What the Hell is "Kyōryū" Even Supposed To Be?
You know how I just wrote a post about the upcoming Jurassic World sequel, Jurassic World Rebirth? Well, it turns that's not the only dinosaur centric thing that's coming out soon in the indeterminate future. Jurassic World Rebirth may have a release date set in stone, but this game, show, thing doesn't. Yes, I'm talking about Kyōryū, an independent project that's maybe a series, but is now a game, maybe?
I watched the trailer they put out back in 2023, and I watched a couple of other videos on the official Kyōryū YouTube channel, and I'm still pretty confused about what this thing is supposed to be. On top of that, this project doesn't even have a Wikipedia page of its own, so it's pretty difficult to get reliable information about it. So, those YouTube videos that they put on to promote the project are all we have to go off of.
From what it seems, it seems like this an attempt by this independent animation/VFX studio, Floating Rock to create their own IP. They initially wanted to make it into a series using the game engine known as the Unreal Engine (they didn't clarify if it's the Unreal 4 Engine, but I assume it was since that's the current version of the Unreal Engine), similar to that three episode miniseries that Oats Studios made using the Unity Engine, Adam.
They wanted it to look as if it were animated in real time just like video games have real time graphics, just like Oats Studios wanted to do with the Adam series. But, after everyone mistakenly thought that it was supposed to be a video game, the people at Floating Rock just decided to turn it into a game instead. As, every video they've posted since posting that initial trailer has been about the game they're making, rather than the series that they initially planned.
Or maybe, it is still planned to be a series? I really don't know. It's all confusing and none of Floating Rock's videos on this wannabe franchise make any sense. Like, I just don't really know what exactly they have planned, or if any of these project that they've announced for this new IP of theirs will ever actually come to fruition, or if this is all just an elaborate scam and these people have no intention or ability to deliver a finished product. It's hard to tell, you never know on the Internet.
The concept sounds nice. It basically takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans brought back dinosaurs using genetic engineering 🧬 similar to the way they were in the Jurassic films. But, some cataclysmic event took place which caused humanity to go extinct, leaving the dinosaurs they created in their place, allowing them to reclaim the world that they had lost millions of years ago.
It's basically if the evil scientist from Carnosaur, Dr. Jane Tiptree (who was actually played by Laura Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd)'s plan had actually worked. She wanted to wipe out humanity with a virus 🦠 and then replace them with dinosaurs, which she felt were more deserving of ruling the Earth 🌎 than we are. She brought them back to life through genetic engineering 🧬, though the method she used was different than the method used in the Jurassic series.
Because chickens 🐓, when they're embryos, they have tails and snouts with teeth, before they were develop into feathers and beaks. Meaning that they still have many features that people associate with non-avian dinosaurs. And Horner fully bought into the idea that dinosaurs could be brought back by reengineering chickens 🐓 to hatch out with their old vestigial dinosaur-like features. He even named this hypothetical creature, the "Chickenosaurus," which is that thing on the cover, it's the Chickenosaurus he wanted to create with a tail. Of course, as you could imagine, nothing came of this idea, and this book 📖 kind of had the effect of hurting Horner's credibility within the paleontological community, as no body but him really took this idea seriously and thought he was a bit of a crackpot for advocating for it.
He also earned the ire of animal rights groups who felt the idea of chickens 🐓 being genetically modified 🧬 to hatch out with tails and snouts was kind of cruel. And a lot of these groups are opposed to factory farming, and chickens 🐓 being raised as live stock overall. A lot of animal rights activists are vegetarians and vegans after all. So, trying to turn chickens 🐓 into dinosaurs or advocating do so wasn't going to win any of their support. He had backed the wrong horse 🐎 so to speak, and since then, you haven't heard anything about this "Chickenosaurus" idea nor have you really heard a peep from Jack Horner himself.
He's not even a scientific consultant and advisor for the Jurassic World films as he had been for the original Jurassic Park trilogy. But, this wasn't the only thing that he's controversial for, he's also earned some controversy over his advocacy for the T. rex scavenger hypothesis, arguing that T. rex was strictly a scavenger rather than an active hunter. He even incorporated that idea into Jurassic Park III which is why we see the T. rex in that film eating a dinosaur carcass rather than hunt and kill live prey, and why we see it lose the fight with the Spinosaurus.
This hypothesis of his has kind of been discredited in the years since he originally proposed it, as the majority of paleontologists believe that T. rex was primarily an active hunter that hunted and killed live prey, while occasionally engaging in scavenging whenever the opportunity presented itself. Just like the majority of apex predators alive or extinct do. Most apex predators are not exclusively hunters, and will engage in scavenging and eat carcasses of dead animals if such a meal is available because hey, it's free meat that they don't have to expend a lot of energy to obtain.)
