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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."
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.
That Final Fantasy is never ever final. Not a problem in terms of job security. But how does one stay creatively fresh if the project never ends?
My boss is pissed. The cut scenes we've been working on for the last few months are almost done and he's screaming: it's not enough! I need more cut scenes! More cut scenes! I was hoping to get around to the gameplay controls, or adding save points, but I guess we'll be working on more cut scenes. I don't blame him though, Final Fantasy is about the experience and gamers are demanding a deeper, more satisfying game experience and that means more unskippable cut scenes, and by golly, that's what they're going to get. Cut scenes, full speed ahead!
He's also worked on several anime series, such as Speed Racer, some Macross titles, and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Interestingly, Yoshitaka Amano worked on none of these. As the first paragraph of 1up.com's article correctly says, his former studio (Tatsunoko Production) worked on those titles, not Amano. Speed Racer (Mach Go Go) was before his time at that studio, and Evangelion was after his time there. Macross did launch a mini-spate of "realistic" transforming robot series, and one of these series inspired by Macross was Genesis Climber Mospeada. Amano did design the Mospeada characters, but not the Macross ones.