I just realized a month or so ago that it's been a whopping twenty years since I made up the character we now know as Joguo Gouen-Zu. Though he's nowhere near as long-running as the characters associated with my old Supernum stories (who go back to 1994-1995 in many cases), or even the Bok's Expedition crew (who first showed up around 1996-1997), twenty years is still a pretty long time to keep drawing and writing stuff involving the same character.
So I figured I'd write a post on here about Joguo and the changes the character has gone through over the years before eventually settling on the current version.
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| Nine years worth of Joguo drawings. The main change since 2008 seems to have been his hair. 😂 |
2001
Joguo's history starts in 2001, with a never-finished OHRRPGCE game project that I had titled Spuduf Splorchers. The game's main character was a bug named... um, Bug... who found out that he had the power to communicate with strange little spirit-thingies known as "Spuduf" (which made him a "Spuduf Splorcher" -- to "splorch" was to fuse together with a Spuduf and gain some of its powers) shortly after his forest home was burned down by the evil Emperor Zheewguu. I'm pretty sure this was the only game idea I've ever had that involved the "hero's hometown gets burned down or otherwise destroyed" trope, funnily enough.
Anyway, as mentioned above, Spuduf Splorchers was never finished. Joguo didn't actually appear in the parts of the game that I had finished, though he was planned to appear in a later part of the game and his graphics and stats were already programmed in.
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| The few surviving Spuduf Splorchers hero sprites |
The image above is all that's left of the hero sprites from Spuduf Splorchers. While nowhere near as good as the ones appearing in... well, any game I attempted to make from 2005ish onward... they were a massive step up from the garbage-quality graphics that I had rushed out for previous game attempts. The humanoids are pretty shaky, but Bug actually looks semi-decent to me even now.
Joguo is the guy who appears enlarged on the right, of course. This is the very first Joguo design, and it's... well, pretty generic-looking. At a glance, you probably wouldn't guess he's the same guy as the blue-haired ninja from Alleghany Hell School. The fact that his shirt says "SS" on it seems like a bit of an "oops" looking back, but I'm guessing it was intended to be short for "Spuduf Splorchers" -- the Nazi connotations of those initials were definitely not intentional.
In the game, Joguo was the leader of a group known as the "Goueng-Zu Splorchers" -- three other members of which are on the same row as Joguo's sprite. There were a couple other members who apparently never got sprites, a guy with black hair and darker tanned skin and a robot for some reason, but I guess I either never finished their sprites or they were never intended to appear as playable characters in the game (I can't remember which for sure at this point, since I lost the game file ages ago.) Joguo and the robot (whose name I can no longer remember) were the only ones among the Goueng-Zu Splorchers' ranks to not be based directly on anyone I knew in real life.
From what I remember of the plan I had for the game, Joguo was going to be playable temporarily in a part of the game where Emperor Zheewguu decided to attack the Goueng-Zu Splorchers directly, fighting the Emperor on his own to hold him off while the others escaped. This early version of Joguo would end up dying after his first moment in the spotlight, sacrificing himself to keep Zheewguu from getting to the others.
So... yeah, originally "Goueng-Zu" was not Joguo's last name, but rather the name of a team of splorchers he belonged to, which seemed to be named after the small island where their base of operations was located. He also was very much not a main character, only playable for a brief segment before dying. He also wasn't officially a ninja at this point, though some of his abilities sort of had a vaguely ninja-like theme -- he had access to darkness magic and some martial-arts-like physical attacks, could summon Spuduf that sort of matched a ninja stealth/tools theme such as the Shadow, Bomb, and Net Spuduf, and so on.
I'm not entirely sure how I came up with the name "Joguo" originally. I notice that it has the same sort of sound to it as some Nummorrian names, particularly those I came up with in this time period -- names like Tanduo and Teyguo, for example -- and I did tend to give a lot of characters I made up back then vaguely Khurbyish sounding names even if they were totally unconnected to Nummorro or the First Nherbi, so I figure it was similarly just made up off the top of my head.
