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Okay so the question is simple, I'd like to see if anyone can answer this for me.

In all artistic renderings of the Final Fantasy VI character Terra, she has blond hair. That includes cut-scenes for the ps1 and portraits of the character, drawn by character designer Yoshitaka Amano, such as this picture here.

-------------------->Amano's Terra


But, in the game, all visuals of Terra clearly show that she has green hair.


WHY?


I can't figure it out. I thought maybe there was an error in designing the character for the super nintendo, that somehow the color blond that they were going for was lost because of the systems 16-bit color restrictions, but that is just ridiculous. Is this just... a who knows? Is there a solid reason for this? I'm dying to know.

I am almost sure that there are over nine thousand threads addressing this issue, but I can't seem to find them.

First of all, apparently Square thought players would get Celes and Terra confused if Terra had blonde hair, which we almost certainly would.

Second of all, Amano draws all of his female characters (and most of the male) with blonde hair, but the sixteen-bit sprites rarely keep to this rule; see Lenna and Faris in FF5, both of whom were drawn with blonde hair and both of whom had technicolor hair in their sprite forms.

Third of all, Terra's unique palette does not really allow for blonde hair. See this thread for more details on that.

Fourth of all, just because she was presented with green hair does not necessarily mean her character was supposed to have obviously out-of-place green hair in the game. It's an anime convention to use wacky-colored hair for characters, with the implicit understanding on the viewer's part that it's meant to differentiate between characters, not to represent that they went crazy with a bottle of Screamin' Green hair dye.

Fifth of all, in the PSX movies, if you look closely you can see that Terra's hair actually has a green sheen to it.

Last, and most importantly, green hair is much cooler than blonde.

This post has been edited by L. Cully on 11th October 2007 13:14

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Eternal Sleep, Track 1-1: The Blue Planet

I'm pretty sure this has been discussed before (in fact I know it has) but I believe the most widely accepted answer is that the game developers wanted to make it easier to differentiate between Terra and Celes.

Edit: Thanks Cully.

This post has been edited by Strideo on 11th October 2007 13:14

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Quote (L. Cully @ 11th October 2007 09:12)

Fifth of all, in the PSX movies, if you look closely you can see that Terra's hair actually has a green sheen to it.

For what it's worth, I would be just as willing to think that any sheen might be as likely to have been an accident as intentional, given that the SNES remakes on PSX got the Square FMV B-Team to develop them.

All told, excellent points, though, and if you say you couldn't find the threads, I'm not about to go looking for them!

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

I looked to see if I could get this answered before posting a new thread, but I couldn't, and so here I am.

And now that I've asked, I almost feel silly because the answer is so obvious... and doldrum.

I was really hoping for something exciting! And spicy! But I was never really going to get that was I?

Mah bad.

Quote (L. Cully @ 11th October 2007 13:12)

Third of all, Terra's unique palette does not really allow for blonde hair. See this thread for more details on that.

Actually, it does. The dark-green hair shade & the dark green of her eyes are two different colors, so a simple sprite editor can make her blond.

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Quote (crashman_alpha @ 11th October 2007 12:49)

Actually, it does. The dark-green hair shade & the dark green of her eyes are two different colors, so a simple sprite editor can make her blond.

Er... what? Certainly a sprite editor can do anything. One could make her hair black, or chartreuse, if one wanted.

I meant that in the palette that Square gave Terra, there are no yellow colors for blonde hair -- besides a rather ugly brass-orange that would be even farther from Amano's original "vision" than green, IMO.

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Some ghost of me might greet my son
the day he is delivered.


Eternal Sleep, Track 1-1: The Blue Planet

Quote (crashman_alpha @ 11th October 2007 12:49)

Quote (L. Cully @ 11th October 2007 13:12)

Third of all, Terra's unique palette does not really allow for blonde hair.  See this thread for more details on that.

Actually, it does. The dark-green hair shade & the dark green of her eyes are two different colors, so a simple sprite editor can make her blond.

While you can replace the color, don't forget that her palette is shared by multiple other sprites as well.

That's the big problem here. The SNES can only display up to 256 onscreen colors at any given time, so sprites have to share 16-color palettes. Hence why certain color arrangements are impossible - there just isn't enough room to load more than a handfull of palettes into memory.

Edit: If you want to see an example of how this can be a problem, bring Sabin and Edgar along when doing the Opera House scene. When Celes blushes after being proposed to, the Figaro twins do so as well. This is because all three sprites share the same palette and the game makes Celes blush by changing her "skin" color to something redder.

The same would happen to other sprites if Terra's palette were altered.

This post has been edited by Silverlance on 12th October 2007 04:08

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I am a fan of the green. I think regardless of the reasons for this and that, players of the game came to identify Terra as being green haired. It would have been nice if future artwork would have adjusted to the communities familiarity. To my understanding, usually in-game renderings and artwork are based off of concept art. Regardless of how close the resemblance between the two, subsequent artwork is based on the game. At least the fan-art follows this guide!

To bring up another discrepancy, on my original SNES cartridge Gau had bright blonde hair with his character portrait showing green. Now that I am playing the game again on a ROM, Gau's hair is a dark green.

As for Gau, I think there's a hack somewhere where they actually recolored his hair.

Or at least, I remember seeing green-haired Gau used as an avatar here. I think so.

As for Terra's green hair, everything I could say about it has been covered by L. Cully. And heck, I was one of those people who started a thread about her hair.

(Wow, this reminds me of a topic I started years back about Terra's hair. I remember I got into trouble for spamming the topic that that topic originated from with a notification that I'd started a new topic....okay, I'll stop saying "topic".)

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Quote (hojomommy @ 11th October 2007 07:48)

Okay so the question is simple, I'd like to see if anyone can answer this for me.

In all artistic renderings of the Final Fantasy VI character Terra, she has blond hair. That includes cut-scenes for the ps1 and portraits of the character, drawn by character designer Yoshitaka Amano, such as this picture here.

-------------------->Amano's Terra


But, in the game, all visuals of Terra clearly show that she has green hair.


WHY?


I can't figure it out. I thought maybe there was an error in designing the character for the super nintendo, that somehow the color blond that they were going for was lost because of the systems 16-bit color restrictions, but that is just ridiculous. Is this just... a who knows? Is there a solid reason for this? I'm dying to know.

mod your game

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