Annotated 39-6
At this point, Flo was often redoing dialogue on the fly while lettering. The original script for the first two panels, shown below, does not display Flo’s ease with gaming jargon (which she knew better than me) as the final version does. The Iwatani dialogue from the draft also reflects older, discarded plot ideas. But I do like the way it shows Daniel as a little more engaged with E-Merl than his frustrated self is willing to admit.
1. E-Merl’s player Daniel sits on an easy chair, laptop in his lap, typing away and muttering E-Merl’s dialogue to himself.
DANIEL
“More frenz? Greaaaat! I love frenz!”
DANIEL
“So whussis favor you want me to do?”
2. Over Daniel’s shoulder and viewed from above, we see Iwatani’s in-color face on his laptop.
IWATANI
If you could coax your associates back here in an hour or so, I’ll explain. But essentially, I’d like you to go on a brief adventure of my choosing.
DANIEL
Ha, ha, sure. Why not, right?
OFF-PANEL
We’re back, Daniel!
So … there’s a dialogue tree but he’s still typing his answers? How does that work? Except for those funny text-based adventures back in the day, which were basically like a command prompt with fairly strict syntax rules, I believe anything else just has you pick an option either by pointing/clicking at it or hitting a number key or so.
I’d understand if Arkerra could interpret natural language properly because it seems to be fairly … capable in other fields, too, but then why would there be a dialogue tree with options on it?
Still gotta select an option, and lacking a mouse, keyboard’s the only good way to do that.
Honestly, I’m not sure how he’s even playing the game without a mouse or controller. Trackpads are garbage.