Tetsuya Nomura

Tetsuya Nomura (野村 哲也) is a Japanese video game director and character designer working for Square Enix (formerly Square), best known for his work on both the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series.

Time before Square
Nomura was born in Kōchi, Japan. When he was a young man, he worked at a vocational school creating art for advertisements.

Time at Square
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's most notable work came in 1995, when Square asked him to be the character designer for Final Fantasy VII to replace Yoshitaka Amano. It was a critical and commercial success. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve & Brave Fencer Musashi. In 1997, Nomura worked on 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 character designing for 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, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, Kingdom Hearts: Coded and most recently, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. He was also responsible for the complete designing and orchestration of The World Ends with You for the Nintendo DS.

He was also the main character designer of Final Fantasy XIII, as well as the character designer of Dissidia: Final Fantasy for the PlayStation Portable.

Movie
Nomura directed the CGI animated film Final Fantasy VII Advent Children which was released on 2005 in Japan and in North America on April 25, 2006, and also wrote some of the lyrics that appear on the soundtrack. This was also Nomura's film debut, and he re-designed the characters as well.

Current work at Square Enix
Nomura is currently working on the Fabula Nova Crystallis: Final Fantasy XIII projects. He is the character designer of all three games and the director of Final Fantasy Versus XIII.

Nomura is currently working on Kingdom Hearts 3D and other new untitled titles of the Kingdom Hearts series, one of which - Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep - is scheduled for release in 2010 which he had previously mentioned in a Twitter interview and the second in 2011; both of which were mentioned in December 2009 where in mentioned that he was working on two more unannounced projects from an existing franchise. In addition he is also working on Kingdom Hearts III which is currently in the conceptual stages.

Most recently in the July 2010 issue of Game Informer an interview with Nomura revealed that he would be involved with a number of titles with the first of which being announced at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2010.