She basically reengineered chickens 🐓 so that would they would hatch out as dinosaurs, which is an actual de-extinction method that paleontologist, Jack Horner has actually proposed for bringing back dinosaurs, or at least, genetically modifying chickens 🐓🧬 to have tails and toothy snouts. It's not as fool proof of a method for dinosaur de-extinction that Jack Horner made out to be all those years ago back in the early 2010s, which is probably why no body has actually done it yet.
Though Dr. Tiptree's virus 🦠 does actually cause women ♀︎ to give birth to dinosaurs, which was how she was planning on repopulating the Earth 🌎 with dinosaurs are humanity went extinct. Women ♀︎ across the globe 🌎 who became infected with the virus 🦠 would give birth to the very animals that would replace us as the dominant species. It's a pretty shocking and evil plan, which thankfully doesn't succeed in the Carnosaur film.
Now, the description underneath the initial trailer doesn't say how humanity went extinct, it just says they did, and that dinosaurs inherited the Earth 🌏. They also don't say how the dinosaurs were brought back to life, it just says that they were genetic engineered 🧬. No mention of amber or chickens 🐓. And I don't think the game or the series (whatever this thing is going to be) will provide much answers.
Especially since this takes place sometime the future, long after the apocalypse happened, and the dinosaurs can't even talk despite them being more intelligent than their ancestors from millions of years ago. But, apparently not long enough for the electricity ⚡️ to go out and for all the lights and technology to shut down. The game trailer shows a dinosaur that screen in Shibuya, so this isn't that far into the future where all electricity ⚡️ was gone out, and all the lights have gone out and nights are just completely dark.
When I was watching the first trailer (the one for the series), and I was a few seconds in, I thought that maybe this took place in some weird alternate timeline or alternate universe where humans went extinct and dinosaurs took their place, like instead of the asteroid ☄️ killing the dinosaurs and making way for humanity to evolve millions of years later, the reverse happened or something like that. Mammals and humanity had evolved first, and had their time in the Sun ☀️ before it was cut short by an asteroid ☄️ or a virus 🦠 or some other cataclysmic that caused the extinction of humanity, and then that allowed reptiles and eventually dinosaurs to evolve and take their place.
That is still a cool idea, and would potentially make for a weird else-world type of story, but no, that wasn't the case. Instead, these are genetically engineered 🧬, presumably cloned dinosaurs that humans had created that just inherited the Earth 🌏 after humanity bit the dust. It's kind of like Planet of the Apes but with dinosaurs instead of apes. Planet of the Dinosaurs if you will. Humanity's hubris and their tampering with nature led to their downfall, and they inadvertently created their own replacement.
It's even similar to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in that the dinosaurs have evolved and formed their own clans, and regularly engage in tribal warfare amidst the ruins of cities. Like, the trailer focuses on this T. rex father and son duo who wander into an abandoned city street while the juvenile T. rex—the son—plays with a human skull 💀 that it dug up from the ground (kind of like how humans used to dig up dinosaur fossils back in their heyday), and they both get attacked by this gang of Dimetrodons. The lead Dimetrodon even kind of acts like a mafia don as some of the comments underneath the video mentioned.
Though of course, I got to mention the one thing that every dinosaur and paleontology enthusiast always has to mention whenever Dimetrodons show up in dinosaur media. The obligatory "Dimetrodons are not dinosaurs and did not live at the same time as dinosaurs" disclaimer. But you know what, in this universe, it kind of makes sense that there are Dimetrodons here since so no many non-paleontological people mistakenly believe that Dimetrodons are dinosaurs—just as they mistakenly believe that pterosaurs are dinosaurs—that whenever biotech company is responsible for bringing back the dinosaurs might've decided to clone them too because they might've in such high demand.
Every non-expert likes Dimetrodon, and says it's one of their favorite dinosaurs even though it's stated over and over again by real experts that isn't, that if given the chance, they'd want to see a live one. Dimetrodons in this universe got lucky and got to come back to life and have a second chance too all because people don't know any better and didn't do their proper research on what is and isn't a dinosaur. Sorry, I had to get that out of the way, that contrary to popular belief, Dimetrodons are not dinosaurs. Even if the majority of people who are into paleontology know that Dimetrodons aren't dinosaurs.
