Phantasy Star Odds & Ends

Look With Your Special Eyes!

	My brand!

Did you know that Chaz has special eyes? Well he does. Magical color changing eyes! It's true. Although I only recently noticed it despite playing through this game many times. That's how observant I am. Zero.

Here's Chaz's status menu portrait. As you can see he has green eyes. This holds true for every cutscene he is in. So his eyes are pretty consistently green. Except when they're not.

This is the mini portrait used when Chaz is talking to other characters or NPCs, examining objects or talking when the Talk/Mumble command is used. Each playable character has a mini portrait that is used for those things. Shop workers, inn keepers, certain NPCs and some bosses have them as well.

Every character save for Chaz that has a large portrait has the same eye color in their mini portrait. So it looks like somebody made a boo-boo here and no one picked up on it. Maybe the two sets of portraits were done by different artists and a small consistency error arose because of this. The style between the two portrait sets is slightly different. But it's not so different that it has to be from two different artists. As far as I know, all character design was done by T. Yoshida.

Since the Chaz's eyes in the mini portrait are not the same color as the background this isn't the same as the issue with Rika's blue mouth in her ending scene.

Looks like this was just a little mistake no one caught on to. It doesn't really matter, as it only appears on the mini portrait and doesn't effect gameplay in any way. At least Chaz's eye color doesn't keep changing in cutscenes. I think this and Rika's infamous blue mouth are the only real coloring mistakes. Everything else tends to be pretty consistent. You could argue that the mini portraits for the NPCs who run the shops and inns usually do not match their on screen sprites. But with the exception of the lady at the Hunter's Guild reception desk and the guy who runs the gift shop in Termi, they are all generic townie sprites anyway. It would have been nice to have a unique set of sprites for the shops and inns. But it isn't a necessity. All they really need to do is stand behind the counter and make your adventure easier.