| EDGE
PROJECT #455 "Think I'm just a spoiled prince, huh? The Royal Family of Eblan are trained as Ninja! I can take care of this myself, okay?" Preamble: Our heroes first encountered Edward "Edge" Geraldine within the mysterious Tower of Bab-il, a lone warrior who was determined to single handedly take on Rubicant, one of the Four Fiends of Elements, who was responsible for destroyed his castle home Eblan and kidnapping his parents. Edge joined forced with Cecil and his crew, and was forced to dispatch his own mother and father, who had been transformed into hideous monsters by Rubicant's minions. Edge was the most effective against combatants when he was given free reign to throw spare weapons from the party's inventory during a fight, doing significant damage to enemies but losing those weapons forever (unless he mastered the arcane Ninja magic of infinite weapon duplication, of course). Despite being a newcomer to Cecil's quest, Edge's skills proved sufficient that he was among the party members who assembled for the trip through the subterranean passages of the Moon and, ultimately, the final confrontation with Zemus. Although it took me a long time to finally getting around to making this project, Edge was actually my first Final Fantasy project idea. The Strider action figure was just so perfect, with the cape and mask and everything, that I knew it would made the ideal Edge toy. In fact, had I never seen this toy in stores to begin with, I might never have done any of these other Final Fantasy projects at all. Construction: The first thing I did was take apart this toy to figure out how it worked. Strider had a gimmick where his right forearm would rotate whenever you turned his waist—connected by a thick rubber band, as it turns out. I hated the way his forearm was stuck in the wrong position when the toy was at rest, though, so I gutted the gimmick and glued his arm together. I also added some articulation to both his wrists since I wanted him to be able to hold his swords dynamically—cutting off his hands, cutting off a section of his wrist, drilling holes into his arm stumps, reattaching the wrists, and attaching small screws to his hands to serve as pegs. Some toys require a lot of modifications to make them look like the characters I'm building, and others hardly require any. This was such an ideal toy to turn into Edge that I really didn't have to do much to it—I removed his original belt and the weapon harness on his back, added some arm guards, hip guards, and a shoulder pad (originally some leftover armor from a Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog figure I used for a previous project) and gave him a new cape (borrowing the one from a Piccolo figure from Burger King's old Dragon Ball Z promotion). I also scratchbuilt a new belt using some assorted odds n' ends (It's a Donatello belt with pieces of Usagi Yojimbo armor stuck to it). I wanted him to have identical swords to represent the Murasame and Masamune, the sister swords Edge finds after venturing into the Lunar subterranean caverns. I settled on the weapons that came with the Foot Soldier from the 2003 TMNT line, because I liked how they were so ornately styled. (I did shorten the handles so they didn't look quite so huge in his hands.) The design and style of weapons in this game don't get a lot of love (we don't actually see most of them, just icons that represent them), but there are game sprites for both the Masamune and Murasame, so in painting them I remained as faithful to their game appearance as possible. I admit that a sword with a red blade is pretty unconventional, but it's also kind of cool. (In the game, one sword has yellow accents and the other has grey. I couldn't decide whether to actually use grey and yellow or whether to convert them to a silver and gold, which seem more likely what the metal swords are "really" colored like. I compromised and used both, saving the unmetallic colors for the tassles at the ends of the hilts.) Comments: Edge's multiple game sprites don't completely agree with each other as far as their color schemes, though the disparity isn't quite as jarring here as it is with other characters. (His cape is red when he's walking around in towns but it's purple when he's in combat, so I had to compromise and made the inside of the cape a different color than the outside.) I'm aware that there's much more detailed and elaborate artwork available of most of the characters these days, but they're all new interpretations of Yoshitaka Amano's character designs, and have nothing to do with the original game experience. The game sprites are highly pixelated and largely open to interpretation, but Amano's designs are pretty abstract to begin with, so using them as a reference didn't seem to make much sense. (The artwork I referred to the most was his super-deformed character illustration, which was used as the control art for his appearance in the game.) I wanted to come up with a version of Edge that was authentic to his true game appearance, as I experienced it for Super Nintendo in 1991. |
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This Page Created 9/9/2010
Last Update: 9/12/2010
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