Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura (born October 8, 1970) is a Japanese video game director and character designer working for Square Enix (formerly Square), perhaps best known for his work on both the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series. In the early 1990s, Square hired him to work as a debugger for Final Fantasy IV and following it as a monster designer for Final Fantasy V and then as graphic director and minor character designer for Final Fantasy VI.

Nomura did not gain recognition until 1995, when Square asked him to be the character designer for Final Fantasy VII to replace Yoshitaka Amano, the series` original character designer. It was a huge critical and commercial success and became the definitive role playing game for the PlayStation. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve & Brave Fencer Musashi. In 1997, Nomura worked on 1999`s Final Fantasy VIII, a game that achieved commercial success, where he returned as the character designer. Afterwards, Nomura worked on several other different projects for Square Enix, ranging from character designing in Ehrgeiz for the PlayStation to complete designing and orchestration of The World Ends With You for the Nintendo DS. He continued on to design characters for Square`s first PlayStation 2 game, The Bouncer, before returning to character designing for the Final Fantasy series with Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, and Final Fantasy XI. More recently, he has acted as the director, concept artist, and character designer for the Kingdom Hearts series, which currently includes the title game, the Game Boy Advance sequel and PlayStation 2 remake Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, and the PlayStation 2 sequel Kingdom Hearts II.