FINAL FANTASY IV
CECIL (DARK KNIGHT) PROJECT #23 CREATED: 1999 "I am just a Dark Knight, with no courage to disobey His Majesty." Cecil Harvey is the main focus of Final Fantasy IV, learning about his own loyalty, heritage, and humanity during the course of his world-spanning adventures. As leader of the Red Wings, his airship fleet cannot be matched by any force in the realm. Though he possesses powerful abilities as a Dark Knight, there remains a sinister and evil force behind the kingdom of Baron, one which he cannot hope to overcome until he embraces the Light. One of the troublesome things about building action figures based on characters from this game is that the characters' appearances are not consistent throughout the game. The original character designs were created by Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano, but these designs were often modified or simplified for the 16-bit pixelated sprites. Furthermore, the way the characters look in the game during monster battles differs from the way they appear when moving about on the map, and their sub-screen portraits were also sometimes different. I had also recently discovered an issue of the Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu PS that included a CGI render of Cecil as a Dark Knight. This project, one of my earliest custom figures, was an attempt to reconcile all these different looks into a single action figure. I started with a Rohan figure from the Mystic Knights of Tyr Na Nog toy line (I bought two of these so I could turn the other into the Paladin version of Cecil). After removing some of the armor panels, I attached the tribal mask from a Velasca action figure from the Xena: Warrior Princess toy line. Super glue wouldn't work on this type of plastic, so I had to attach it with pieces of a paper clip. As one of my earliest project, I'm not one hundred percent happy with it as it stands today. It's possible I may have to redo this one at some point in the future. |
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