For some reason, I decided to do a search for an Angel Beats! themed Honda Beat, thinking that surely someone out there must've already done one. I came up empty, and I don't know why I felt so offended. I mean, come on, it's
right there in the name! So yeah, spite made me go out of my depth to make an Itasha.
I can't believe it's been 14 years since Angel Beats! first aired, and I argue it's still as worthy of a watch as it did back then. It's an emotional roller coaster; it made me laugh, it made me tense, it made me sombre, it made me think. The premise is that teenagers who've died before living out a fulfilling life have their souls put into an afterlife school, where they'll (hopefully) get to live out a full life and find happiness before being reincarnated. However, a group of teenagers in said afterlife are angry at the injustices dealt to them by life, and want to seek out god for revenge, actively resisting happiness in that world to avoid being reincarnated. The leader of that group of rebels is Nakamura Yuri, who features on this design.
Since the Beat is a Kei car, I've decided to make it a fictional entry into Japan's eccentric K4-GP series. You can read more about it in
this MotorTrend article, but the long and short of it is that the series is a low cost discipline of motorsports that welcomes drivers of all skill levels. Regulations are comparatively lax, allowing a variety of machines—from a Kei sports car that can be driven home to bespoke, shrunken down replicas of the Chaparral 2J and Porsche 962—to compete in a bi–annual endurance race around Fuji Speedway. Unlike a typical endurance race, each car is limited on how much fuel it is allowed to use, putting more emphasis on efficiency rather than outright speed. But efficiency is exactly where Kei cars excel, so that makes sense! Live feeds from the races are even free to watch on the
K4-GP YouTube channel!
Unfortunately, it seems that the series isn't that prominent—a crying shame considering how much character and entertainment value it has—with not many decals available on Discover, meaning I had to make my own. This is where
@MatskiMonk was of invaluable help,
spending an hour without prompt to shrink a 144kB decal to under 15kB for me! I promised to show them the end result, and quite frankly if it hadn't been for that, I might not have seen this project through; my game for some reason often doesn't want to load up a complex livery to edit, or even save edits sometimes, despite being on wired LAN connection. Making this definitely was more frustrating than fun at times!
I don't make liveries that often, much less Itashas, but I hope this has been a worthwhile read!