Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura (野村 哲也) was born October 8, 1970 in Kōchi, Japan. Before working for Square as character designer, he was at a vocational school creating art for advertisements. In 1992, Square 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) was stopped after several months of development, and became a PlayStation game, developed in collaboration with Square. The characters, designed by François Rimasson at the beginning, were re-designed later by Tetsuya Nomura; but the project was never completed, and Silent Chaos was cancelled in November 1999, after two and a half years of development.

Nomura's first major breakthrough came in 1997, when Square asked him to become character designer for Final Fantasy VII. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve and Brave Fencer Musashi. The following year he impressed his superiors with his realistic character design in Final Fantasy VIII. He was given not only the job of character designer but also of battle visual director.

Square then asked him to work on several other projects and decided to choose him to be character designer for their first game on PlayStation 2 (The Bouncer) and then for their first Final Fantasy installment on that console (Final Fantasy X). He continued working on Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts games.