A Young Lioness

Man, I was playing entirely too much of Final Fantasy Tactics when I drew this. Even had another run of the game planned out, based around the idea of unlocking the Dark Knight job class as fast as possible and renaming Ramza to "Ramzarok". Which is either going to be amazing or hellish, because unlocking the class will likely take a ton of grinding and half the game to acquire, and I might not even have access to decent equipment by then for the class, but it's an overpowered job class they put into the remake so you could give anyone access to Gafgarion's bad-ass moveset.

In fact, that's kind of the class of the company Ross is leading in the picture: a squad of Dark Knights. The idea is that the helmets flip open to reveal the glowing yellow eyes. For the unfamiliar, in Final Fantasy, the Dark Knight is a class of warrior bound in dark armor, capable of wielding special swords and expending their health to perform devastating attacks (though there's also the Famicom FFIII where they can use White Magic, and FFXIV, where they use up MP instead of HP for dark-attacks, presumably for the sake of game balance). Story-wise, they don't have very long life expectancy, because of the high-risk nature of their class, and in FFIV, because they can't remove their armor and are basically incapable of combating anything that's really evil.

I tried to vary the body types and temperaments of the knights, to make them feel more like a group, not faceless cannon-fodder. I didn't go so far as giving them actual names and characters, but if you know me, you're well aware that it's only a matter of time. I'm already thinking of what the rest of the empire's military strength looks like. The idea I'm thinking I'll run with now is that it'll be divided by job classes, like having a group made up of Dragoons, a team of Ninja, Devouts for a healing team, Magi for offensive magic... maybe I'd theme it around jobs from the Water and Earth Crystals in FFIII.

Gonna be interesting when I finally come up with the lore for this. Playing FFXV got me a little more into the idea of a royal lineage. So I really hope I can come up with something worthwhile, which will be weird because none of it would be very involved with the current-day story's link in the chain. Vita's probably not even aware of being technical royalty.

Oh, the title's a reference to FFT's war of succession, the event being examined in the game, a struggle known as the War of the Lions, wherein Dukes Larg and Goltana, known as the White Lion and Black Lion respectively, battled over whether the infant Prince Orinas would ascend the throne - giving his mother direct control - or whether the previous king's daughter Ovelia would become ruler.