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Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano talks games as art, details the art process

by rawmeatcowboy
09 May 2016
GN Version 5.0

A portion of a USGamer interview with artist Yoshitaka Amano...

USG: So where do you stand on the debate over whether or not video games can be art?

YA: I feel that games can become art. When I'm involved with a game project, that’s what my approach is. What I'm doing is drawing the original image, and then someone will take that original image and integrate it into the work. Games can become art.

With movies, you are only able to watch. But with a game, you can be a part of the world. With the VR technology, you could literally go inside the game world — and there's another thing. Work that wasn’t even viewed as art in its own time, after time, it turns into art, too. If you go to the Louvre, you will see a lot of Christian paintings, and those were not made as art back in the day. But after history gets added to it, it turns into art. Games, too, can turn into art after a while, as well, in the same manner.

USG: When I look through books that collect your works and then see the video games, compare the video games that were based on the illustrations you created, it’s almost like peeling back layers and saying, how do they get to this pixel art from this illustration? How involved were you in the classic Final Fantasies, with taking those images and turning them into what was on the screen?

YA: From Final Fantasy I to IV, what they would do is approach me and ask me to draw, for example, Bahamut — to draw this or that. You know, outside of Japan, Bahamut is known as a being with a sheep's face. But I didn’t know that, so I was thinking maybe a dragon sounds really cool, so I created a mecha dragon for Bahamut. Now everybody in Japan, when you say Bahamut, they just picture the mecha dragon, never the sheep thing. That’s actually written in Wikipedia. I inadvertently made the standards for Bahamut in Japan! My point is that the influence of a game is really big — my art defined the image of the legendary creature Bahamut is in Japan.

So, from I to IV, they would ask me to draw specific images for each creature or monster or character. But from V and beyond, what they would do is take the basics that I had already created and rearrange the art. So whenever they had a new creature or monster, they would come to me and ask me to create the original of it. I guess to answer your question, the process has been that they gave me keywords and asked me to create the original image of it. Then from there and beyond, they would take that and implement it into the game on their own. After I submitted my drawings, I wasn't involved in the game process.

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