Great as this looks, the bright colors, relatively light texture and larger areas of color remind me more of the style of the earlier FF installments.

Why is Mario the only one that lost hp?

okay that's what I thought, just wanted to make sure. :P Great piece once again.

No, he never had a smiley in his chest. He has some other thing in there. The upside-down smiley is a symbol I use to represent myself and to sign work; I hid it in his chest because it was a way to sign this covertly.

Thanks!

Am I going crazy, or did Tabuu always have a smily face in his chest?

Either way great work BlackMarket, the background is absolutely kickass and defs my favourite part of this piece.

I've never really paid much attention to the style of Final Fantasy sprites, but I kinda like this. Tabuu needs his old gritty man look, though, and I can't quite capture that here.

Phantom! Thanks a lot! I was scouering the lists of FF6 enemies to look for something to work with and I found nothing that could help, when I should have been looking at Espers too... Thank you!

Fair enough. I meant to say before... the sprite for the esper Phantom might be a good reference for capturing that glowy-translucenty effect. It's a lot less dull than what you have now (and so looks less... radiant?) but I guess that's kind of FF6's nature. Given the doubled size, it might be a bit hard to capture FF's style anyway, so take what Ive said with a grain of salt.

Good eye. FF6's sprites are exactly half the size of what I've done here - I doubled the size of everything for this.

Tabuu, being translucent and patterned was very difficult to shade like an FF6 sprite and keep him looking like himself at the same time. I ended up having to make a compromise somewhere along the line. In retrospect, I probably should have at least posed him the same way Kefka is posed at least.

I think one of the major problems is that your sprites are far to big to resemble ff6's. Some of the largest sprites in ff6 are around half the size of yours (Kefka's final-form sprite, for example, is only 127x127) while your Tabuu's body alone is around 200 pixels tall. The other thing is that most of the FF sprites seem to rely pretty heavily on (as good as) straight black for their darkest shade, and generally use less saturated colours.

I really love that background. <3

I have no idea about Tabuu or FF6 or any of that ... but I dig the style and like the piece!

9999 HP is cheating