Okay! I think I'm done with this! At least I'm not willing to work on it anymore hahah
Kind of a B-side painting to Hard Rain.
Also heavily inspired by a piece by @pkdinosaur (who I hope doesn't mind me tagging them!!) because the vibe was immaculate and I wanted to try out something similar
Trying to find a good middle ground between rendering styles for me. It's always an experiment~ Maybe also the next painting won't be BLUE AGAIN
In an alternative universe where Earthbound 64 and Super Mario RPG 2 merged development
I'm supposing in the context of this version, the Star Spirits serve as the guardians of the needles instead, but instead of vanishing they are freed upon each needle? And maybe you encounter the Masked Man much more often as a result.
Don't ask why Lucas has Goombario as his partner tho lol, too lazy to make a custom partner even though partners based on chimeras would be cute.
Paper Mario assets other than character sprites are a lot harder to come by than Undertale, probably because of its use of 3d backgrounds, so I had to edit screenshots I took from a playthrough to make these. Things aren't gonna look perfect and resolution is low as a result unfortunately. In addition, I struggled to replicate the smoothing effect seen in-game. (and finally: nobody seems to know let alone have the font used in the original Paper Mario, so I used Hey Gorgeous, which mimics the font used in TTYD)
That said, I'm proud of my sprite work if nothing else. I wanted to make more, but this already took a lot of work.
Credit to the Spriter's Resource for various sprites I ripped