(This is a very long post)

I was not planning to post it now, I originally had in mind to make a video where I would talk about Project Thundercloud and Animation is Magic! but some technical problems delayed the recording.

As I said before, my plan at first was to make Yoki's Story in five episodes but I wanted to complete it with a movie-like episode following the events of the fifth episode. I wanted to do something inspired by FFVII : Advent Children, where another of Reswob's creation would have attacked the island. I wanted to build a Koopa-like character with different ideas than Yoki. When I realized it would have ended too quickly I decided to extend it to seven episodes instead and to make a remake of the first episode too.

Some people have pointed out how the story of Yoki's Story was inspired by Naruto, it was the case for the four first episodes but I stopped watching the show after that.
Yoki's Story 5 got a lot of inspiration from Final Fantasy VII instead with it's blend of prerendered cinematics and realtime animation. This one is my favourite episode, thanks to this I finally found my style and made something different than other sprite animators.
With Yoki's Story VI the choice of adding voice acting to the movie was made at the middle of the project, explaining why it looked rushed in the movie. It's hard to believe but the idea came from My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic, I originally had in mind to make a few reference to the show in the episode. In a scene we would have seen Shion watching a parody of the show called My Little Yoshi and in the Koopa city we would have seen a grey Yoshi with walleyes in the background. I also wanted to use the Rainbow Dash stage theme from Fighting is Magic during the fight on the airship.

Project Thundercloud have been a radical change for me, not only I had to learn how to emulate a new style of animation but I also had to make something even better and for that I had to use all my experience from Yoki's Story to make it work. This was not just a new project, I had to learn everything again. At first I thought that after the project I would return to Yoki's Story but I realized it was a one way road and that after that I couldn't return to sprite movies. I was thinking of continuing Yoki's Story with something else than sprites, but anything else would have been unsuitable as it would have taken too much time to do. With Yoki's Story V and VI taking over six months to do instead of the three months I had for the other episodes I understood that another style shift would have been a development hell for me and that I would have to stop working on it someday.

For the rest of the episodes, here's how I would have made them :

I tried many times to make an anime-like intro to the series like many others did but what I wanted to do was too big for me, I wanted to do something like the fifth opening of Naruto with 3D effects and action scenes. I would have made one between two episodes.

For Yoki's Story VI : part II I was not planning to add anything new to the animation and to wait instead for Yoki's Story 0 for that. Yoki's Story 0 was an episode I wanted to make before Yoki's Story VII that would have told about a war between the Mushroom Kingdom and the Koopa Kingdom happening decades before the first episode where Yoshi's Island was pressured by both sides to join them. The characters in this episode were Yoshi (The chief) and a black Yoshi trying to save the island from the attacks. At the end we would have seen the black one save Yoshi at the cost of his own life and it would have been revealed that his name was Yoki. Instead of focusing on 3D animation I would have made the backgrounds in 2D using photos of trees and forests with a cartoony outline.

After that there would have been a remake of the first episode, with a revised script and much better animation.

And then the last episode, Yoki's Story VII, that I would probably have split in two parts. It was supposed to start with the war from the episode 0 from the point of view of a very young Bowser and Peach's mother (That I was thinking of calling Rose, but I didn't want to make any connections with Rosalina). This would have talked about how the conflicts between the two kingdoms caused Bowser to become crazy and develop a split personality. We would have then discovered that Reswob was in fact that split personality and that Bowser jr. and Yoki were brothers. The events from most Mario game would have been explained as different retellings of Reswob's failed attack against Peach. Reswob's army of mechanical puppets would have then attacked the Mushroom Kingdom, where Yoki and his friends would have fought back. The ending would have been with a conversation between Bowser and Yoki, where Bowser would have asked Yoki to save him from himself. For the finale I would have modeled the Mushroom Kingdom with a low level of details and made some higher detailed parts on separate models to use when needed.

After that I had no more plans for Yoki, at the beginning I was thinking of making a Flash game with him but now I realize that it would have been too hard to do. I also wanted to combine every episodes together in a single movie and to reedit the scenes from the previous episodes with better visuals and voice acting.

So, yeah, this is how Yoki's Story would have ended if I had continued the story.