I HAVE TWO CONFLICTING PLOT IDEAS FOR THE SAME GAME CONCEPT. HELP!

So in 2015 I released my first published RPG Maker game, Zero Gear Fighters. It was... not great. It was pretty clear it was the work of the childish 13 year old with a lot of imagination and child-like wonder but very little skill both in writing and developing. For ages I have wanted to remake the game in some capacity to make a completely new game out of it, as the original game was extremely flawed both in gameplay and especially in story.

In 2019/2020 I came up with a concept for a game called "Chronicles 2: Zero Gear Saga." I would be a direct sequel to Chronicles Meteorfall, that one game that has been in development hell since late 2019 that I'm still working on. Originally what was planned was that the games "Chronicles Meteorfall", "Chronicles 2: Zero Gear Saga", and "Chronicles 3: Ascension" would be part of a trilogy called "The Crimson Meteor Saga" which was part of the larger "Chronicles of Chronicles" world. This series plan has been set in stone for nearly half a decade now and if only one thing was changed, it would completely throw off the rest of the series lore completely.

If you aren't aware of the plot of the original Zero Gear Fighters, here is a basic summary. You are Zero, a boy/girl (you can select the gender because the only RPGs I had played at that point was Pokemon and Mario & Luigi) who has their sister kidnapped by an imp named Vixi who is such an obvious knock-off of Fawful it's not even funny. (que "I have cheese! WITH HOT SAUSE!!!(sic)" line here) Zero then races after the Imp who summons an RTP orc that Zero fights instead of the imp because I was too lazy to program in an actual boss fight. Then you go to this abandoned town for no reason and sneak into a cult evil organization full of cultists evil grunts who watch "baby shows" like Dora the Explorer and Barney the Dinosaur. (I would have definitely been a GoAnimate/Vyond kid if I was born 4 years later) You then beat them up and their leader Cynthia and rescue Cynthia's younger sister "Yusa" or something who then tells you the lore. Yada yada endless sea yada yada giant crystal yada yada wish granting gears yada yada. And this folks is the first major plot hole. The crystal of life, you know, the thing that created the world was apparently turned into 12 golden gears despite, you know, being a crystal. Also, 12 mcguffins? Everyone knows that I didn't have the dedication back then to make 12 separate dungeons/quests.

Anyways you then head to the Tower of Madness past a bizarre map featuring crude pixel art made from lava tiles and an obscure optional boss fight with Mario himself before making your way to the Tower of Madness filled with ghosts that instant-kill you when you touch them. Also here is a secret dev room where you can meet a self insert of me, fight golden slimes that give infinite EXP, and recruit the secret character "Jordan ZERO" who was one of my friends that I put into the game at his request. Once you reach the top of the tower you enter a completely different map that's just a copy and paste RTP map that you don't even get to explore. Heck, you don't even get to fight the arc villain, "Big Bronco." You instead fight a seemingly out-of-nowhere boss called "Daisa IEI" who was based on another of my middle school friends who's attacks are all inside jokes. Yes, this was real.

Fun fact, originally the characters were named "Big Mac" and "Little Mac" based on Mc Donalds but when googling Little Mac I learned what punch out was and had to scrap the idea. Little Mac as a party member would be fire tho, and there's no reason why I couldn't have done it when Mario was a optional boss and the game used stolen Nintendo music frequently. After you beat those guys and recruit not little mac you take a boat to yet another tower which is just a sample map because this is the point where I started to get very lazy. After a few hours of RTP hell you fight Zaful the minotuar, Flush the fishman, and Reep the ghost all at once, some of my brother's OCs from elementary school. Then the game gets softlocked and you can't continue without a walk through walls cheat. Yes, seriously. You then go to the final town, recruit Philip the Vampire (another of my friends who got self-inserted) and get the infinity+1 sword "Thorn." Just Thorn. You then get to lord Anal Lust's castle, beat up Vixi's new form which for some reason is hot now, and Lord Anal Lust himself. Then Zero's sister dies because plot and some random out-of-nowhere guy named Thaddeus Blinn comes in, turns Zero evil, and then the game ends.

