Christine Derry is the protagonist of the 2001 obscure video game Kingdom of Ages: A Hoshihime Tale, the prequel to the equally obscure 1998 arcade game Hoshihime, both for the obscure Japanese indie video game publisher Takavera CyberForge. While the only entries in the whole two-game franchise, and both never quite made it out of their original home nation, this character still managed to captivate the hearts of a very select group of fans that enjoyed such a cult classic.

The original game Hoshihime was a fairly simple on-rails shooter utilizing the at-the-time brand-new Sega Model 3 hardware in its cabinets. The game itself doesn't have much of a plot, but what can be inferred is that you play as one of four female knights of the titular Hoshihime defending your planet from a group of incoming alien invaders. While the designs of both the ships and the characters invoke an homage to the legendary Matsumoto Leiji, and is clearly inspired by Victorian concepts of space travel, its uniqueness ultimately wasn't enough to make it stand out over its direct competitors in the arcade circuit, such as Daytona USA 2, Virtua Fighter 3, and the Star Wars Trilogy, all of which utilized the Model 3 to much greater effect.

Kingdom of Ages: A Hoshihime Tale, by contrast, is a globe-trotting JRPG that tells its own story while not directly tying itself into the original too tightly. In the game, you play as Christine Derry, a noblewoman of the kingdom of Ion who has been cursed by the malicious Hoshihime named Yaguka into being a werewolf, never able to change back thanks to the influence of the moon. It is eventually revealed that the two were friends growing up together, until Yaguka revealed she had been sent from the moon down onto the world to appraise its worth, and wanted Christine to betray her homeland for the moonfolk. Ultimately her agonizing decision in rejecting her best friend's offer results in Christine being transformed as the moonfolk begin their invasion.

The story has you taking Christine and her party across their world, each party member based off of a different major European nationality, with Christine being the British-coded melee fighter and party leader, her airship mechanic and gadgeteer Tommy Knocker being German-coded, her rival noblewoman Saleme Pangborne, a dabbler in the occult art, being French-coded, and Vera Carietta, the Italian-coded nun who serves as the divine healer and protector of the group for a nebulous Greater Power. Rounding out the team was Christine's faithful cabbit Danny, a cute fluffy mascot. Strangely enough, the party, and several other characters, all have multiple references in their names, personalities, and backstories to various works of writer Stephen King, with Christine being the most blatant.

As you travel to the different corners of your world, fighting off the nefarious forces of the moonfolk, who are all given Japanese and Chinese-inspired designs, you encounter more ethnic stereotypes as well as concepts from fictions about imagined places from the Age of Discovery. There are also all manner of NPCs to encounter and all sorts of creatures to fight, including literal Darkest Africa, as in, a jungle made out of shadow, a wide desert full of nomadic centaurs, and a continent at the south of the world that is full of dinosaurs. Eventually, your airship that you use to travel is upgraded to traverse the aether between your world and its moon to bring the fight to Yaguka right in her palace.

Unfortunately, despite its epic scope, Kingdom of Ages had several flaws. Firstly, the game was a bit too big for the Dreamcast to handle, the sweeping tale spread out across 5 GD-ROMs, which made the game a bit too pricey and unwieldy for most. Secondly, the idea of European steampunk/Age of Discovery characters fending off an Eastern-themed foe invoked the old idea of yellow peril a bit too much for the game to resonate with its Japanese audience. Thirdly, the game was released at the tail end of the Dreamcast's lifespan, so its reception was barely noticed by the general public, who were more focused on bigger and better things, and the fact that SeGaGaGa came out around the same time overshadowed the JRPG into obscurity, never getting the Western release that might have saved it. But most damning of all was that the game just felt like it was borrowing ideas from other games that were popular at the time, yet not going into outright parody, dooming Kingdom of Ages, and, by extension, Christine, to slip through the cracks of video game history...

Real talk, thanks to  angryfennec for this adopt,  alanscampos for making the original base, and  naviabbot for once again helping me with writing this concept! Glad this got out in time for the end of the Appreciation Month of a certain video game character in the furry fandom!