Tetsuya Nomura

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Tetsuya Nomura (野村哲也; Nomura Tetsuya, born October 10, 1970), is a game and character designer at Square Enix. Before working for Square Enix, formerly Squaresoft, Nomura was at a vocational school creating art for advertisements. In 1992, Squaresoft hired him to work on the battle graphics of Final Fantasy V and then as graphic director in 1994 for Final Fantasy VI. In 1996, a game project called Silent Chaos (which was originally the sequel of Dark Earth, a PC adventure game) was stopped after several months of development, and became a PlayStation game, developed in collaboration with Squaresoft. The characters, designed by François Rimasson at first, were totally redesigned by Tetsuya Nomura; but the project never ended and Silent Chaos was definitively stopped in November 1999, after two and a half years of development.

Tetsuya Nomura did not gain recognition until 1995, when Squaresoft asked him to be the character designer for their new opus, Final Fantasy VII. The game was a huge critical and commercial success and became the definitive role playing game for the PlayStation. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve & Brave Fencer Musashi. The following year, Nomura worked on another game that achieved commercial success—Final Fantasy VIII—where he acted as the lead character designer and the battle visual director.

Afterwards, Nomura worked on several other miscellaneous projects such as Ehrgeiz and Parasite Eve II for the PlayStation. He continued on to design characters for Squaresoft's first PlayStation 2 venture, The Bouncer, before returning to character designing for the Final Fantasy series with Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy XI. More recently, he has acted as the director, concept artist, and character designer for Kingdom Hearts, , and Kingdom Hearts II.

Nomura directed the CGI animated film which was released in 2005 in Japan and in America on April 25th, 2006, and also wrote some of the lyrics that appear on the soundtrack, except for the final track of the movie's soundtrack: "CALLING".

Nomura is currently working on the projects as the character designer of all three games and the director of Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

Contents

1 Criticism
2 Works Credited
3 See also
4 External links

Criticism

While his artwork and style was praised by many fans of Final Fantasy, especially the legions of new fans that joined the series with the release of Final Fantasy VII, Tetsuya Nomura has been criticized by fans of the original character designer Yoshitaka Amano. His critics have described Nomura's designs as too juvenile when compared to Amano's work. Fans of Nomura point out how deeply involved he was with Final Fantasy titles before Final Fantasy VII, especially his involvement in the creation of popular characters Shadow and Setzer Gabbiani for Final Fantasy VI, which were both redesigned by Amano for the game itself. A famous image the art of Cloud and Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII's faces mirrored and showing them having the same face (although often mistaken as intentional) is used as a popular example of his poor design at that time.

His fans have also noted that Amano has still produced promotional art for other entries in the series and that Nomura was very cautious about using Final Fantasy IX's Vivi (as well as Setzer, of whom Nomura recognizes Amano as the designer) as a character in Kingdom Hearts II because Nomura himself was not the character's designer. Strangely, characters with whom Nomura has had no part in the creation of have a tendecy to be somewhat deeper and more complex, like the entire cast of FFIX. This is entirely coincidental however, as Nomura cannot be held accountable for the personalities and narrative functions of his characters.

Nomura has recently been criticised for reusing his designs. For example: the costume the main character of Final Fantasy XIII wears is similar to that of Yuna's in Final Fantasy X-2. Similarly, the costume worn by the main character of Final Fantasy Versus XIII is wearing what looks like a darker version of Cloud from Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children's costume. Another such criticism against Nomura is his predilection for adorning his characters with abundant decorative buckles, belts, and zippers.

In 2000, Nomura stated in a magazine interview that he would like to work with Nintendo, which caused some controversy since during that time Square was openly not working with Nintendo. Square issued a statement that Nomura's comments did not represent the company's plans and policies. Ironically, Nintendo and Square reconciled a few years later which led to the release of as well as numerous Square RPGs on Nintendo handhelds.

Works Credited

External links

[Tetsuya Nomura's Biography and Artwork]
[Tetsuya Nomura] Rap sheet at MobyGames

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Tetsuya Nomura

Criticism

Works Credited

See also

External links