"Goueng-Zu," on the other hand, I actually do remember a specific origin for. I remember back around the time I was making this game, I was in the basement of a particular church in Clifton Forge at least once a week for Boy Scout meetings, and on one wall of this basement was a huge map that had a lot of locations in China clearly marked (it probably did the same for other countries, but China was right near a spot in the room I often ended up standing on sitting near for some reason.) I'm pretty sure "Goueng-Zu" started out as a modified version of "Guangzhou," the name of a city that appeared prominently on that map.
2004
After Spuduf Splorchers, Joguo didn't show up again for a while. He was not planned to appear in the 2003 Fnrrf Ygm Schnish game, and didn't show up at all in the Crappy World comics I was drawing around that time either.
Looking back, it's almost kind of odd that he wasn't reused, considering that Bob (the guy with the wide eyes and brown clothes in the image above), the other Goueng-Zu Splorchers (except for the robot), and the unnamed armored girl all made appearances in Crappy World at some point, in one form or another. Of course, the Crappy World cast was pretty huge already, and didn't really focus that much on the "regular human" characters (revolving more around the Question Marks and Master Fartbean earlier on, and then shifting toward the Damuru-J/Damuru-F/Rupoo storyline), so even if he had appeared he likely wouldn't get to do a whole lot.
Three years passed, and in the summer of 2004 I started working on another game, this time using RPG Maker 2003. This game ended up being titled Uggy Barfoo, after a nonsense phrase that my younger sibling Jules said while we were goofing off. I've always been kinda terrible at coming up with titles for things, so I pretty much just threw those nonsense words on the title screen and then came up with a meaning for them much later.
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| An in-battle screenshot from Uggy Barfoo including Joguo. |
Joguo was the second playable character in Uggy Barfoo, randomly joining Enduo (now known as Eddie -- 2004 was a time when I wasn't using the same first or last names of any characters based on real people, including myself!) in order to investigate a meteorite impact to the south of the town of Nifclont where they both live. This was the first game where his last name was given as "Goueng-Zu" rather than not being mentioned one way or another.
Joguo in Uggy Barfoo was... pretty generic and vaguely defined, just like in Spuduf Splorchers. In other words, he still wasn't a ninja yet (he didn't even get access to the Ninja class using the game's Orbs which served as a Final Fantasy 5-ish class-change system!), and basically had no particular role besides "random guy in town who joins you early on." This game was the first to give him the dark blue hair that he's become known for, and also influenced his later designs -- though he's never looked exactly like the edited RPG Maker 2003 default thief sprite that he borrowed an outfit from here, he has kept pretty close to a green-and-blue (and sometimes a bit of white) color scheme in pretty much every appearance since.
Funnily enough, it does seem like his strong points stat-wise have stayed pretty consistent from this game onward -- he's tied with Enduo for the highest base Defense stat out of all the main characters, and he's the second-fastest character. So I guess Uggy Barfoo's generic Joguo did have some lasting contributions after all. Unfortunately, in every other area he's either tied for weakest or second-weakest. On top of that, he had no special techniques in his normal state, only a few super moves that could be used with specific weapon types (just like everyone else in the game had)... so unlike some characters like Robert there was pretty much no reason to ever not change his class to something other than the default using his Blue Orb.
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| Joguo as a Swordfighter, Gunner, Warrior, and Wizard (the Trainer class didn't get a unique sprite.) |
Speaking of his Orb, he had access to the classes Trainer (basically a low grade summoner, based on Pokémon Trainers), Swordmaster, Gunner, Warrior (the game's heavy-armor "fighter" type class), and Wizard (which gave him access to light, darkness, and water magic -- similar to his setup from Spuduf Splorchers but trading the wind magic he used there for water instead.)
There's not a whole lot else to say about the version of Joguo in Uggy Barfoo. He kinda just fills up a space in the party, never really being the strongest in any particular area, and usually being the first to get swapped out for one of the optional characters once you start to gain access to them. Even the one part of the game where he's supposed to be the main character ended up revolving more around someone else, the mysterious Anrijue. Or at least, it would have if I had ever finished it.
2006
After I had pretty much given up on finishing Uggy Barfoo after getting stuck in a rut partway through the game's second half (what was it with early-2000s-era me insisting on games having a "second half" introducing new enemies out of nowhere, anyway?), I ended up starting on another OHRRPGCE project for the first time in a while. This was the second attempt at a game titled Fnrrf Ygm Schnish, following the 2003 one that never really went anywhere.
