FINAL FANTASY IV
GHAST PROJECT #631 CREATED: AUGUST 2019 The undead Milon, one of the sinister Four Fiends of Elements, was charged with destroying Cecil Harvey before he could successfully ascend Mt. Ordeals to become a Paladin. Milon confronted Cecil and his companions as they reached the top, flanked by four dangerous, undead Ghasts. The Ghast was similar in appearance to the common Revenant, but had special powers that other undead monsters lacked. The Ghast could use a powerful Drain attack, effectively absorbing the very life force of its opponents. However, like all undead creatures, the Ghast feared fire, and was also susceptible to the rather counterintuitive move of using curative remedies against it. The four Ghasts fell quickly, and Milon was soon defeated as well. (In the Game Boy Advance remake and Nintendo DS remake of Final Fantasy IV, the Ghast was renamed Skullnant, a portmanteau of "skull" and "revenant.") I encountered a problem when working on the Ghast and his undead friends. The game is no stranger to taking the same game sprite design and doing a palette swap. This is normal, and we've come to expect it. However, the Ghast is identical in appearance and color to the Revenant. I'm sure this was a mistake. I wanted my projects to be authentic (and I usually consider the Super Nintendo game sprite and colors to be the definitive look for these monsters), but I didn't want to just paint two identical figures to represent both the Revenant and Ghast. So, I looked at how they handled this problem in the various remakes. When the game was ported to PlayStation Portable, they cranked the saturationup on the Ghast and lowered it on the Revenant to try to distinguish the two a little. This wasn't a completely terrible idea. In the Nintendo DS version, though, they gave the Ghast completely different colors. Did they consult the game developers and discover the original intended color scheme? Or did they just make this up out of whole cloth? I really don't know. It's a different and distinct look, however, so I went with it. |
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