Tetsuya Nomura
Tetsuya Nomura is a video game director as well as a character designer for Square Enix, and mostly works on games in the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series. He joined the company back in the early 90’s when the company was still called Squaresoft and hadn’t merged with Enix yet. His first project in the final fantasy series was Final Fantasy IV, but he gained a lot of respect and prestige as a game developer and artist when he was given the job to create the main characters for Final Fantasy VII.
This is a series of concept art that Tetsuya Nomura created as he was creating the main protagonist, Cloud Strife, for Final Fantasy 7. This shows the change in style over time as they were developing the game, and I think it’s very interesting to see how in each iteration, Cloud seems to appear older, and Nomura adds more detail and complexity to the design each time. I aspire to follow down the same career path as Tetsuya Nomura, so I try to learn a lot from his work and methods so that I can be as skilled as he is one day.
Lightning Farron from Final Fantasy XIII is another character that Tetsuya Nomura designed. In the image above, you can see the final iteration of the line art on the right and the fully colored version of her on the left. I really appreciate the way he develops the color palettes for his character designs. On the right is the 3D model for Lightning Farron that actually appears in the game. Seeing the concept art brought to life, almost perfectly reflecting his vision of the character is really astounding. Although some colors have been altered, every single detail is perfect and the lighting / fabric effects that are added to the 3D model are very realistic. This game was released in 2009, and it’s graphics were far superior to almost every other game released in that year on the game consoles. The attention to detail and emphasis on beautiful and creative visuals is one of the main reasons why I was so in love with the Final Fantasy series in the past, and why I hope to work for Square Enix in the future at some point. 
This is a scanned image of a page of Tetsuya Nomura’s sketch book. Before Tetsuya designed characters, he designed monsters for final fantasies 4, 5, and 6.
In addition to the final fantasy series, another major title he worked on was Kingdom Hearts. This image was used for packaging and promotional purposes. Tetsuya designed all the human characters in this piece, as well as designing the outfits for Mickey, Donald, and Goofy.
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