The 2006 Fnrrf Ygm Schnish did at least get to a point where the early parts of the game were... somewhat playable, albeit horribly incomplete since it was only the intro sequence that took place at Alleghany High School and even that wasn't finished -- mostly due to the school maps being very incomplete, with hardly any rooms accessible. Since only the intro was even partially finished, this game ended up being just like Spuduf Splorchers for poor ol' Joguo -- his sprites and stats were programmed into the game, but he never actually appeared.
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| Joguo's battle sprites from the 2006 Fnrrf Ygm Schnish game. |
Joguo's design in this game seems to be a blend of the previous two -- his hair is blue like the Uggy Barfoo version but with the super short style he had in Spuduf Splorchers, and his clothes have the white/green/blue color scheme of the Uggy Barfoo version but with the original's long blue pants.
In terms of his abilities, this Joguo is definitely closer to the Uggy Barfoo version. He does finally have a few special moves, but they're nothing too flashy -- he can do various fairly ordinary things like dodge enemy attacks, steal items, trip enemies to stun them briefly, or counterattack. Stat-wise, he still specializes in Defense and Speed, having the third-highest out of the game's oversized cast in both categories. His other stats are a bit better this time around, though -- his Attack is fourth-highest out of the main cast, his HP is only third-lowest rather than being near the bottom, and even his lower stats aren't that far behind the other characters.
This game establishes knives as his weapon of choice, with some of his arsenal including familiar items like the Steak Knife, Chef's Knife, and Poison Knife. His strongest weapons are the "Ninja Knife" (its sprite resembles a kunai) and the hilariously named Murderiffic Knife (which deals extra damage against humanoid enemies, in addition to just plain being stronger than his other weapons.) None of his other equipment is really worth a mention, since pretty much every character had the same armor in this game rather than having their own specialized gear.
I honestly can't remember what Joguo's role would've been in this game or when he would've been introduced, so I'm guessing it would've been a similar situation to in Uggy Barfoo -- generic guy who happens to be around when something happens, so he joins the party "just because."
Sheesh. Joguo was kind of boring in these old games! He's come a long way since then.
2008-2012
2008 was the year that I originally started working on Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School, though due to several discouragements and distractions (two of the major distractions being spending a bunch of time working on other games like Okédoké and Puckamon) it wouldn't be until much later that I actually released a demo of that game to the public.
This was the game where Joguo finally started to get some actual character development, backstory, and connections to the world that the game takes place in -- rather than just being some random bystander who basically just gets roped into everything by virtue of being in the right place at the right time and just kind of inexplicably manages to keep up (sort of) with the other characters despite not having any superhuman abilities as far as anyone ever mentioned. In Alleghany Hell School, Joguo being able to put up a fight actually makes sense -- he even mentions early on that he's had ninja training, and demonstrates the ability to jump down pits roughly 20-30 feet deep and land flat on his feet without being the slightest bit inconvenienced by the fall. He's not just some random guy who picks up a knife and starts blindly stabbing at whatever giant bugs or monsters get too close, he's the heir to the leadership of the ancient Goueng-Zu Ninja Clan, trained in ninjutsu since he was a little kid... even if he has slacked off in his training a little bit during the high school years (and thus doesn't start out way ahead of some of the other characters.)
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| Joguo's FYS:AHS sprites -- 2008 original, 2010 upgrade, and final. |
It was in this game that his design pretty much settled into its current form -- slightly scruffy blue hair, light blue-green shirt, dark blue pants, brown shoes (though they briefly turned into white tennis-shoes when I redid the sprites in 2010... oops!), and a green scarf that flutters in the wind behind him even when there... isn't any wind behind him. Secret ninja technique, probably.
His abilities in this game were similar to the version from the 2006 Fnrrf Ygm Schnish, except now he was fully ninja-themed. Rather than just having steal, dodge, and trip attacks he also performed flying jump-kicks, threw shuriken, and could use sealing ninjutsu to prevent certain enemies from using their special attacks. His weapons include both knives and swords, and his lineup of protective equipment includes a variety of scarves on top of the standard jackets, bulletproof vests, and ninja suits you would expect. The "Shiznit" stat (which basically functions like a Luck stat) introduced in this game lets him keep up with the other characters pretty well, giving him a randomized chance to get extra hits with most of his attacks -- so instead of just throwing one shuriken at an enemy, he might fling out two or even three in rapid succession. After landing a jump-kick, he might bounce off and land a second one right away. And so on. Despite having relatively weak attacks (at least compared to some of the stuff characters like Bridget and Damuru-J become capable of later), the high chance of getting multiple hits makes him feel pretty effective throughout the game, especially if he can keep finding stronger weapons.
