FINAL FANTASY IV
MIND PROJECT #680 CREATED: MARCH 2024 The Mind held the unique distinction of being the final type of creature that Cecil Harvey and his team would encounter on the Moon before finally confronting the dreaded Zemus. The Mind seemed to both exist and not exist in normal space simultaneously, its physical form almost a ghostly echo of Zemus himself. The Mind used Armor upon itself that neatly deflected most types of melee attacks, and used its mental powers to place a Charm upon Cecil's party members in order to win them over psychologically. Successfully-charmed party members would attack their friends or even themselves. Such efforts were fleeting at best, however, and Cecil's group would quickly dispatch the monster before reaching the lunar core to confront Zemus in person. (The creature's name was truncated as Mind in the Super Nintendo release of Final Fantasy IV in America, but it was renamed Zemus' Mind for the Game Boy Advance remake and later versions, which is closer to the original intent from the Super Famicom release in Japan.) The Mind creature appears in the game as a large humanoid (or half of one, at least!) so I started with the 12" action figure version of the Human Torch from the 2005 Fantastic Four film. Where the Breath (who shares a game sprite design) was orange, the Mind is purple, so I had to spray paint the toy using a translucent polycarbonate spray paint that I bought online. That stuff smelled toxic. I'm sure I killed some brain cells. Anyway, I used a Tamashii flame effect for this project, attaching the parts to each other, and hooking a couple of them to the arms of the figure. The Mind has a weird inverse color scheme, with highlights where there should be shadow and dark spots where the light should be hitting him. That means he has black eyeballs with white pupils! I tried to reproduce that look as closely as possible using my airbrush. Note that the game sprite for the Mind is normally semi-translucent, but it turns opaque when you cast magic spells upon it in the game—the only such time you get a glimpse of the game sprite as it was originally designed. |
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