They've had that factoid drilled into them by every paleontologist and paleontology enthusiast they've ever listened to, and every YouTube video talks about prehistory and mentions Dimetrodon has to mention that Dimetrodons are not dinosaurs, the same ol' song and dance every single time 😒. We get it, you can stop saying it now. But, unfortunately, there are still people who are unaware of this fact, and still believe that Dimetrodons are dinosaurs, including many Hollywood screenwriters apparently. They're a completely different species belonging to a completely different group of prehistoric reptiles. In fact, they aren't even really reptiles, they're a part of a completely separate clade of animals from reptiles and birds called Synapsida that first evolved in the Paleozoic era.
The animals that were apart of this clade were called Synapsids, and are often referred to by paleontologists and evolutionary biologists as "stem mammals," "proto-mammals," "paramammals," or "pan-mammals." Whereas the clade that reptiles and birds (and therefore dinosaurs) are part of is called Sauropsida, and animals that evolved in this clade during the Paleozoic are called Sauropsids, and are often considered to be "proto-reptiles" as well as "mammal-like reptiles," though that's an outdated term.
So, despite Dimetrodons looking very reptilian, especially in the majority of dinosaur media that they're featured it, they are Synapsids and are therefore much closer to mammals than they are to reptiles, meaning they're more related to us humans than they are to dinosaurs. But, I won't fault this project too much since Jurassic World Dominion also had some Dimetrodons in one scene. It was a really cool and kind of funny scene, but they don't really fit if we want this to be a strictly dinosaur affair, which a lot of Jurassic fans claim they want.
But, if they want Jurassic to be a strictly dinosaur affair, then that means they can't have any pterosaurs either. No Pterodactyls, no Pteranodons, no Dimorphodons, none of that. We can't have mosasaurs either since hey, mosasaurs weren't dinosaurs either. But, I guess a lot of Jurassic have bought into the fallacy that pterosaurs, mosasaurs, and Dimetrodons are dinosaurs, so they don't mind that they are in here.
I've already kind of said this before in my post about Jurassic World Rebirth, but if we're going to bend the rules a bit and include animals that are not dinosaurs, and animals that are from different eras than the Mesozoic (the one in-which non-avian dinosaurs actually existed), then I don't see why we can't include animals from the Cenozoic era.
It doesn't even have to be the various Cenozoic mammals like saber-tooth cats, or mammoths, or Short-faced bears, Gylptodons, or Thylacoleo carnifexes (the "marsupial lion") among others, it could be some of the Cenozoic reptiles and birds like the Terror birds, the dodo birds 🦤, the Megalania, the Titanoboa, the Vasuki, the Sebecids, and the Planocranids. You could even include a Megalodon in there if you want, even if that would be kind of encroaching on Meg's territory. The Meg series was supposed to be the Jurassic Park for prehistoric sea creatures, and I for one wouldn't want to take that away from it. Anyway, enough ranting about some Jurassic fans' shortsightedness, hypocrisy, and lack of imagination, let's back to Kyōryū.
There's also this whole Japanese theme 🇯🇵, which you probably could tell just by looking at the title. The adult male T. rex ♂︎, the father, has skin that looks like samurai armor and horns that make it look like he's wearing a samurai helmet. The city street where him and his son confront the Dimetrodons, that bright neon-lit street looks like a Japanese city street 🇯🇵. It looks a street in Tokyo, only there's weeds and plants growing on the road and on the sidewalks, and all the cars are all rusted up and destroyed, and the entire place looks dilapidated.
I know for sure that's a Tokyo street because the game trailer shows that famous Shibuya intersection crossroad area that you always see in movie set in Tokyo, or in YouTube video travel videos that are centered around Tokyo or Japan 🇯🇵 as a whole. The reason for this what I could tell is that one of the people at Floating Rock, one of the creators of Kyōryū is Japanese 🇯🇵 himself, or at least, he's of Japanese descent 🇯🇵.
This is a New Zealand-based company 🇳🇿 because the description for the Kyōryū channel says that it's a Wellington-based company, and Wellington of course is the capital of New Zealand 🇳🇿. And some of the people who have appeared in these behind-the-scenes type of videos that they've put on YouTube do have New Zealand accents 🇳🇿. So, it's not a surprise that they have people on their staff who are of Japanese descent 🇯🇵 since New Zealand 🇳🇿 has a lot of Japanese immigrants 🇯🇵 or people who come from Japanese immigrant families 🇯🇵, and that one of came up with the idea for this new dinosaur IP, and came up with the idea of basing it in Japan 🇯🇵 and imbuing it with Japanese culture 🇯🇵. Even giving it a Japanese name 🇯🇵.
I am on board with this, I am interested to see what Floating Rock has to offer, and what Kyōryū will eventually come. I'm just glad to see someone work on a dinosaur franchise that isn't Jurassic Park or Jurassic World. I don't want to live in a world where the Jurassic series is the only dinosaur centric franchise that we have, and that we actually get content out of, especially since there limitations on where you can go with a Jurassic project. Largely limitations that the fans have imposed on it, read my Jurassic World Rebirth post if you want to learn more about that 😒.
