The 1991 “Nintendo Power” magazine promoting “Final Fantasy II” on the Super Nintendo featured some spectacular manga of the game’s heroes. Fans who saw these remember them fondly decades later, and it’s been suggested to hack them into the game— working notes are collected here for this project, “K.Terada FF4 Portraits”.

Guidelines

  1. Modify the Nintendo Power art as little as possible
    1. Full body portraits aren’t possible given the 32 by 32 pixel dimensions
    2. Cropping a head-and-shoulders or a face portrait of each character and deciding which approach to use is the first step
    3. Create 16 color images (needs 1 clear color, and 1 shared black outline color)
  2. Find more work by K. Terada to use for the characters that were not featured in the N.P. issue.

Nintendo Power Manga

Paladin Cecil

Yes I know it says Dark Knight Cecil behind this image. It’s obviously meant to be Paladin Cecil.

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Kain

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The origin of the subligar armor in FFXI? 🤔

No way to get it into the portrait, mercifully.

Rydia

Sis is CALLing. She is beckoning, even!

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Tellah

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The bird is such a colorful touch! Where did it come from? Makes me wonder how much information Terada-san had to work with, when he was commissioned for these character sketches!

Edward

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Edward looks stricken: either with fear, grief, or maybe even both. Totes on brand.

Rosa

Love this “Mad Max”-esque ensemble for Rosa. Perhaps the first underboob I ever saw. 😻 I’m personally in favor of the “head and shoulders” option for these based on this one alone.

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