Here's something I've been meaning to research more: Did you know that Mamoru Nagano of Five Star Stories fame was involved with a whole bunch of material related to Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers? Nagano's always been a big videogame guy, playing PSO religiously and even lending his designs to the "experimental"* RPG Airs Adventure on Saturn. But man, he was really into Virtua Fighter for a while.
At some point during the big Japanese Virtua Fighter boom of the mid-90s, Nagano became absolutely enamored with the game. So much so, in fact, that he bonded with similarly legendary artist friend Mutsumi Inomata to publish VF2-related articles and art in the Tales of Joker magazine (published by Toyspress) and helped out with other Virtua Fighter-related publications like the Model 2 artbook. Inomata did most of the really splashy illustrations, including the rather iconic Sarah art seen above.
Inomata's Fighting Vipers art, along with some more VF art from her and Nagano, was showcased in Kodansha's relatively short-lived game magazine Haoh. Sadly, none of this stuff seems to be archived anywhere on the web, adding to my ever-growing list of "media to obtain and preserve." Also, Nagano did some art and commentary for the Fighting Vipers fanbook My Sweet Honey, which you can see above. Him being a Tokio guy makes sense to me.
There's a lot for me to dig into here, but I've found a good starting point: A somewhat recent (2018) interview on DenFamiNicoGamer by VF2 tetsujin-class player (and longtime games writer) Bunbunmaru sees Nagano and Inomata reflecting both on what they're playing at the time and their experience with Sega fighters at peak popularity... including anecdotes about buying arcade cabinets and PCBs and Nagano himself guiding the future VF legend Chibita to Spot 21 in Shinjuku to face off against its pool of killers. It's packed with amazing photos from the era, too, if you love looking at mid-90s Japanese arcades like I do.
Nagano would later do outfit design and art for Tekken and Soul Calibur, but I don't think he's done much fighting game art design recently. His closeness to AM2 does makes me wonder if Nagano was on the shortlist for artists to do FV2's designs...
- Some would just outright say "kusoge"
