Sniper Joe Green and Yellow Outfit with Helmet from the Mega Man series

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So today is the other costume day that I promised to my husband – he was starting to offer me money, so I thought that I really had better humor him – and he wanted a Sniper Joe outfit. Apparently Sniper Joe is a Mega Man enemy, a mass-produced Protoman clone. (Brian’s been on a real Protomen kick lately, you see…)

Well, of course I get slightly bored with things like that, so I gave Sniper Joe – let’s call her Sniper Jo – a cute little skirt. Her shield is smaller than it is supposed to be, I think, so let’s pretend she’s an updated model who can take down Mega Man just fine without that clunky big shield, thank you…

So now you have a taste of what this blog would be like if my husband was the artist… Tomorrow, back to cute dresses, I think.

Scribblenauts Outfit with Rooster Hat and Pencil

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So while I promised you all four weeks of to-be-determined Halloween themes, this did leave three days at the beginning of the month, and those I promised to my husband. One of those he graciously returned for my use so I could make an October birthday dress in a timely fashion; the other two days I’m drawing as he wishes.

This first day is devoted to an outfit from the game Scribblenauts. It’s a DS puzzle game where you can solve challenges by writing almost any noun you can think of, then using it in some fashion. For example, in one level near the beginning, you have to knock over a stack of bottles without using “guns or cheating.” I created a bowling ball and tossed it at the bottles. Brian summoned a whale and dropped it directly over the stack. (We’ve been having these conversations that go like this: “How did you get past this stage? NO WAY. You can do that?” He also schooled me on proper summoning of Scribblenaut zombies…)

Anyways, this outfit belongs to the main character, Maxwell (although you can use different avatars in the game – I like running around as a bride). It’s pretty flat, but then the game is like that, so it works out well enough.

I’m sorry I didn’t post anything yesterday. I am almost all done with another paper doll, but her head is all wrong and I haven’t got it fixed to my satisfaction yet. I’ll try to put her up soon, though.

Tomorrow, we have Mega Man (OK, technically we have Sniper Joe, and probably with a cute little skirt at that). And then soon, in a surprise upset, Lord of the Rings beats fairies for week one of Halloween… For most of the time fairies had a comfortable lead. I would think some LOTR fansite linked to me, except for that I don’t see anything like that in my referrers… I guess the poll is not quite done yet, so it could still change, but I’m thinking starting next Sunday is hobbit o’clock.

Nera’s Dress from Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

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Brian got Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride a little while back, and we traded off turns playing it for weeks. In terms of overall plot it’s pulled straight from the big book of RPG cliches – evil dude wants to take over! only the legendary hero can defeat him! queens are kidnapped! – but there’s two things that really make it great. One is “party talk,” where in different situations (entering a new town or dungeon level, for example, or after talking to most NPCs) you can talk to the characters that are in your group. The amount of dialogue this game must have is staggering – imagine writing a different response for all those different characters! It’s amusing because a lot of the time it’s stuff that you, the player, are probably thinking, so hearing it from another character in their own voice can be a little startling. It really helps make the characters real, too, when they have their own takes on situations or wonder about things that you might not even have noticed. That leads into the other thing that makes the game great: the generation system. You start out as a little kid, then time skips forward and you play as an adult, getting married, and then time skips forward again and your children are old enough to go adventuring with you. So it’s not like your character is accompanied by some random red mage, fighter and white mage: you’re almost always with friends, often with family, and they always have some interesting thing to say. For someone like me, who likes story and character interaction better than battle systems and so on, the game was great fun.

In the DS version of the game, you have the option to marry three women: Bianca, your childhood friend, Nera, the kind and gentle daughter of a rich family, and Deborah, Nera’s haughty and blunt sister. The game pushes you to choose Bianca (you have adventures with her in your childhoods, Nera has another guy that loves her, heck, in the old versions of the game if you didn’t choose Bianca her father died) but you can choose any of them. So I did choose Bianca my first time around, but Nera definitely has the prettier dress, and anyways she’s more my type, if I was a male RPG hero. (Although I suspect that playing the game with Deborah around to talk to is the most fun.)

Hinawa’s Red and White Dress from Mother 3

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OK, I really can’t call this dress a costume, since it’s from a video game I’m very excited about, although it would make a good and easy, albeit verrrry obscure, Halloween costume. This is an outfit from the Game Boy Advance game Mother 3, worn by the main characters’ mother whose name is Hinawa. Mother is a series of Japanese RPGs, the second one of which is known in America as Earthbound. (The first one was fully localized, but never released in America.) Mother 2 (Earthbound) was a quirky, sometimes creepy, playful game which was extremely popular in Japan, but not so much in America. However, it became a cult classic and it attracted a huge, dedicated fanbase. They tried like crazy to get Nintendo’s attention, but even after sending Nintendo a petition to bring Mother 3 to America with more than 30,000 signatures, they were ignored. After Mother 3 came out two years ago and it was confirmed that there were no plans to bring Mother 3 out in English, they got together and made a translation themselves. It’s a fantastic game — if you liked Earthbound, please try Mother 3!

New poll soon…

Cloud Strife’s Purple Dress from Final Fantasy VII

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This demure-seeming dress is actually not as innocent as one might think. It belongs to a videogame character named Cloud Strife; with each successive post-Final Fantasy VII appearance he makes, he becomes cooler and cooler. It’s as if to help us all forget that in FF7, rather shortly after you first meet him, you had to dress him up like a girl to gain access to the red light district. (The first time I played that part, I had my mom watching. Awkward.) Your female co-conspirators Tifa and Aeris have plunging necklines and bared arms in their chosen dresses, but with Cloud we are spared that vision…

FF7 has been on my mind recently on account of Brian starting to play it again, but our PS2 is now quite thoroughly kaput, and I don’t think he’ll have the heart to start it up again just to have it crash once more.

