A History and Defense of Tetsuya Nomura Part 1 Pre Kingdom Hearts

Let's talk about Tetsuya Nomura, a man with heavy involvement with many of Square's most mainstream games and ever a lightning rod for debate about his merits as an artist, game designer, director, fashion designer, etc. He's been in the industry for over 30 years, starting as a debugger on FFIV. He did some monster designs in FFV as well as much of the enemy spritework (this helps explain why the enemy sprites in FFV are so very different in style from the ones in IV). He designed some of the most beloved, uniquely Final Fantasy, iconic bestiary including the Tonberry and Cactuar. In FFVI he became a character designer, though by no means the sole character designer, but he designed characters such as Setzer (try and unsee it now) and Shadow. By Final Fantasy VII he's got a few interesting credits but his importance to the franchise would skyrocket with VII.

So this part's the real obvious one, Nomura is the character designer for FFVII, a title he inherited from... it's complicated. If you asked the English fandom who the character designer on the first six Final Fantasy games was at least up through the early 2010s, they'd have told you without skipping a beat "Oh those are all Yoshitaka Amano." In that sense they would honestly mostly be wrong, at least, in the sense of what his actual job was. A more precise term for what Amano was doing would perhaps be "character illustration"? I want to give Kazuko Shibuya her due here first though. Shibuya was responsible for "graphics" in a number of early FFs and her sprites were made, then Amano would illustrate them. Having Amano actually design characters would have been a fairly clear fools errand in 1987, he was a well known illustrator for fantasy novels like The Heroic Legend of Arslan and his sweeping, dreamlike watercolor style would not have even remotely translated to the available technology, so logically they made graphics and to sell them better asked him to do his job, illustrate his interpretation. 

While this is him designing characters, the character designs were not typically being used in game in a real sense. Amano without specific direction definitely has a very specific type and so we see many of his illustrations of the Warrior of Light, Cecil, etc fighting in that style, tall, thin, pale, capes, blonde. It's quite fair to say his illustrations were never more obviously disloyal to the source art than in FFV though. Five candy colored jokers that enter the party at various points, five pale, light haired, Amano creations. The contrast in versions which contain his portraits, such as FFV Advance, is so stark it's honestly pretty distracting. It's like playing a game with a bunch of unrelated pictures every time someone talks. Shibuya has a lot to do with the visual identity you associate with these early FFs even if she isn't the one credited with designing a character. Even by FFVI someone had to interpret those designs into sprites, and many of Shibuya's choices are still more iconic to these characters to most players than the Amano designs. This isn't to take away from Amano's work so much as to remind that game design is both extremely collaborative and that it can be hard to tell who did what on many projects.

So that aside, let's consider Final Fantasy VII, the first time most people might have specifically heard Nomura's name attached to a project. Why was he chosen? I can't speak with certainty, I've never read an interview detailing that choice but if I were to hazard a few guesses. First is that Nomura's designs were more more translateable to PS1 models. Nomura is now known for extremely complicated character designs, but he was likely both cheaper (remember, Amano is a well known fantasy illustrator) and more likely to play ball with a request of "please make simple designs". That's the numbers and business part of the decision, but there is another reason I'd assume he was chosen. While the credited scenarists on FFVII were Yoshinori Kitase and Kazushige Nojima, they were seemingly working from an outline handed down from Hironobu Sakaguchi, about what you'd expect except that there's one other credit for this outline, Tetsuya Nomura. In game this is rendered as

Story By

    Kazushige Nojima

    Yoshinori Kitase

Based on the Story By

    Hironobu Sakaguchi

    Tetsuya Nomura

This aspect of Nomura's career often feels somewhat ignored, that FFVII wasn't just his first time as primary character designer, but that it was also the first time he'd had a major hand in a scenario. I have no way of knowing what that original pitch of FFVII looked like. The game's development is legendary for having produced about a dozen pitches for what it would be that would evolve into things as disparate as Parasite Eve and be used as late as FFXV. Whatever the case, the pitch Nomura and Sakaguchi put forward seemingly became the game that a team would extrapolate into Final Fantasy VII. For these reasons his choice as Character Designer makes more sense, he was cheaper, more likely to bend to the needs of the hardware, and was familiar with the artistic goals of the project. 

