So I was looking at
NusuttoSan's latest blog post, in which he provides scans from the manual to Gowin's GBC game
Dino Century. And I noticed a couple things:
1. The style of the character art in the manual looks
very similar to character designs I've seen in Chuanpu and Vast Fame packaging.
2. Take a look at
the last page of the manual, which is a promotion for Gowin's other games. Notice anything? Yep. Although the GBC games seem to have been developed by an entirely different team, they're still advertising their older monochrome games which seem to have connections to VFame (Magic Ball, YehRude, Lasama, Rainbow Prince, and Mi Tu de Lu). I'm especially curious about the two Binary Monster games;
this image from taizou shows the first to be a mono RPG, while
the sequel is a platformer with VFame-looking graphics.
Edit: OK, I'm
really curious about Binary Monsters after squinting at the back of the box even closer. Could this be the first game to use what we now know as VFame's RPG engine?
Edit further: An already-sold eBay auction for Binary Monsters. And that is definitely a PC Paint font I see on the title screen...