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final-fantasy-i-ochu-vs-the-warriors-of-light-by-yoshitaka-amano
The worldwide success of the Final Fantasy series of role-playing games is due in great part to the contributions of graphic artist Yoshitaka Amano.
Born in 1952, Amano began his career as an animator for seminal Japanese animation series like Speed Racer and Gatchaman, before turning freelance in the 1980s and concentrating on illustrations. His artistic signature, quite different from the big-eyed, primary-hued anime style that had come to define postwar Japanese aesthetic, lent a truly otherworldly feel to the covers of the sci-fi and fantasy novels his work appeared on.
Approached by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to design the look of the nascent RPG series for the 8-bit Nintendo Famicom circa 1987, Amano brought a uniquely graceful and artistic touch to a medium that was at that point still dominated by rough and utilitarian “programmer art.”
“I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art,” Amano told 1up.com in 2006. “I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.” The full illustrations would be printed in the game’s packaging, instruction manuals, strategy guides and other promotional materials.
Last year, Dark Horse Comics released The Sky, a limited-edition box set of books collecting Amano’s illustrations for the last 25 years of Final Fantasy games, which quickly sold out. On July 19, it will release a “Slipcase Edition” of the collection, without some of the limited-edition inclusions but with all of the artwork presented in three hardcover volumes.
Here are some of the pieces that will be included — plus a look at how the characters depicted ended up looking in the game itself. Do the game sprite characters make you think of Amano’s art, or the other way around?
Above:
Born in 1952, Amano began his career as an animator for seminal Japanese animation series like Speed Racer and Gatchaman, before turning freelance in the 1980s and concentrating on illustrations. His artistic signature, quite different from the big-eyed, primary-hued anime style that had come to define postwar Japanese aesthetic, lent a truly otherworldly feel to the covers of the sci-fi and fantasy novels his work appeared on.
Approached by Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi to design the look of the nascent RPG series for the 8-bit Nintendo Famicom circa 1987, Amano brought a uniquely graceful and artistic touch to a medium that was at that point still dominated by rough and utilitarian “programmer art.”
“I looked at the sprites as just a symbol of my art,” Amano told 1up.com in 2006. “I was in charge of making the master art piece that people would keep in their mind, and people would remember this art because of these symbols in the game.” The full illustrations would be printed in the game’s packaging, instruction manuals, strategy guides and other promotional materials.
Last year, Dark Horse Comics released The Sky, a limited-edition box set of books collecting Amano’s illustrations for the last 25 years of Final Fantasy games, which quickly sold out. On July 19, it will release a “Slipcase Edition” of the collection, without some of the limited-edition inclusions but with all of the artwork presented in three hardcover volumes.
Here are some of the pieces that will be included — plus a look at how the characters depicted ended up looking in the game itself. Do the game sprite characters make you think of Amano’s art, or the other way around?
Above:
Final Fantasy: ‘Ochu vs. the Warriors of Light’
This early illustration from the first Final Fantasy game clearly illustrates the divide between Amano’s conceptions of the characters and how they had to be rendered on the low-powered gaming hardware. The enemy “Ochu” (“Ocho” in the first English version of the game) was represented by a sprite only as tall as the player’s characters, but in reality it was supposed to be a hundred times larger than the nameless protagonists, two of whom are seen attacking the creature in this piece.
Artwork courtesy Dark Horse; sprite graphics from various Final Fantasy games by Square Enix