Phantasy Star II

This is where, in a perfect world, I would give information about the artist who created this phenomenal piece of art. Unfortunately though, I've been unable to ever find any mention of WHO it is! So if you just so happen to be the artist who painted this amazing piece, please contact me.

Sega was notorious for ditching the original Japanese art when releasing the Genesis versions of games for North America, and replacing it with different art that they figured would be more palatable to Americans. Sadly the new art was usually not nearly as good as the original. This here though, is one of the rare instances where the new art was actually something truly special.

You can tell the artist was only given a few details about the game. It's a sci-fi fantasy epic. The main character is a male hero with blue hair, who has a female companion with really tall pointy ears. The villain is something called Mother Brain that is threatening the planet. And the artist took these details and created an amazingly imaginative piece of art that I would love even if it didn't happen to be related to one of my favorite RPGs of all time.

While there are decent scans of the game cover available online, it only utilizes a portion of the painting. There are no high-resolution scans of the entire painting from what I could find, and even then, the only images of the whole painting are in a 256-color indexed format instead of full color. This means the challenge of improving the clarity of this image was not just a matter of detail, but also of color fidelity. I ended up splitting the image into two parts; a black and white version for focusing on smoothing out all the pixelation & getting rid of noise, and then a color version where I switched from indexed color to full color, started blurring the colors together to create new ones, then expanded the range. After that it was just a matter of turning that second part into a color map to layer on top of the black and white version. Finally, in order to create a landscape-oriented rectangular image instead of it being square, I expanded the background using a mix of stretching and clone stamping.

If I ever find out who the artist was who created the original painting, I'd love to have the opportunity to talk to them about this and see what other things they came up with.