So, that was Zero Gear Fighters, a pretty bad game all things considered. You can definitely see why I want a redo of this so much. Later, when developing the Chronicles of Chronicles series, I created as part of the plot a reimagined Zero Gear Fighters that's almost completely different, but shares some of the base ideas.

In this new version Zero is no named Sero and is a young woman working as a mercenary to pay for his sick younger sister Yua's medical bills. However, one day she gets a job offer from the king of Morda Vael himself offering 10 Billion Bx in exchange for the four elemental crystals of Morda Vael. Sero accepts, and slowly builds up her cred as a merc in order to tackle harder and harder missions and eventually collect all 4 crystals while slowly gathering new allies. Upon collecting all 4 crystals, the world slowly begins to fall into chaos and powerful monsters rise from the earth. Worse of all, Sero's hometown of Alphes is under attack from a giant monster, and when Sero rushes in to help the entire town is burnt town and everyone is dead. Sero slays the monster, the "Arbiter of Imbalance," but it is then revealed that the monster is actually Sero's sister who's lifeforce was tied to the crystals to save her life and whenever Sero took one of the crystals her condition got worse until she turned into a monster.

Sero, absolutely enraged, leaves her friends and goes on a killing spree against the government of Morda Vael, aiming to murder the king who tricked her as revenge for taking away her home and her sister. Eventually Sero's friends rejoin her, and together they slay the King of Morda Vael, who claims the he doesn't know what is going on and that he's innocent. Regardless, Sero strikes him down, and King Gasper Conan is actually her grandfather and her mother was the lost princess who eloped with a commoner, making Sero the legitimate heir. Before Sero can process this Harumi, the chairwoman of Morda Vael Sero previously fought during her massacre against Morda Vael, appears and reveals that the king actually WAS innocent. She had been running the country from the shadows for years and was actually the one who sent the initial job offer that set all of this into motion. Harumi reveals to Sero that the Morda Vael Crystals hold countless souls within them and recycle these souls in order for them to be reborn to keep the cycle of mana from going into chaos.

Harumi plans to use these souls to power an ancient weapon known as the Zero Gear, a superweapon created by the people of the lost civilization of Arcadia that can alter reality on a massive scale at the cost of eating human souls, but was sealed deep underground in fear of it's power. Morda Vael uncovered it in an expedition but kept it hidden in the castle vault so no one could use it. Now that Harumi is in control she plans to use the zero gear to resurrect her dead husband and children who died in a housefire 15 years ago while also making herself queen of the world. Sero stopped her, but then decides to selfishly use the Zero Gear herself to revive her mother, sister, and grandfather so they can all live happily together.

Mia, one of Sero's friends, stops Sero while she is in the machine by destroying the crystals, knowing that they would eventually be reformed and the planet's mana cycle would heal. Sero's body was left behind when Sero's soul entered the machine, and Harumi's lingering spirit took advantage of this by possessing Sero's body, creating Dark Sero while the real Sero helplessly watched. Sero murdered Mia and badly injured her other friends Bronze and Philip, forcing them to flee. Harumi's confused due to the merged consciousnesses of Harumi and Sero, decides to go for plan B and open the Obsidian Gate, the portal to the nether realm, ending the game on a cliff-hanger to be resolved in Chronicles 3, a reimagining of Dragon Ascension.

Pretty good plot, eh? However, in the wider multi-universal lore of the series, both the original Zero Gear Fighters and the reimaging Chronicles 2 both happened. The characters in Chronicles 2 are reincarnations/rebirths/reflections of the cast of Zero Gear Fighters, echoes of their original selves caused by something known as the "emulator effect." Dragon Ascension, the sequel to Zero Gear Fighters, also happened, but was never fully completed. If it was, in the true ending the world would have been destroyed by a being known as Omegeo, setting up the events of future universes and putting an end to that universe. That incarnation of Ryuuta would also be something called "the demiseraph," a divine hero that is the only one that could slay the ultimate evil, Elzakalas, at the End of Days. However, Omegeo with is final attack split the demiseraph into 13 pieces, the 13 main protagonists from across the Chronicles series. Splitting the pieces also made them imperfect and subject to corruption, and one of them became so corrupted that he became the basis for Elzakalas' origin, ensuring an infinite time loop.

