How does Motomu Toriyama, the Square Enix director whose most recent project wasFinal 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'sFamitsumagazine in Japan."With Yuna fromFinal 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..."
What happens next?"After that, we wrap up the details behind each character's background,"Toriyama continued."With Lightning, that would be how she resolved to become strong in order to protect her sister after their parents passed away. We're working on all the characters in parallel, which results in some inconsistencies popping up later on in the designs and story backdrops -- when that happens, we rework as necessary to fit with the design. With Lightning, one look at the design made me say 'This is it!' She looked so cool and strong that there was no need for any retakes. It was the same way with Yuna. Making an FF game takes several years, so if you don't essentially fall in love at first sight with a character, then you really can't keep yourself going."
Then comes the process of actually rendering the heroine as she appears in the game -- the hard part, in other words,"When portraying a character, we take extreme care in her movements and voice,"reflected Toriyama."This begins with the motion-capture process, something that will make everything go wrong if we mess it up, so we get very intricate with our directions for that. The voice acting comes last in this process, and the actors we work with are good enough that things usually go pretty smoothly. The voice we record essentially becomes the main image of the character, so in a way that's the most delicate part of making the character."
So what's Toriyama's favorite leading girl?"Out of the heroines I've had a hand in creating, Lightning and Yuna are definitely the ones that stick out in my mind,"he said."That, and Yoyo from {Japan-only Super NES RPG}Bahamut Lagoon, the first game I worked on. I wanted to make her into a heroine like any that's existed before."
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