Princess Garnet’s White Gown from Final Fantasy IX

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Brian finished Final Fantasy IX recently, and since I’ve always loved the gown that Garnet a.k.a. Dagger wears at the beginning and end of the game, I just had to paperdoll it. For cutting this one out, it ought to work to cut the sleeve around the ends, and then both arm and sleeve go above the skirt. I am tempted to do a “Fancy Gowns of Final Fantasy Games” series…

Once again, Verithin pencils to the rescue with those vines. I love those things.

Don’t forget to vote for the mermaid tail for next Monday:

Red, Black and Gold Captain’s Outfit based on Puzzle Pirates

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I downloaded Puzzle Pirates the other day — it just looked too cute not to give it a try. And indeed it was very cute, and I played a good deal of it for a couple of days. There’s a lot of puzzles to try, although I only really liked one or two of them, and the world is fun too: you can do puzzles by yourself, but you can also do them as a team, everyone working on a different kind of puzzle to make your little pirate ship sail smoothly, and it’s a lot more fun doing puzzles when you feel like it’s contributing to the speed of the ship or patching up the holes. You can also buy items for your house, or cute clothes to wear, which is where today’s paperdoll comes in.

The game has a lot of different items of clothing you can buy, and then the colors can be customized. Today’s paperdoll is based on a captain’s hat, a buccaneer jacket, flare pants and buckle shoes. One interesting thing about the clothing system is that different colors cost different amounts; this ensemble uses two of the most expensive colors, black and gold, making the estimated cost well over $100,000. Changing the colors to brown, green and white lowers it to about $7,000. So, of course, Sylvia is an admirable pirate, very skilled at plundering and puzzles, and wears plenty of black and gold. (My in-game character wears plenty of white and a shirt she got for free.)

I found this site when thinking about this paperdoll: Quid Pro Clothes, which is the website for one of the in-game tailors. (Players can just do puzzles, like me, or they can get into the metagame and the economy and start their own stores, buy their own ships, etc.) This site essentially removes much of my need to play the game, because of one reason: if you sign up for the site, it lets you play with the clothes without having to spend hours and hours saving the money first. You can also look at other people’s creations; I like this take on the Greek gods.

On a side note, apologies to Mom for driving her crazy today as I enlist her help in resume creation. “Remember it goes like this: letter first, paperdoll second” she says.

Archades NPC red dress from Final Fantasy XII

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This is just a red gown worn by a random Archades resident in Final Fantasy XII. I thought the original in the game was really pretty, but I don’t like how the drawing came out in the first place, though, and then my scanner ate it and playing around in Photoshop didn’t make it better. (Note to self: until new scanner arrives next week, white things scan better…)

It turns out that I don’t know how to color copper. So, once I figure it out, expect to see a mermaid with a copper tail soon, to compliment her gold-tailed sister…

Princess Ashe’s Wedding Dress from Final Fantasy XII

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So I started playing Final Fantasy XII again recently. (It works nicely with my job. For my fifteen minute breaks, I do dishes and pick up, and on my half-hour break I go beat up some skeletons.) I think the thing I love most about the game is the lushly textured world design… everything is just so pretty. Funny, then, that I don’t really like the character designs for the main characters, except Fran and Balthier. (Don’t get me started on Penelo’s weird leather wings … or Ashe’s little sailor collar… or Vaan the most well-dressed orphaned urchin ever … or Basch’s potholder) I was thinking that I should paperdoll the NPCs, because each major area has its own style, and the female townspeople always looked really cool to me, especially the Arcades women. Luckily, I found a great Ashe shrine that has screen captures of the dress, plus the original concept art, which meant I got to abandon my half-hearted sketch of her regular costume and go for this one instead!

This is Ashe’s wedding dress, and you see it in the very first part of the game, followed soon after by her mourning dress. If I didn’t do the wedding dress, I’d have done a white dress she wears that I also liked, which as it turns out is just a white and grey version of her mourning dress. Maybe another day…

Scanner messed this one up too, but I fixed it up well enough. Does anyone have any idea why it does that? It scans intially sort of softer and the colors are true to the page, then when the scan or preview is done, the colors get more saturated and it looks kind of like someone ran a sharpen filter on the whole thing…

Flora’s Red Gown from Professor Layton and the Curious Village

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I’ve been into Professor Layton and the Curious Village lately, playing it every chance I got – using my 15 minute breaks during work to ferry those miserable wolves and chickens across the river, and so on. You come across this dress early in the game, and I thought it was lovely, even if Flora is rather younger than Sylvia. I’m rather fond of Layton’s outfit, actually… who knew brown and orange worked together so well, or that a top hat can be pulled off in any way, shape or form. If I didn’t have so many other outfits I want, I’d so do a female version…

Incidentally, Flora in the Japanese version is named アロマ, or, rather literally romanized, “Aroma.” I can see it as being “Alma” if one slurs quickly over the vowel of the ‘ro’… or maybe it’s just meant to be Aroma. Who knows…

I’d like to do an Oscar dress this year, but I’m not really feeling any of them. Possibly the scaly mermaid one…