So, since Zero Gear Fighters and Dragon Ascension canonicly happen, just in a previous version of the universe, that leaves us with all the random plot holes and unexplained oddness of those games that needed to be corrected. Right now I am currently making a "lorebook" for my series containing the entire history and lore of my entire series in incredible detail. This includes small tidbits about worlds that came before the current "Zutara Continuity." However, due to the incomplete nature of the Zero Gear Fighters/Dragon Ascension duology with all it's oddness, I wanted to remake their original games as well. Originally, I wanted to just do straight-up faithful remakes fixing the glitches and the suckiness to make the games at least somewhat playable while keeping their odd and childish nature intact. However, while writing my lorebook, I realized how much untapped potential the original, unaltered Zero Gear Fighters plot had. Most notably, where the heck is the zero gear? Yeah, the golden gears are a thing, but first of all those things make no sense and secondly they're not the Zero Gear!

So, I came up with a new plot for the original Zero Gear Fighters. Now, the game is a sort of dimension-hopping adventure, fixing the weird world design of the original game. It also allows me to add more variety, remove the RTP genericness, fix the plot and pacing issues, add in new characters, and just make the game massively improved far more than a mere "fixed" version could do. First of all, there are no more golden gears. Instead, they are "creation shards" formed from the crystal of life. "Lord Anal Lust" is now "King Aeolis" who is a tyrannical king made a deal with demons in order to gain magickal might and be able to track the crystal of life, which he desires to recreate the world in his image. However, Aeolis discovers not only that the crystal had been shattered into many pieces, but that only one shard exists in this time and place. The other shards have been sent to other, bizarre dimensions to protect them from anyone who wants to steal them. The one crystal still in their world is trapped inside Ella, a little girl and Zero's younger sister.

Zero in this is explicitly non-binary, referencing both the choice of gender in ZGF and their unclear, mysterious gender in DA. Ella at a young age was terminally ill with heart disease, but was saved by a mysterious doctor who did a heart transfusion. Apparently, this transfusion had the doctor place a shard of the crystal of life inside her, keeping her healthy. Zero does not know this, and makes a deal with Aeolias to return Zero's sister in exchange for Zero gathering the crystals. However, the crystals are scattered across dimensions, so Zero gets help from a quirky scientist called Dr Matsuda who builds a device called the "Central Omniversal 0th-Dimensional Antiverse Warp Gear" or "COOLDAWG" for short. Zero thinks the name is dumb so they rename it to the "Zero Gear," the device that can travel between dimensions. Now Zero must go on a quest through 6 different bizarre worlds in order to collect the shards of the crystal of life and save their sister. In each world Zero obtains a new ally, but in the end Aeolis reveals that he had extracted the shard from Zero's sister and now Yua is dying. Yua dies in Zero's arms and Zero swears revenge, fighting through Aeolias' castle defeating his general Vixi who transforms into her true form, a succubus witch, before facing off with Aeolias himself and defeats him and his second demonic form. However, Thaddeus Blinn ambushes Zero from behind and possesses them, becoming Dark Zero. Dark Zero then plans to open the Oblivion Gate to unleash hordes of demons upon the planet, leading to the events of Zero Gear Fighters 2.

