FINAL FANTASY IV
MAGE PROJECT #664 CREATED: MARCH 2022 The dark and mysterious Mage was a squid-like creature who practiced the mystical dark arts. Cecil Harvey and his group first encountered the Mage within the caverns of Cave Magnes, sometimes in pairs, and occasionally traveling with an Ogre or a Panther. The Mage seemed to possess some form of mental powers, seemingly capable of powerful psychic attacks. Luckily, Rydia was capable of giving the Mage a taste of his own medicine. On rare occasions, she was even able to force him to bend to her will, gaining the power as a Caller to summon a Mage and force him to fight on her behalf. (Two relatives of the Mage first appeared in the original Final Fantasy for the 8-bit NES, and were named Sorcerer and Wizard. The original Japanese name for the Mage was Mindflayer, as the monster was directly based on the classic Dungeons & Dragons creature of the same name. The original name was later restored for the Game Boy Advance and PlayStation Portable releases of Final Fantasy IV.) Unlike a lot of monsters from Final Fantasy IV, the Mage does not share a game sprite with any other monsters, so I only had to build one of these. I wanted a smallish figure in long, flowing wizard robes, so I started with the Wizard Deadpool figure from the Funko Pop assortment. I thought that the Tessek character from Star Wars (also called Squid Head) would make an idea donor for the head, but as of this writing there's never been a Tessek action figure at the six-inch scale. Fortunately, there was a guy on eBay who was selling a custom-designed head and hands for the character, so these were perfect. A few interesting things about this character's design. When his original Super Nintendo game sprite was updated for the PlayStation Portable edition of the game, the graphics artists accidentally interpreted the collar of his cloak as part of his head! If you look closely at the SNES sprite, though, that's clearly his collar. Another strange interpretation is the addition of the tentacle feet to the Nintendo DS version. (I thought this was a cool idea, so I added them, but they're hidden so he's still authentic to the original game design.) Also, if you look closely at the original concept art by Yoshitaka Amano, his scepter actually has a bird's head at the top! The bird head made it into the SNES sprite (you can see the black pixel meant to represent the bird's eye), but it was excised entirely for later sprites. I didn't add it to my project, but now I'm second-guessing myself and I may have to go back and include it later. |
|