Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura (野村 哲也) is a Japanese video game artist, designer, producer, and director working for Square Enix.

In 1991, Nomura was hired by Square and at first worked as a debugger for Final Fantasy IV.

Some time later, the company's staff was divided and he was placed in the team in charge of Final Fantasy.

After he had received some training by artist Tetsuya Takahashi, Nomura designed the monsters for Final Fantasy V.

At that time, each Final Fantasy developer had their own plan book as a compilation of ideas to present to the director of a game.

While the others typed their plan books at the computer and then printed them out, Nomura wrote his by hand and attached many drawings which impressed director Hironobu Sakaguchi and event planner Yoshinori Kitase.

Nomura then became the graphic director of Final Fantasy VI.

For this game, he conceived the characters Shadow and Setzer as well as their background stories.

Their designs were reused from some of Nomura's abandoned concepts for Final Fantasy V.

Following several smaller projects, Nomura was asked to be the principal character designer of Final Fantasy VII in replacement for Amano.

Nomura drew the game's characters in a stylized and chibi way and came up with the idea for the "Limit Break" attacks.

He also took part in the making of the story and had a hand in plot elements such as Aerith's death.

He was hired by Square initially as a monster designer for Final Fantasy V (1992), before being shifted towards secondary character designer alongside Yoshitaka Amano for Final Fantasy VI (1994).

Final Fantasy VII (1997) had him working in the original story alongside Hironobu Sakaguchi, and marked his debut as the lead character designer, a capacity he would retain for several future installments of the series, as well as other Square Enix titles such as The Bouncer and The World Ends with You.

In 1998, Nomura worked on both Parasite Eve and Brave Fencer Musashi.

He then designed characters and monsters for Final Fantasy VIII in what he described as his "actual style of drawing", working alongside art director Yusuke Naora to realize the more realistic approach to the game's graphics.

Additionally, he wrote the character's background stories and was the battle visual director in charge of designing fight sequences.

Afterwards, Nomura worked on several different projects for Square, for example as a character designer of the 1998 fighting game Ehrgeiz which also used characters from Final Fantasy VII.

Nomura was the character designer for 2000s beat 'em up The Bouncer before he returned to the Final Fantasy series in the same capacity with 2001's Final Fantasy X.

He worked with the staff so that the characters' clothes would be identical in full motion videos and in-game scenes, unlike in Final Fantasy VIII.

In February 2000, he started working as the director of Kingdom Hearts with the production team consisting of over one hundred members from both Square and Disney Interactive.

Nomura first heard of the game during a discussion between Shinji Hashimoto and Hironobu Sakaguchi regarding the use of the character of Mickey Mouse in a video game.

He was inspired to work on Kingdom Hearts by Nintendo's platforming game Super Mario 64.

After discussing with the Disney staff, Nomura convinced them to use original characters with him as the character designer.

The game's protagonist, Sora, became his favorite character he had designed so far.

Following Kingdom Hearts, Nomura worked once again on the Final Fantasy series with Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy X-2.

Additionally, Nomura created and has led the development as director of the Kingdom Hearts series since its inception in 2002 and has been creative producer in The World Ends with You series.

He has also directed the 2005 film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, and directed Final Fantasy VII Remake (2020), while coming back as creative director for the sequel Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (2024).

Nomura's father influenced his interest in art and games early on, creating little drawings and unique Sugoroku board games for him.

Nomura started drawing at the age of three years and developed his own Sugoroku games during his elementary school years.

As a child, he spent much of his free time playing baseball, swimming, fishing and building fortresses.

When he was in middle school, his father told him that an era of computers would come and bought him his own computer.

Nomura played Legends of Star Arthur: Planet Mephius on it and started creating his own video games by learning programming.

He first tried a Nintendo product with the tennis and ping-pong variant of the Color TV-Game console and later borrowed a Family Computer in high school.

Around that time, Dragon Quest became Nomura's favorite because it surprised him and introduced him to video games with story elements.

His art teacher in high school pointed him towards the works of Final Fantasy illustrator Yoshitaka Amano.

Nomura also created his own manga during class and intended to do this as a profession although he ultimately abandoned the idea.

Nomura went to vocational school to learn magazine and advertising artwork.

Nomura then looked for an advertising job at a publishing company.

However, he eventually applied to Square after he had seen a job advertisement with a drawing by Yoshitaka Amano.