Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy veteran says he started making hot characters after a friend said he didn’t want to be “ugly” in games, and then never stopped

Tetsuya Nomura thinks back on a crucial high school memory

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Tetsuya Nomura’s character design inspirations come from an early high school memory that he’s carried with him through designing some ofSquare Enix’s most iconic Final Fantasy pretty boys like Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart.

In a recent interview withYoungJump, and translated by the Twitter accountShinra Archaeology Department, Nomura recalls watching his high school classmate play a video game with what Nomura considered a particularly unattractive protagonist. According to the story, the classmate asked why he had to be “ugly” even when playing a game. Of course, this would have been around the late 80s, so developers were working with the limited number of pixels they had to flesh out character models the best they could.

Still, this moment resonated strongly with Nomura, and based on that experience he believes that “players have this desire to be cool and handsome in games.”

Of course, the concept of handsomeness is going to vary wildly by person, but this design philosophy has led to some of our earliest video game crushes like the blonde spikey haired super soldier Cloud Strife or the black robed mage Lulu. Whether it’s Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy, Nomura is set on designing what he believes are cool characters, even if they havefar too many belts and zippers for any one human.

Tetsuya Nomura is still working on Kingdom Hearts 4, which was announced back in 2022 as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations. It’s been roughly two years with almost no information on the game, but we at least now know have firm confirmation that Nomura agrees Sora is cool and handsome.

If you’re looking for even more about Tetsuya Nomura’s next project, take a look ateverything we know about Kingdom Hearts 4 so far

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Jesse is a freelance games journalist with almost a decade of experience. He was the Associate Editor at Prima Games for three years and then moved into the world of freelancing where you might have seen his work at the likes of Game Informer, Kotaku, Inverse, and a few others. You can find him playing the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV or whatever hot new multiplayer game his friends are playing.

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