HALFWAY THERE!!!!

Day fifteen of the 30-day drawing challenge is to draw someone from your favorite board or video game.

Being a gamer for over 25 years, there’s a LOT of potential candidates for this thread.

My favorite game of ALL TIME though? The winner by a very narrow margin (to Final Fantasy IV or VI), is Valkyrie Profile, the epic (and very underrated) RPG from Tri-ace.

Since I’ve drawn the main characters (Lenneth Valkyrie and Lezzard Valeth) from this game plenty of times, I wanted to focus on my two favorite ancillary characters in the story — Suo (a samurai from Wakoku) and Shiho (a blind battle songstress from Hai Lan).

Those of you who are familiar with this game know that every character you encounter will have a VERY tragic fate.

These two characters are combatants from rival warring cities. When Shiho is left on the battlefield for dead by her compatriots, the samurai finds her and brings her back to his camp — where his general promptly slays her!

Suo (who up to this point was a killing machine), is so distraught over Shiho’s pointless death that he questions everything he’s been fighting for the next battle, and lets his guard down — where he is slain by a villager!

Afterwards, the Valkyrie Lenneth claims both Suo and Shiho as her own Einherjar, and send their souls up to Valhalla to fight alongside each other in the upcoming battle at Ragnarok.

These two are the only true “couple” you encounter in the game, and their story is enough to warrant the box of tissues on the couch. (Or in my case, about 3 shots of scotch.)

This sketch is my study of a piece out of the Material Collection art book.

This game is a FLAWLESS story. Though it was a little rough on the gameplay, it had an addicting game engine, a truly emotional, engrossing story, AMAZING art, and EPIC music.

They just don’t make games like this anymore.