So, that was the plot for both ideas I had for remakes of Zero Gear Fighters. Only problem? There are two of them. I would be really weird to have 3 different versions of the same game. The original 2015 version, the first remake outside of the Chronicles lore that overrides the original plot, and the second remake that IS part of the Chronicles lore that exists separate of the original game. The first remake is a lot more faithful, expanding the original game and fixing it's many continuity errors, while the second remake is a complete reimagining taking the original game's framework and making something new out of it like I did for my real first RPG Maker game The Legend of Light (which is sadly lost to time) and it's reimagining Chronicles Meteorfall. But the problem is this: what game can you possibly think of that had two different remakes/reimaginings that went in entirely different directions but were still based on the same core ideas? Nothing in the history of ever has ever done that before. And I just know that it will be insanely confusing for someone to come in and see Zero Gear Fighters, Zero Gear Fighters ReMake, and Chronicles II: Zero Gear Chronicles and get completely confused at the continuity and how those games connect. It's not very intuitive that the same game gets a remake not once, but twice but not only that the remakes are completely different. This isn't like Fire Emblem Mystery of the Emblem and Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon where Shadow Dragon is like an improved/complete version of book 1 of Mystery of the Emblem while featuring some new original additions, basically a second shot at a remake, these are two games releases relatively close to one another that are both completely different stories set in entirely different universe, but both based on the same plot. How the heck am I supposed to manage this whole mess? The original zero gear fighters was supposed to be forgotten, but now that I have a second idea for a remake I can't get it out of my head! And I can't combine the two plots together because the lore of the first remake contradicts the lore of the chronicles series! And if I just remove Chronicles 2 and 3 from the timeline the whole plotline with Baetylus is never resolved! Baetylus is still sealed away by Tayo and could be released at any time, and without Baetylus being dead Elzakalas can't make any more incarnations meaning no Laos, Astraphantos, Pranola, Eos, or any of the other archons! I just have no idea on how to handle this. I know this post/loredump was insanely long, but any ideas? Please? Thanks.

I do want this. This story is my life's work. If it takes the rest of my life to finish this story to it's conclusion, so be it. If no one cares, it doesn't matter. It's what I want to do with my life. Tons of famous artists were never appreciated when they were alive. Picasso, Van Gogh, Henry Darner, etc. I just want to put something out there that can be remembered for all time, even if no one cares about it while I'm still here.

I do take people's advice to heart. Their advice really does help. Usually I have some sort of question, I post it here, but the next day I come up with some new solution. Personally, these pieces of advice really spoke to me when I made my decision to make both remakes at once:

author=Lascivaware
You can explain the differences between the games in the description.

author=aquatorrent
Not sure about games but I can think of 1 series that do this: Fate. In short, they support parallel worlds so any spinoffs that they made is basically canon.

Why can't I make both remakes at once? It's my own series and nothing is stopping me from doing so. It will be like fate, parallel worlds that can coexist at the same time and make the differences known in the description. That's really all there is to it.

And about the "this series is my life's work" thing, yes, yes it is. I'm not saying I'll be super famous in the future or something, though that is a possibility with how ambitious some of my later games (as in, games that haven't been made but are in the idea phase) get in terms of scope. I don't really care if I'll be famous in the future after I'm long gone. All I care about is getting my work out there and my stories actually manifested, regardless if people care or not. There has been no other continuity in my imagination that has been as detailed or as complex as the Chronicles of Chronicles series.

Zero Gear Fighters + Dragon Ascension was actually the FIFTH continuity I had developed, there were 4 other continuities before it and only the fourth one got a game which I never released and was lost to time, which was actually the basis for the story of Chronicles Meteorfall. Heck, the sixth continuity in-between Dragon Ascension and the current CoC series was never even publicly released, Draco Anima Origins/Stardust Saga, now known as Lost Anima. Also the third continuity will get an actual game being called Spirit Roamer. The first and second continuities are best left forgotten, though aspects of them will be used in the Chronicles of Heroes sub-series.

I will not abandon this series. It is my life's work and passion. I will not change my mind and peruse some other new continuity. Everything is connected in this new world I've built and everything will continue to be until the series is finished with THE END OF CHRONICLES. I'm not insane or delusional, I'm simply a girl with ambition. It's just that games take forever to make and Chronicles Meteorfall has been in development hell for way longer than I hoped. (It should have finished by September 2020) I don't care about fame, or money, or anything like that. Just the ambition to get my chronicles told to the very end.

I'm still in the process of learning and every game I make progressively gets better and better than the one before. I learn from every project that fails, and overall Chronicles: The Lost Page was a pretty good success on my part. Noel and the Tower of Doom will likely been even better, and Chronicles Meteorfall even more so. Each game getting better and better until I reach Chronicles: The Last Dragon's Elegy, my first commercial game.