In terms of his game stats, he's basically just an upgraded version of what he's had in the previous two games. He has the best Defense out of any playable character, this time by a pretty decent margin considering that he can also equip most of the best armor in the game. He's still one of the faster characters, only falling short of Bridget and an optional character who hasn't appeared yet in the current demo version. His Shiznit is also second-highest, once again behind Bridget -- but Joguo probably benefits more from it, since nearly all of his attacks can get additional hits as his Shiznit gets to a high enough level. He only ranks last place in one stat this time around -- his Wisdom suffered a bit when he slacked off in his ninja training to pursue sports and girls during the earlier high school years, of course. 😅
2013 - 2021
Joguo's most recent appearance as of 2021 is still the (as of yet unfinished) Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School... which I will hopefully be working on more at some point this year, now that my depression/anxiety issues have calmed down a bit and I might eventually be able to dredge up the motivation to work on some of my game projects again. But even though he hasn't had a "new" game appearance, I've continued to develop his backstory and come up with more and more information revolving around his family and their history.
As of 2017, Joguo became the only character to have a family tree that's fleshed out enough that it covers three whole generations, then skipping back a few generations to focus on Joguo's great-great-great-great-great-grandparents.
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| Joguo's family tree going back to his great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, drawn in 2017. |
During these years, I came up with the whole backstory of the Goueng-Zu clan, explaining why the heck there's a family of freaking ninjas living in middle-of-nowhere Virginia all the way over in the United States, far outside of what you'd usually think of as the ninja's natural habitat. It all started with a guy named Gaitou Goeung-Zu...
...Who happens to be Joguo's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. |
| Red scarf, not green. Is that relevant? ...Maybe someday. |
In the year 1798, Gaitou married a young girl whose name has now been lost to history, perhaps only recorded in the personal archives of the Goueng-Zu family and not spoken of outside their walls. One year later, the two of them had a child -- who would turn out to be their only son. A year after that, Gaitou's wife stumbles upon an unusual stone while exploring some remote region of Japan... an unusual stone which turns out to be a powerful artifact known as the Uggy Barfoo. She picks it up, planning to take it home to Gaitou as a present, as people tend to do when they find neat rocks out in the woods.
Though depleted of most of its power, the lingering traces within the Barfoo are still more than enough to lead to disaster. Something within the stone clashed with an unknown power within the girl who found it, and this clash within her caused a horrible transformation. She was rapidly driven to insanity, unleashing strange powers that had previously laid dormant within her and rampaging across the country.
The unfortunate young wife, now only known as "the demon Arkusazzo" (presumably a name bestowed upon her by surviving villagers who managed to escape her rampage, or perhaps one she chose for herself after the clash with the Barfoo's power caused her to snap), was now barely recognizable as her former self. She was almost entirely silent, her eyes went blank and glowed red, her nails grew to claw-like length, her hair moved on its own and sometimes was known to suddenly extend to unnatural lengths and strangle those unfortunate enough to get too close. Three years pass before members of the Goueng-Zu Clan are finally able to track her down, and after a prolonged battle, it is Gaitou Goueng-Zu himself who stops her rampage -- by sealing her away within a tree using the Goueng-Zu Clan's most powerful sealing ninjutsu.
Despite being the ones responsible for stopping Arkusazzo's rampage, the Goueng-Zu Clan are the ones who are blamed for all the destruction. It was, after all, one of their members (albeit one who joined the clan by marriage rather than by birth) who was responsible. They are shunned, and several years later they end up leaving Japan, uprooting the Goueng-Zu Clan (along with literally uprooting the tree where Arkusazzo was sealed so they could take it with them) and eventually settling down far across the sea in a mountainous area which would eventually become the town of Clifton Forge, Virginia. From this point onward, the Goueng-Zu Clan began a new life, secretly continuing their ninja training (because Arkusazzo would eventually break free of the seal placed upon her, there must always be a Goueng-Zu ninja capable of returning her to her prison within the tree) and mostly keeping to themselves.
