Here are a bunch of things and thoughts on this series that I couldn't really fit into the game pages, so they're all on this page instead.


The future of this series

Q] What is the future of this series?

A] It has no future.

An accurate reaction of Annet and Earnest playing their own games. Thanks, Anna!

Q] ...what's the REAL future of this series?

A] To give a brief overview of what was going on in the 1990s:

-The ending sequence for Annet Futatabi bluntly states "FIN" rather than "To be continued", so maybe Wolf Team didn't want to make a sequel in the first place, and were done with these characters.

-Telenet Japan, the company who owned Wolf Team, seemed to give up on SEGA at some point in 1993, and stopped making games for SEGA consoles. It's unknown why they did this, the only thing I could find on the net was a vague statement about their games sales declining around this time. This does seem believable as the Mega Drive and Mega CD didn't sell very well in Japan. They could have made a new Earnest/Annet game, but perhaps the idea of making one on a non-SEGA console wasn't something they wanted to do, since all of the others were SEGA exclusives.


It gets a bit confusing what happens next, but here's what I've pieced together regarding the rights:

-Telenet Japan went out of business in 2007. They'd taken some desperate measures to stay afloat, with their most infamous move being Valis Cross, a pornographic entry in the Valis series that had been released in 2006. Thankfully there was no Earnest/Annet porn game, perhaps because they didn't have the rights to the characters any more?

-Wolf Team found success with the Tales series, which had its first game in 1995. However, arguments between Wolf Team and Namco led to several Wolf Team members leaving the company. These members made their own company called tri-Ace. Does tri-Ace have the rights? Or does Wolf Team? Well Wolf Team doesn't exist any more, as they were renamed Namco Tales Studio in 2003 after Telenet Japan had sold them off. Does this mean Namco has the rights? No it doesn't, because of the following:

-In December 2009, Sunsoft announced that they had purchased Telenet Japan's entire software library. The press release does mention El Viento and Earnest Evans by name, and it seems the plan was for Sunsoft to release some of Telenet Japan's games on the Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console. But this never happened.

-In 2019, a company called City Connection then obtained Telenet Japan's game catalogue from Sunsoft. However, just like Sunsoft, they also failed to do anything with any of Telenet's games.

-In January 2020, Edia acquired Telenet's catalogue from City Connection. This led to El Viento finally seeing a re-release in 2022, as one of the games included on Renovation Collection 1.

-In November 2024, the Telenet Revive Twitter account tweeted this, which has a link to this site. What could be happening?

El Viento: The French Connection

El Viento was not released in Europe -this is what everyone thought, but recently it's come to light that the game was released in France. However, it appears that it was simply American version of the game, sold with an additional instruction booklet which was translated into French. A copy was sold on eBay in 2020, which ended for a bank-account busting $257.

Richard Cox owns a copy of this version, and sent the above pictures of the manual. Interestingly, whoever translated the instructions must have been using the Japanese manual as a reference -Al Capone's name is used, instead of Vincente DeMarco, the character's American version name. The French manual only has 7 pages in total, and has been simplified in places -most notably, the character descriptions are much shorter than what's seen in the American or Japanese manuals.

This isn't a fan-made thing, as a photo of another copy can be seen on this site. What's unfortunately not known is who did this -according to some magazines, Ubi Soft were meant to be publishing the game in Europe, but the European version was cancelled. An issue of Mega Tech stated that Ubi Soft were planning on selling some Japanese games with adapter cartridges and translated instructions.

As Ubi Soft is a French company, I would guess they were the ones responsible for this -it would appear they did release the game, but only in France. And even then, they were selling the American version with some extra instructions, they didn't actually make their own version for Europe.

A later issue of SEGA Force mentioned SEGA weren't happy with Ubi Soft, and any plans for them to publish any of Wolf Team's other games in Europe were scrapped. It would appear, perhaps, that when SEGA found out about Ubi Soft releasing El Viento in France, they came down on them hard.

Earnest Evans: The Official Theme Song

SING!! Sega Game Music Presented by B.B. Queens is a Japanese music CD which was released in 1993. It features several SEGA game related songs, which all have vocals provided by Japanese group B.B.Queens. One of the tracks is Earnest Evans related! It's called "Dangerous Heart" and was sung by Fusanosuke Kondo.

Click to listen to Dangerous Heart

The track should sound familiar -it's inspired by the music used in the game's first level and credits sequence for the Mega CD version. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the lyrics and can't figure them all out myself, but what I can figure out sound humorous. If you play the CD on a Mega CD console, you can play a special version of Teddy Boy Blues, where you can select tracks from the CD to play during gameplay.

El Viento card

Click on any of the above pictures to make them larger. This appears to be a El Viento collector's card, featuring artwork from Kazutoshi Yamane. The front of the card features a color picture of Annet, whilst the back features Restiana, Zigfried and Henry, along with a couple more pictures of Annet. Kazutoshi Yamane was also responsible for the El Viento manga, indeed, one of the images of Annet on the back of the card was also used on this manga page. However the other art used on the card was not used on any other promotional material.The art wasn't the reason I've listed this here, oh no. What I need to show you is the English text on the card.

FRONT

It was in U.S.A., 1928, the evil brotherhood had faith in the DEVIL HASTUR, the inferior gangster AL CAPONE, and the gang, were active behind the scenes to control all the world.
ANNETTE perceived their misdeeds, and fought alone against then, with the courage and the mysterious power. But the battles were getting more and more tight.
In the EMPIRE STATE BUILDING, turned into the doomed tower, they were on the point of opening the bloody ceremony for the RESURRECTION OF THE DEVIL HASTUR.
The crisis stared ANNETTE in the face.


BACK

She has a fine feature, charming nose, sensual lips, large limpid eyes. And the body......
high lifting breasts, long legs, slim waist, swelling hips and passionate brown skin.
Of course not just good - looking, she is lively and intelligent.
Most than anything else, lots of people love her, she has the courage and the will to better world.
The battle is too hard, but whatever may happen, she never give up hope.
It is also delightful, just like a gust of wind. You love her, she with you!

Yes, well. Hopefully you love her and her swelling hips as much as I do.

Aneko Land comics

Published in five issues of Beep! Mega Drive, these comics show Annet getting into some wacky hijinks. One of them features a guest appearance by Reika, who appeared in Time Gal (Wolf Team handled the Mega CD port). Anyway, thanks to shmuplations you can now read these comics in English! With more panty related humor then you could possibly need!

Ernest Evans

In 1998, Star Ocean: The Second Story was released for the Playstation. This game was developed by tri-Ace, which consisted of several people who'd previously worked for Wolf Team. It seems that tri-Ace decided to pay homage to Earnest Evans by creating the above character, who's called Ernest Raviede. Ernest is an archaeologist, has long, blonde hair and attacks with a whip. This appears to just be a tribute to Earnest Evans... or a bit of a dig at him since the Star Ocean wikia mentions he's considered to be the worst character in the game.

Interestingly, one of Ernest's endings has him being clueless around his girlfriend, Opera. They head to a planet together, but rather than spend time with her, he decides to head off to check out some ruins. This ending somewhat resembles part of Annet Futatabi's ending.

Annet Futatabi cheats

Q] Why haven't you listed any cheats for Annet Futatabi?

A] Because it doesn't have any. At least, I don't think it has any. No cheats sites have any codes listed for this game, the closest I've seen are Game Genie codes for infinite health or magic. Given how obscure the game is there may be cheats for it, it's just nobody has figured out what they are yet. The other games in the series had cheat codes, such as level skips, so I feel the third game must have something as well. So here's a challenge to you, the reader: can anyone confirm if this game has cheats or not?