art forms, including movies, TV shows, books and comics. Heck, for a short time, video game cover art borrowed massively from popular films to the point where artists basically traced stills from famous movies and used them as the basis of their covers.
With this in mind, it's interesting to note that the protagonist of a relatively obscure Japanese manga and anime series, Dragon's Heaven, sports a mecha suit that looks a lot like Samus Aran's Varia Suit in Metroid.
Well, it's not an exact match – it's mainly the massive, spherical shoulder pads which look the same – but the similarity has been picked up recently by video game historian Kate Willaert:
While Willaert specifically references the Original Video Animation (OVA) from 1988, Makoto Kobayashi's original manga was actually released in 1986 – the same year that Metroid launched on the Famicom in Japan.
Set in the year 3195, Dragon's Heaven is heavily inspired by the works of Jean 'Moebius' Giraud and Hayao Miyazaki, and focuses on the aftermath of a war between robots and humans. Shaian, a sentient combat armour, has lost its human companion in battle but is reactivated when a new human ally appears.
You can watch the OVA below, complete with English subtitles.
Do you think this was an inspiration to the Metroid team at Nintendo? Or is it just a mere coincidence? Let us know with a comment below.
[source twitter.com]
Comments 7
It sounds kind of cool, I might watch it sometime.
Seems so, it looks vary similar!
The visuals in Dragon's Heaven are superb, it really looks amazing with its gritty look. I re-watched it recently but it never occurred to me it could have been the inspiration for Samus' Varia suit. The live action intro using models is really cool too.
What a crazy coincidence. I just watched a video about this show two days ago. Was Youtube's algorithm pushing this? Obviously, this one stands out for its art style which is traditional 80s anime(the best kind) and the Moebius style with more lines and marks than was usual. The armor design here kind of reminds me of something out of Aura Battler Dunbine. Perhaps that style was a bit trendy at the time. I can believe there was some anime influence on Samus' suit. Even if this was too late to influence the first game, it's possible this might have contributed to later designs too, when the shoulders got bigger.
It's a possibility at the very least. If nothing else it could have, as mentioned above, inspired the suit design in later games.
Haven't watched it yet, but I will definitely.
The armour reminds of the Light Suit in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. Only thing is that, ironically, the Light Suit doesn't have shoulder pads.
Of course that Varia Suit was very like a bad translation of Barrier Suit and it just stuck.
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