Always watching the tree for any signs of the demon's escape, the Goueng-Zu Clan were responsible for putting a stop to her escape in 1862 -- making sure the Civil War was the most significant historical event of the 1860s rather than being a mere footnote in the "those years when an ancient Japanese demon laid waste to the country" chapters of the history books. Each time, it seemed that she escaped a bit more quickly and caused a bit more damage -- in 1908, she nearly killed several members of the Goueng-Zu Clan but was stopped and sealed away just in time for all those involved to be saved. In 1966, she killed Moriko Hosuda in a surprise attack and wore her husband Akinosuke to exhaustion in a prolonged battle afterward -- he would pass away as a result of his injuries not long after she was sealed. The elderly Bairei Goueng-Zu was forced to step in to perform the sealing ninjutsu, as his son Ran was not yet ready, but the strain of the technique caused his life to give out in the process. This led to the surviving children of the Hosuda branch of the family distancing themselves from the ways of the ninja, moving away from Clifton Forge and pursuing a "normal" life somewhere in the midwest instead. Akinosuke's signature green scarf and collection of ninja tools were left with the clan in Clifton Forge, where they would eventually be passed down to Joguo.
Arkusazzo's most recent escape from her tree prison was in 1993. Before she was sealed away again, she killed Joguo's older sister Kiyoko, who had attempted to confront and seal the demon on her own but was not yet fully prepared for such a task.
2021 and Onward
Around 2023, I decided to drop the second "G" from Joguo's surname -- you may have noticed that I've edited the opening paragraph to use the spelling "Gouen-Zu," despite using the old spelling throughout the rest of the post. This was done to make the name sound closer to something that could be an actual Japanese name (since Joguo's ancestors are supposed to be a ninja clan who came from Japan); the "-ng" sound is something you see in several other Asian languages, but not in Japanese.
Speaking of making the name feel more like an actual Japanese name... I also poked around with figuring out how to write Joguo's name in Japanese, both in hiragana and kanji.
じょぐお (JIo-GU-O)
ごーえんず (GOu-E-N-ZU)
I wrote down multiple ways of writing both Joguo and Gouen-Zu in kanji, but I don't think I ever decided for sure how I was going to write Joguo's first name -- only the "Gouen-Zu" part.
砂椽鶴
The kanji used to make "gou-en-zu" here mean "sand," "porch," and "crane/stork." Considering how surnames very often relate to something in the distant past of the family (like how a lot of English surnames are stuff like "Baker," "Smith," and "Cooper" which were the jobs done by one of their ancestors centuries ago when surnames first started developing in that language), the ancestral home of the Gouen-Zu clan would probably be someplace with sandy ground and near a river where large water birds like cranes or storks might be sighted, and the home of the first to have the name "Gouen-Zu" probably had a porch that stood out from the houses around it. Or maybe there was a crane that would regularly land on or near their porch? Something like that.
I'm not sure when, or if, I'll have a chance to actually include all of the ninja clan backstory stuff in one of my games. It's at least vaguely referred to here and there in Alleghany Hell School, but since the game takes place almost entirely inside the school and the plot doesn't revolve around the Gouen-Zu Clan's history at all, there's not a lot of room to fit this stuff in.
Maybe someday Joguo will get a game, or story, or something that focuses on him for once. I don't know when or how at this point, but it's definitely possible, especially since I've already put so much thought into his family's history and everything that comes with that. It's kinda crazy that Joguo now has more extra stuff revolving around him than most of the FYS:AHS cast, considering the bland, generic secondary character that he used to be back in the early 2000s! At this point he's probably the one character who is most likely to get his own spinoff/sequel game in the future, considering that I already had the idea that after the end of the FYS:AHS story he'd start devoting more of his time to ninja training and end up traveling to the homeland of his ancestors back in Japan. Lately I've had the thought that maybe he'd travel to various harsh environments as part of his training, with one of them being the Australian outback (hot, dry, remote wilderness, everything is poisonous) in a mirror of how Joguo's solo portion of Uggy Barfoo had him land on the Australia-equivalent "Kangaroo Island."