I also want something that isn't supposed to be educational, but something that is actually a fictional story with a fictional universe and fictional characters, its own made up lore and everything. So, the game, Saurian doesn't count in this case for me. Kyōryū is something that has a lot of potential, and has the potential to push the limits of what a dinosaur project can be, and take the dinosaur genre in a direction that no one ever thought possible. They could do things that the Jurassic franchise could never get away with doing without some ridiculous fan backlash 😠.
I just hope that Floating Rock gets their act together, and actually commits to a project, and commits to an idea of what they want this franchise to be. Do they want it to be a video game or a TV series? Pick one. Your independent studio with not a lot of money 💵 or resources, at least at the moment, you can't exactly do both. For now, it seems that they are committing to it being a game, which is why I'll tag this post in the Video Game section, as well as in the Streaming or TV section. But, they could always change their minds and decide to make it into a series again.
Like, was this always their intention? Did always plan on making it into a video game, and all that stuff about it being a series was BS? Or did they originally plan on making this into a series, but then decided to make it into a game after a small minority of people mistook it for a video game, and because they actually have the resources to make it into a game rather than a series? It's all very confusing, and none of the videos they've put out that I've seen actually clear any of it up.
It reeks of something that didn't have much of a solid plan behind it beyond the basic concept, and this studio is just making it up as they go along. Or at least, that's the sense that I'm getting. If anyone from Floating Rock is reading this, please clear this up for me. Was it always your intention to make Kyōryū into a game or was that like a plan B that you switched after everyone in the comments of the trailer wanted it to be a game instead of series like you claim you originally wanted? I would really like to know because the videos you put on the Kyōryū YouTube channel really didn't go a good enough of job of explaining what this thing is supposed to be or what your plans actually were and are.
Maybe their plan is to make it into a game first, and then maybe if it's successful enough, then they'll turn it into a TV series on Netflix or wherever they go to pitch it and air it if gets greenlit. I mean, hey, Five Nights at Freddy's started off as a small indie game made on a really small budget by a pretty small, but dedicated and passionate team, but grow into this massive multimillion dollar franchise 💵 that is producing all kinds of new games that are outside of the original game's genre, that has merchandise, and has a pretty successful live action film adaptation, among other things. So, maybe Floating Rock thinks they can do the same with Kyōryū, start small and then grow big.
Regardless of whatever Kyōryū ends up becoming or growing into, I will consider checking out. I just hope that if is a game like they've been saying for the past month, that it isn't a PC exclusive that you can only get on Steam because I don't have a Steam account, and I don't have a gaming PC. I use a MacBook 💻, which automatically cuts me off from the 99% of PC games that are available on Steam and elsewhere. I can only get games if they're available through the App Store. Even then, games don't exactly run that smoothly on Mac computers 🖥️💻, at least from my own experience.
I don't have the money 💵 to invest in buying a gaming PC, and buying the equipment I would need to assemble one, nor do I even have the expertise to do so. I don't know anything about modern PC gaming. I'm a console gamer through and through, and my only experiencing PC gaming is back in the old days when PC games came out on discs 💿, and you had inserted them into the computer, which was separate from the monitor, and ran on Microsoft Windows. That's my only experience with PC gaming, everything since then is completely alien to me. I prefer playing games on a console with a controller 🎮 rather than playing games on a computer 🖥️💻 with a keyboard ⌨️. Unfortunately, it seems that's what Kyōryū seems like it's going to be. It's going to be a PC only game that you can only get on Steam because that's all Floating Rock can afford right now.
If Kyōryū does become a series, then please for the love of god, do not put it on Netflix 🙏. I already have issues accessing Netflix to watch the shows and movies that I have on my list to review due to them ending their password sharing policy, making it harder to use the service for anyone who doesn't have their own account. I don't want to add this to that list. Plus, Netflix is a terrible company overall that doesn't deserve your money 💵. They're killing the TV industry.
They're the reason why TV sucks now, and why everyone's just stuck with streaming. They're trying to get rid of regular cable and satellite TV, and monopolize the entire film and TV industry. We cannot allow them to win. So, if you're reading this, Floating Rock, if ever decide to make a Kyōryū series, please do not go to Netflix to make it and release it. Go to Paramount+, Apple TV+, or Max, or Amazon Prime Video, or Hulu, or even Peacock 🦚 though that's Jurassic Park and Jurassic World's domain. Anything is better than current day Netflix.
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Here's the original trailer for the "series":
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Here's the trailer for the game:
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