The TTYD remake is finally here! It's a super exciting day for any longtime Paper Mario fan, and I have been saving something special to post today.

About 11 years ago, I started working on a Paper Mario fan game concept back on my first DeviantArt account. That project was more or less the reason I ended up becoming interested in art and game development, so it's fair to say Paper Mario has had a pretty enormous impact on my life. To celebrate the return of the game that my old fan game was based on, I decided to revisit one of the original characters from it.
Specteira was the princess of the Nox Kingdom, an ancient civilization that existed on parts of modern-day Mushroom Kingdom territory, and was known for their proficiency in dark magic. The game's antagonist, in the process of opening a time portal to the Nox Kingdom, inadvertently releases Specteira into the present, and she teams up with Mario to repair the portal and get back to her home time period. She acts as a non-partner companion who does tattles and helps perform Mario's special moves.
Since I've learned a lot about character design in the last decade or so, I wanted to see what I'd come up with if I tried to redesign Specteira completely from scratch. I ended up with this sort of princess plus Tribe of Ancients blend that I think looks pretty cool. If you're curious what she looked like before, here's the last time I drew her original design.