I want to keep track of what games Nomura actually has writing credits on and while this is a relatively small "writing" credit it merits mention. Nomura is often credited or blamed for many of the wilder stories from SE but it feels worth looking at where he's credited as an actual writer to see how fair that is. Notably, while he would retain character design credits on Final Fantasy VIII, he seems to have had little if anything to do with its writing. The credited scenarists are Kazushige Nojima again and Hiroki Chiba. Nomura's evolution here would primarily be in what amounts to the beginning of an ongoing bet with the actual modellers. Squall's fur collar was essentially a dare to the modeller's to see if they could make PS1 character models that would read well enough to communicate that aspect of his design. For what it's worth, it worked pretty well. The pitches for what would become Kingdom Hearts likely would have started around this time. Final Fantasy X would come in 2001 where Nomura would again design an entire outfit as a dare (Lulu's infamous belt dress) to see if the model would read properly. Some addiitonal work is being left out for brevity but he also did some character design and illustration work on titles such as Brave Fencer Musashi and Parasite Eve 1 and 2. A more art analytical mind than mine could definitely come up with something more to say here. Nomura's character designs begin to be more out there and start taking on aspects of Japanese youth fashion. When allowed to stretch out Nomura's designs tend to take on a lot of "Shibuya fashion of the moment" styles, for the early 00s this meant zippers and because many of his most iconic designs are from this period, it's seen as a calling card despite not showing up that often after this exact period. Other artistic analysis is beyond my ken but I can spot the occasional trend.

This leads us on to Kingdom Hearts, Nomura's first job in the director position to my knowledge. For those unaware Kingdom Hearts came about because Square and Disney were on different floors of the same office building in Japan. Execs from both were on the same elevator ride, one pitched working with the other, and a series of meetings took place about what that would look like. Not much is known about these pitches other than they probably started with Mickey RPG and moved from there. Eventually Nomura submits a pitch, new character travels with Donald and Goofy to various Disney worlds. At this point in its existence, Disney desperately wanted the teenage boy demographic that at the time propelled a lot of the worldwide JRPG market, so they were less precious about their IPs. That's the only reason I can assume they signed on to KH. Kingdom Hearts ends up producing an action RPG pretty dissimilar from most anything that was available at the time but that will be its own dedicated post. Disney didn't completely let the game sail through production, negotiations about what amount of crossover was allowed (no movies except in very special circumstances, Donald and Goofy and original characters okay) what weapons were allowed to the characters (a nix on the original idea of Sora wielding a bladed weapon, nothing even resembling a weapon for Donald and Goofy) and doubtless many negotiations of what movies were on the table. Despite all that the game seems to have gone through production pretty smoothly. Nomura would take on Direction, character design, and other key roles. Curiously though he's not listed among the three credited writers though in the pitch he likely outlined how the plot would function. The three credited writers ended up being Kazushige Nojima (remember him, he'll show up a few more times) Daisuke Watanabe (we'll be seeing a lot of him) and Jun Akiyama (mostly works on other projects after this to my knowledge). Watanabe merits mention here, he's generally the credited scenario writer on many if not most of these games, so while Nomura as director would have had a lot of power here, it'd be wrong to say he was the sole arbiter of where these plots went.

That should be enough to start with, Nomura's one of a few late 80s early 90s hires at SE that ends up getting in good with the old guard and shooting up the ladder as the 90s progress into the early 00s. Kingdom Hearts will need its own post just to sort of go over what exactly is right and wrong with it before we look at Nomura's stronger influence on Square in the mid-00s.