Been sitting on this one for awhile. Had the line work finished for weeks, but never felt right with the shading until this morning.

I don't have that much of a connection to Tempo, a musical themed platformer released on consoles that didn't get a great amount of market penetration, or else just not localized from it's original Japanese game. This wasn't the only thing working against the character as he came in at the tail end of the attitudified-mascot run of the early-to-mid 90s with accompanying garish box-art for the US release (and made slightly more horrendous in the European box as well).

But with that said, this guy just has a bit of charm to him that made him unique from most of his peers. I think it just largely comes from him being earnest and happy without being openly smarmy about it, allowing him to break free of being defined with how dated even his theme song makes him.

Unfortunately I have little else to comment on him, only having played a little bit of the 32X game and unfortunately unwilling to shell out for the shockingly expensive Saturn game.

To speak a little on his design though, I had a good deal of confusion how to render the little guy, as even mid-animation the game plays fast and loose with even basic anatomy with an additional set of arms and wings that hide themselves in most default poses.

As for the theme of this picture itself, I'm not entirely keen on the Tempo lore, but he does come off as a bit of a young-rock-star sort of character who is not-unfamiliar with a pampered life-style (and by that I mean someone who is well taken care of in decadence. He even gets his face powdered between stages although that might be from the game itself being framed as a television show). But with his place in pop culture I wouldn't be surprised if his younger exposure to media could have come from being in commercials and ads even in his childhood. Including for some infant and youth care products.

Yeah let's run with that.

Tempo is the property of Sega