For me, the Amano artwork is symbolic, it does really inspire the production staff seeing a beautifully crafted piece of artwork about the game.
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For me, the Amano artwork is symbolic, it does really inspire the production staff seeing a beautifully crafted piece of artwork about the game.
To be fair to Amano though, you really couldn't do his artwork completely for the characters in the 2D game due to technology limitations. Though his monster designs were pretty faithful, even going back to FFI, the Four Fiends and Chaos are pretty gorgeous even as enemy sprites.
Though they really don't have an argument for that now. I would be really interested to see them transcribe his art into a game with little corner cutting. I mean the FMVs for FFV and VI on the Anthology set were pretty breathtaking.
I don't think Square considered Amano as big deal to them otherwise Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals would look like this promotion piece:Quote:
Originally Posted by Wolf Kanno
http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__...omo_Pin-up.jpg
Considering that Hironobu Sakaguchi said that his goal in gaming was to make games that looked like Amano's art I would disagree.
Besides, Legend of the Crystals barely follows the mythology of FFV, and didn't even use Nobuo Uematsu for music, so it sounds like this was a decision by Studio Madhouse rather than Square.
But Sakaguchi says a lot of things... they ditched Amano as character designer for VII onwards and Nomura began taking over even on FFVI.
But I still think the series as a whole owes a lot to him. The early games really were shots at making an Amano world and that's been institutionalized in the subconscious of what the series is trying to do.
Not completely true, Amano did the initial character designs for FFIX and he also helped with some of VII's designs as well. Sephiroth is collaboration between Amano and Nomura. Noumra style was just easier for 3D cause it was simpler in overall design. It didn't help that his non-FF work brought him more recognition out of Japan in the mid-90s and he did several world tours with his art galleries.
Though I agree that Amano did a lot for the series and that a part of the appeal of the early games is trying to capture the allure of his artwork that inspired the games to begin with.