A Day in the Life With a Final Fantasy Creator

1up has a feature up looking at a day in the life of Yoshitaka Amano. This talented artist has been behind much of the visual appeal of the Final Fantasy series over the years. He's also worked on several anime series, such as Speed Racer, some Macross titles, and Neon Genesis Evangelion. In addition to background information, the article has a piece talking directly with the artist himself. From the article: " Final Fantasy wasn't the first video game-related job I did. So I went to America for a week, which was the first time I went to America, and I don't remember what company it was, but this company asked me to do an illustration similar to Dragon's Lair, the arcade game, and that was the first game-related job I had."

The Good Final Fantasy Games, Not Current

[Anonymous Coward]

It needs to be noted that Yoshitaka Amano is responsible for the good Final Fantasy games (that is, the original through VI), and not the abominations the series has turned into. People's favorite Final Fantasy characters were mostly his creation. (I can't say "most famous" because Sephiroth and Cloud probably take that trophy, and no real fan liked them. But he wasn't responsible for them.)

He has continued to work with Square-Enix on the more recent Final Fantasy games, but he was not the lead artist. The bland and uninteresting character designed in VII-XII are not his fault, he did draw some of the sketches used for them, but they were largely developed by comittee.

Since he did the artwork for the 8-bit and 16-bit series, his sketches had to be turned into sprites, so a lot of the quality of his work was unfortunately lost. But he managed to bring an amazing amount of life and quality to simple 2-bit palette sprites on the Nintendo. (Yes, 2-bit: 4 colors total, one which was usually "transparent".) The jump to the SNES allowed us to see more of his art in the amazing backgrounds in the battle scenes and the enemy graphics.

Much of what gave the old Final Fantasy games their character was based on Amano's artwork. The fact that the series has totally lost its way since he's moved on is a testament to just how important his art was to the full experience.

We can hopefully look forward to more of his work from the new company he works for, Mistwalker, which is home to most of the people from the Final Fantasy games we all know and loved (as opposed to VII and later, which just kind of ruined the series). Mistwalker will be releasing games for the XBox360, which is just another reason not to bother with the over-priced PS3 and instead just grab a XBox360 and a Wii for less than the cost of a single PS3.