Cowboy Up!

Yes ladies, he's still single!
You don't want to know what I went through to get this fanart... Irvine is one of the quintessential ranged characters of Final Fantasy, so I HAD to find art for him. After pages upon pages of Irvine Yaoi I find this gem. (I swear, I just can't look at Zell in the same way again.)

Seifer-sama really makes Irvine shine in this piece. I've always had extra respect for artists who are especially good at drawing folds of clothing around a figure. I think this piece is a great example of that, the lighting seems spot on too.

One other thing Seifer-Sama said that I thought was interesting was that the piece was done in Crayola colored pencils. I'm such a snob about my prismacolors, it's nice to see something this talented come out of what I would assume are pretty ordinary colored pencils. Shows me that I should pay more attention to actually drawing then how much I pay for my art supplies...

Check out her page for some more awesome fanart. She has A Song of Ice and Fire fanart too!! Lots of stuff actually, I guarantee you'll find something you like. Check it out at http://seifer-sama.deviantart.com
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In the game, Irvine is the worst nightmare of Mages for sure. I see it being pretty common for the ranged characters to make it to the front row and get taken out before they can hit the mages in the back. Irvine just bypasses the middleman and takes the guesswork out of stopping a bothersome mage. Remember all the Bahamut stuff I talked about last blog? Barring any sort of recovery ability, Irvine ends the problem for you right there with his grenade rounds.

Another less noticeable thing is that Irvine becomes a real threat when you attach weapons to him. He's already at 1400 attack, and it's not difficult to get him a bit higher. When he hits 1600, he can take out most melee characters with ease, not to mention a lot of characters with the "counter" ability are monk type characters who's defense happens to fall into the 1400 range.

Anti-Mage, Anti-Monk, what's not to love?

The 1000 defense really hurts... but he can also run to the rear, and get a parting blow at the same time.

I guess there really isn't much synergy with him as far as card combos go, but he's definitely a solid character and worth a place in the ranged portion of your deck.