FINAL FANTASY IV
CROCDILE PROJECT #667 CREATED: JUNE 2022 The Crocdile was a reclusive creature that tended to dwell in the subterranean caverns known as the Old Water-way, a flooded underground tunnel that served as a secret entrance to Castle Baron. Lesser creatures often sought the Crocdile for protection—the Piranha, ElecFish, FangShel, and Aquaworm wre all known to travel with the Crocdile at various times. So powerful and vicious was the Crocdile that it could lash out with two attacks before its victims even knew what was happening—swinging its mighty tail to trip up its enemies and then snapping at them with a mouth full of dangerous pointed teeth. Cecil Harvey sometimes had difficulty distinguishing the Crocdile from its less powerful Aligator cousin, though the Crocdile was indeed the more dangerous of the two by far. (The name of the Crocdile was truncated to eight letters due to programming limitations in the original Final Fantasy IV. A later remake for PlayStation Portable used the correctly-spelled name Crocodile; the Game Boy Advance remake referred to it as the Gigas Gator.) I bought two of the highly realistic Schleich crocodile figurine to make the Crocdile as well as the Aligator (who shared a game sprite design). I didn't have to make any physical modifications to the figures. I painted the Crocdile's body a dark green color and used my airbrush to create a dark-to-light gradient for his belly. I also went back afterwards and applied some dark brown spots on his skin to try to match the look of the Super Nintendo game sprite. I ended up doing a lot of research for this project, looking at photos of real alligators and crocodiles to see what their skin patterns and coloring looked like. But, ultimately, authenticity to the SNES game sprite design trumped all other considerations. |
|