How does Motomu Toriyama, the Square Enix director whose most recent project was Final Fantasy XIII, approach designing the women that populate his games?
“The first aspect of a heroine’s design we decide upon depends on the game we’re making,” he said in an interview published in this week’s Famitsu magazine in Japan. “With Yuna from Final Fantasy X, we started with the back story of a summoner that fights against Sin, but for Lightning in FFXIII, our initial concept was just for a ‘strong woman’ — it was personality-based instead of plot-driven. Then we consider the heroine’s ‘job,’ her position in the story and duties in battle. We always try for unique worlds in the FF series, so we don’t base characters off of real people or anything like that, but since there are so many games in the series, it’s always a trial to ensure that new characters don’t overlap with previous ones.”
It isn’t until that point when Tetsuya Nomura, Square Enix’s resident character designer extraordinaire, gets involved. “Once the character’s concept starts to take form, we write out her basic personality traits and so forth on a sheet of paper and give it to Nomura,” Toriyama said. “Sometimes this is before all of the details are worked out for all the characters, but we’ve got to get them drawn sometime, so…”
