The original Final Fantasy on the NES has six character classes the player can build their party with: fighter, thief, black belt, red mage, white mage, and black mage. Video games of this vintage were often limited in how many colors they could display on a single object. Consequently, each character class is represented by a sprite with only three colors + black.¹
¹ I can't say for sure, but I'd bet the black is actually a transparency, and these sprites were just always rendered on a black background.
The characters are grouped together in two color palletes. The fighter, red mage, and white mage are both rendered using red, white, and a light peach²; while the thief, black belt, and black mage are rendered in blue, yellow, and brown.
² It is utterly maddening that English doesn't have a better word for "white person's skin tone." smh
Shortly after I completed the game I was thinking about good cross stitching projects. Something that flexed my creativity, without setting too difficult a challenge for my first foray into the textile arts. It occurred to me that I could create a third set of characters by combining the two color palletes together. Perhaps in brown, red, and blue? I told a friend about the idea, and a few days later I woke up to discover all the materials I would need in a little baggie beside my bed.
I wanted these to fit within the context of the original game as neatly as I could manage, both artistically, and conceptually. The game's six classes can also be broken down into three pairs: the physical damage dealers (fighter and black belt), the magic users (white mage and black mage), and the oddballs³ (thief and red mage). So, if my new pallete included one of each of these, the current balance of character types would be maintained.
³ Admittedly, "oddballs" is kind of a cop out of a category, but I think it fits. The Red Mage is good at everything, and the Thief is bad at everything.
I settled on these designs for my alternate-universe version of Final Fantasy, with 9 character classes instead of 6. Then I spent the next 18 months stitching them. I took a lot of breaks. Cross stitching is deeply engrossing while I'm enjoying it, but it's very easy to fall out of love with for months at a time.
The Barbarian was the first I designed, and first I attempted. The strictly limited size of these sprites really forced me to decide which details to include. How does one depict "barbarian" when every spot of color added to one feature necessarily removes space that might be used on other features? Muscular arms seemed the most sensible place to start, so I started with the Black Belt's arm (strongest looking of the original six) and added just a bit of mass in a few places. I further emphasized this by using the Thief's posture on the rear arm, so I could really show off how swol this fella is.
Scraggly hair, uncut beard, loin cloth, and sandals are there to suggest this is a wild man, untamed by civilization. Rendering his eye in red seemed like a good way to indicate his berzerker frenzy, and the rest of the color decisions flowed from there. Blue hair so the eye wouldn't blend into it, and by process of elimenation that left red for his clothes.
In retrospect the blue hair seems like a fortuitous accident, as I now read it as a thick cake of woad. By that logic I suppose he could also have had blue skin and brown hair, but somehow I don't think that would have looked as good as this does.
Mechanically, the Barbarian might be a simple automated character, like Umaro in Final Fantasy 6. To be real with you though, I've always hated Umaro. I think it'd be much more interesting if the Barbarian was able to use weapons like the fighter, but was unable to wear armor. Any time he takes damage he has a small chance to make an immediate automated counter-attack. Perhaps the counter attack is guaranteed if the barbarian takes enough damage to be slain? The character would be a physical damage glass canon: able to increase the party's damage output by a whole extra attack per turn, but not able to soak up much damage.
The Psion is perhaps my favorite design. It was fun to look at the robes of the other two clothies, and find some third way to depict draping fabric. That was the most interesting rendering challenge of this project, and the one I feel most successful at. Her cinched waist, furled hood, tighter sleeves, and bare feet create shapes that feels both distinct and natural to me. I also love her huge bald dome. Such a fun feature in this set of characters who are largely defined by their distinct hair styles or hats.
I also like how red she is, with just a small splash of blue at the waist. Incidentally the other two characters I created feel defined by their blue-ness, so this is a nice contrast. Pretty sure I was thinking about the Red Wizards of Thay here. They're a group of villains in Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms which I don't actually know anything about, but which have a cool name and always look cool in art.
Mechanically, I'm not sure what to do with her. A third spell list distinct from the other two is the most obvious choice, perhaps focusing on mind-affecting spells? Yet the Black Mage already has SLEEP, HOLD, and CONFUSE, so that route either requires the spell lists to have overlap, or redesigning the Black Mage's spell list as well. Perhaps a more fruitful idea would be for the psion to have two abilities: a mental attack which deals middling damage to foes, or a heal which restores a small amount of HP to their allies. Like the other two caster classes, the Psion can learn abilities by buying them in towns. However, the psion does not "cast" these abilities. Instead, they become attached as bonuses with a % chance to occur each time the psion deals damage or heals.
So, for example, the Psion might heal the fighter, and that heal might have a 5% chance to also increase the fighter's attack power. Or the Psion might deal damage to a foe, and that damage also has a 5% chance to put the foe to sleep. As the psion levels up and gains more of these abilities, some effect will occur more and more often, but never in a way that is predictable for the player. Though the player would curate the ability list somewhat. Like the other two casters, each level of psionic power would have 4 options, but each psion could only learn 3 of them.
The Beast Master is definitely an oddball. I think I was successful in crafting something offbeat yet still consistent with the oeuvre that Final Fantasy was drawing from. I'm conflicted about the pointing finger. It doesn't feel quite right for a resting pose, but it's also doing a lot of work to communicate what this character class's deal is. I'm also quite happy with my pixel rendering of a cowboy hat. It's not quite as successful as the robes of the Psion, but at the same time I had fewer relevant references among the existing characters to work from.
I had no references at all for the dog. I wonder how a more developed pixel artist would have handled that element. I don't think it looks bad necessarily, especially considering I was limited to less than half the height of a character. It's a very boxy looking dog, though.
Mechanically, they're a natural fit for the Blue Mage skillset that would eventually become a staple of the series that followed that original game. When the character is hit by certain enemy attacks, they learn those attacks, and can use them from then on. In this instance, rather than learning them as spells, the Beast Master would be training their dog how to use GAZE, SNORT, STUN, DEADLY GAS, etc. Admittedly the original game has a much more limited list of enemy skills than later entries in the series do, but I think there's enough there for this to be fun.
As a capstone to the project, I wanted to place all my new characters in a scene against one of the game's coolest looking bosses: Kary the Fiend of Fire. I'm immensely proud of this piece. Making it was a miserable slog that I never want to repeat. I really comitted myself to doing black floss on black aida. The effect is striking. Leaving the black areas of the art blank and allowing the black aida to fill that space really doesn't have anywhere near as much visual impact. At the same time, the individual stitches are nearly invisible while you're laying them in, which makes the whole process slow, and prone to mistakes which then need to be undone.
The fighter gets to tag along, since you need 4 characters for a full party. In retrospect though, it might have been fun for the fighter to be KO'd here, to further let my invented character classes shine. The Beast Master gets to be the one taking action. It's pretty easy to imagine how the Barbarian and the Psion would be animated, but the Beast Master benefits a lot from having a second pose to look at. I'm also much happier with how the dog looks here.
This final piece demonstrates an interesting way in which cross stitch is a medium uniquely suited to pixel art. At this scale, where each pixel of the characters is represented by a single cross stitch, there's a fuzziness to the rendering. The X of fibre isn't a perfect square of color, and this style of pixel art was always intended to be seen through the fuzzing effect of a CRT display.
—Nick LS Whelan
March 1, 2025