I've been playing through the Etrian Odyssey HD collection, and simply put, the second game has been kicking my ass. I've recently cleared the 3rd stratum, but only because Wisp, my hexer, managed to lock some tough battles down. If you've not played the series, hexers are a mesmer type class - that is, they specialize in inflicting status effects and debuffs on enemies. A small branch of their skill tree is based around Evil Eye, an ability which inflicts the terror status, giving enemies a fair chance to be too scared to act. Once an enemy is terrified, the hexer can command it to not act, to attack a comrade, or, most fun and powerful of all, to attack itself (at max skill level, the enemy will hit itself 3 times, generally for more damage with each hit than even my strongest character). Keep in mind that these commands override whatever the enemy would have tried to do, meaning as long as an enemy is terrified, the hexer can completely lock it down as it attacks itself instead of the party.

There are some rough fights in Etrian, and it's very easy to get in over your head. Etrian 2 in particular seems eager to play with the variety of its mechanics right out the gate, so by floor 15 its not holding too much back. Battles are vicious. The stratum boss is able to attack multiple party members for their entire HP bar and then some (I don't think I'm particularly underleveled at this point, but I do refuse to turn off Expert difficulty).

Enter Wisp.

Turntable animation of Etrian Odyssey 2's Hexer.

In random encounters, Wisp's Evil Eye is able to prevent enemies from attacking or inflicting petrification. While bosses are resistant to most statuses, rarely are they immune. If the terror takes hold, Wisp stares down this singular enemy, turning their great strength against themself. Where my specialized damage dealers were struggling to hit three digits of damage, the boss was doing over 200 each of its three hits each turn at Wisp's silent command.

There's a beauty in turn-based combat systems with minimal visuals. As extravagant as things like FF7's summons can be, the imagination filling in the blanks is a wonderful thing. That's the inspiration behind this piece. Battles raging on, my party on the back foot, but in the back lines there's Wisp, staring. Her character portrait is evocative, this gorgeous art by Yuji Himukai speaking volumes to a character you give a name and little more to. Over all the noise, the din of battle, there is this quiet fear creeping from shadows, a silent song of torment, and if it takes hold the tide turns so suddenly, a crashing wave of tension.

For me, this becomes an incredible sense of relief every turn I see that little terror icon over the enemy's head. But what would that be like from their point of view?

Hexer texture details.

That's a bit of what I wanted to capture with this piece. I was already tossing around the idea of modeling an Etrian character because I simply love the art, but what cemented the hexer as the focus was this concept of her eyes following the viewer silently, even in this static pose. The creeping shadows swirling at her feet was something I was less sure of, but certainly wanted to try. The eyes though, that was the concept that got me to put down my Switch and go open Blender.

An idea I did try but ultimately cut was rotating the shadow texture on her legs as well. It didn't read well and added too much visual noise. The movement needed to be subtle and understated, but also clear. I wanted to have that brief doubt, that quick second-guessing that the eyes are following, the shadows are moving, and is that blood on the snow?

When I started this model, I hadn't quite decided on a technical style to aim for. This non-commitment cost about 2 hours of what is best called exploration (and uncharitably would be called wasted work). I had a leg I was happy with and streamed about 2 hours working on a torso and cloak that was devouring triangles and just not shaping up how I wanted it. This solidified the thought that I should aim for Nintendo DS technical limitations (the system Etrain Odyssey 2 originally launched on), but I also had the lingering idea of how the 3DS had these delightful system menu models for game titles (that's where the little snow platform comes from). While I didn't dig too deeply into how the graphics systems work for the DS, I have previously explored a number of models for the system. I did check on texture filtering, a key characteristic differentiating the visuals of the N64 and PSX: The DS is similar to the latter, relying on nearest-neighbor scaling.

Hexer WIPs progression.

Thus armed with model reference and a clearer idea of goals, I had a target of 350-400 triangles. My hexer model is 394 triangles with a single 128px square texture (using only 32 colors was a personal limitation I set, not necessarily a technical choice). Note this excludes the snow platform, which has its own 64 triangles and texture, much of which unused space. I had considered doing a bit of forest background, but frankly my attempt didn't look right stylistically. However, it did become the base background of my video render after some intense blurring.

There is one technical aspect I'm not entrily happy with, and that's UV crimes. I must admit, my UVs are probably not very good in most cases, but there's always a point where it stops being "this is fine" and it starts being "this is a crime." For this piece, it's the hair, just the upper section where it goes from dark to light with a bit of outline to keep it separate from the face, but those UVs are very specially crafted to get the lines and portioning to work and look nice. Under the hood, it's not pretty or nice and if I tried exporting this out of Blender it may not work quite the same way. UV crimes are something I fall back into far too often, and I really need to break that habit. I can't keep getting away with it (because it does cause problems if I ever decide to revisit a piece).

All in all, I'm very happy with how this piece turned out. I may have done a tiny little UV crime to make it happen, but I'm happy, it worked out, I'm glad I cut the ideas that weren't working, and I hit my triangle budget. Were this model actually on the Nintendo DS, I may have some more to say regarding where I spent my texture detailing (that medallion would be like 2 pixels at best on the hardware). I had thought to maybe try some more pixelated rendering I've seen other low-poly modelers use, but that's another idea I cut because it wasn't working. (I maybe did just go and try another test render of this, but I still find it wanting.) Ultimately, this came out how I wanted, which may not necessarily be what I originally envisioned, but it nailed the concepts I was going for. While I have called this an Etrian 2 Hexer model, the truth is it is my hexer. It is this silent terror on the backline, controlling the battlefield with her freezing cold stare. It is Wisp.