Display MoreKagemusha is a beautiful film! It's the sort of movie you don't actively seek out but are glad to have added to your canon after you've seen it. It's long and covers history that you likely aren't intimately familiar with… but it's so lush and beautifully put together that each new shot is worth pouring over. The Wing Commander movie club says check it out!
One thing's for sure: we learned what a "kagemusha" is! The term literally translates to 'shadow warrior' and here it is someone who is hired to impersonate a military commander (the lead character, in this film). It seems appropriate for End Run's Kagimasha, which ultimately dies taking a hit for the Tarawa and the marines.
This all prompts us to wonder: what IS a corvette, anyway? A corvette is the smallest type of warship in the traditional naval order of battle. They typically serve as pickets, patrol ships and fast attacking missile boats. They're often the first ships to engage in battle and the ones called on to use their speed and maneuverability to counter larger and more powerful warships. And yes, the term predates the car. In fact, Chevrolet named the Corvette after the type of ship in 1953.
And Wing Commander traditionally treats corvettes the same way… although they were famously one of the first things cut for space in the earlier games! Wing Commander I was made with the intent of including two corvettes: the Confederation Venture and the Kilrathi Spikeri. Both were cut for disk space from the base game, though the Venture was ultimately restored. The Venture, which was left in Claw Marks, appeared in Secret Missions 1 although it appears in only a single mission. You escort the TCS Marciano to join the Tiger's Claw at the start of the campaign and then it's never seen again.
Super Wing Commander updated the design and gave the Venture a starring role: in the game's second set of cutscenes which show a Confederation attack on the Brimstone system. In the winning version, a Venture glasses a Kilrathi missile base…
… but if you've allowed the Kilrathi to be resupplied then they instead destroy the Confederation fleet with the missiles! A favorite example of Super Wing Commander expanding the text.
Ventures also appear as part of Task Force Delta, the Tiger's Claw's battlegroup for Super Wing Commander's equivalent of The Secret Missions. Perhaps that's the Marciano!
And the SNES port of The Secret Missions makes the choice to offer players something new by replacing the Exeter artwork with the Venture… making the TCS Gwenhyvar a corvette instead of a destroyer! A corvette that carries fighters? But even if the decision doesn't make much sense in terms of continuity it does make for a unique mission where you have to FIGHT a human corvette!
The artist covering the game for Nintendo Power magazine was apparently particularly taken with the ship that they made… a lot… of them despite the fact that it only appeared in the game twice!
The Venture makes a return appearance in the novella Milk Run which proceeds End Run. There, a long duration patrol Venture named the Johnny Greene is pulled off the line for a secret mission behind enemy lines (and two additional Venture are found to have been lost in the process). It's very cool seeing life on a Confederation corvette described in so much detail!
Harcourt grunted. They had all had more than enough experience with the lightly armed, privately owned raiders who kept appearing out of uncharted jump points to raid the Confederation colonies along the edge of the war zone. At least, they thought their jump points were uncharted—but after two years on picket duty, the crew of the Venture-class Corvette Johnny Greene knew where all three of them were, so well that everyone on the crew could recite the coordinates in their sleep—and frequently did.The Kilrathi Spikeri was replaced in Secret Missions 2 by the newly designed Hhriss fighter and it remains unseen today, though art exists for a potential Super Wing Commander version. A file labeled SPIKERI.3DS ultimately became the game's Fralthi, while FRALTHI.3DS has been seen in pre-release footage of the game.
Wing Commander II again ran into the dreaded disk space issue and decided to cut its intended Confederation corvette, the Crossbow. Fans of Special Operations 1 will know the design returned along with the name… but this time as a bomber! The Special Operations team retextured the original ship, giving it a new white and blue livery and removing windows and adding a cockpit in the process.
You can still see the original 'capital ship' version and livery in Wing Commander Academy on the turnstile on the ship selection screen!
The Kilrathi corvette, the Kamekh, made it to the game… and it was a delight to fight, lacking the impenetrable shields of other capital ships.
It appears in cutscenes, too: picking up Thrakhath at the end of the game! We're told that a Kamekh is threatening the Concordia in Special Operations 2. However, that's a case of the game misidentifying a Fralthra!
The Kamekh would go on to appear in Wing Commander Privateer with a new 'Gemini' paint scheme. Here it's the most fearsome Kilrathi warship in the area, appearing in some of the game's toughest missions. The manual does refer to it as a destroyer rather than a corvette at one point, though!
A Kamekh even appears on the box of Origin's screensaver, Origin FX! Technically this is the first time the Privateer Kamekh was seen, as it predated the release of Privateer itself.
The mesh for the Kamekh would go on to become the main body of Super Wing Commander's Snakeir carrier… which would itself become Wing Commander Armada's Shiraak carrier. Origin used every part of the animal!
Finally, the Kamekh would make multiple appearances on Wing Commander Academy! They first show up in Chain of Command. One acts as the jump scout at the start of the episode and then Gharal's fleet in act two includes three of them. In Walking Wounded, Maniac faces off against a Kamekh corvette that's using a battered human hospital ship as a lure. In the process we get a great look at the Kamekh's bridge design.
Wing Commander's most famous corvette, though, may be the Kamrani-class introduced in Wing Commander III. The Kamrani is one of the toughest ships in the game because of how well its five turrets provide coverage for the entire spacecraft. They're a challenge in the game!
Wing Commander Prophecy revisits the Kamrani using it as the base of operations for the Kilrathi cutlists that you must side with in the game… and you're ultimately given the opportunity to join with Hawk in attacking one, should you so desire. There's still some confusion under the hood,though: the updated Prophecy Kamrani design is named SORTHAK (a similar ship design but not a corvette!) internally. The ICIS manual also mentions an unclassed Confederation corvette, the TCS Brack.
Wing Commander Prophecy also introduces us to the Nephilim corvette, the Barracuda. It's a very distinct fish-like organic spaceship! The original name during development was the Skate, which was later assigned to a different Nephilim bomber.
Even Privateer 2 has mention of a corvette:
The Wing Commander novels use corvettes repeatedly and even introduce several new types. Dr. Forstchen in particularly continually references "light corvettes" operated by both the Confederation and the Empire. He also refers to a Confederation "fleet light corvette" and a Kilrathi "patrol corvette" in Fleet Action. Two obsolete corvettes are mentioned as well: the Granicus-class medium corvette (discontinued twenty years earlier) and the Falcon-class light corvette. The Landreich are seen operating a Ferret bolted to a Falcon-class corvette's engine. The Wing Commander IV novel even introduces a new role for corvettes: the Border Worlds operates "obsolete corvette with a large parabolic antenna that looked to have been salvaged from an obsolete orbiting microwave power station separated itself from the main body" which can open jump points for non-jump-capable fighters!
Finally, we talked quite a bit about the final movie Kilrathi outfits (and especially their flags) being inspired from Japanese history when we covered Seven Samurai. So this time we'd like to compare them to the concept art done for the movie by Mariano Diaz:
Sully's kagamusha is his sister Lumi.
