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September 8, 2008
Good ol' Tetsuya Nomura. While I think it's highly debatable how much he personally has influenced the field of Japanese role-playing games, he's unquestionably come to symbolize the shift in Square Enix RPGs from bright, colorful, lighthearted affairs about groups of scrappy adventurers defeating evil wizards, to dark, science-fantasy stories about angry young men learning to get in touch with their feelings. Most often it's the folks who started playing console RPGs back in the days of the NES and SNES who most villify Nomura and his penchant for zippers, belts, and lone angel wings, while it's those who started post-Final Fantasy VII that can't get enough of his angsty pretty boys who look like they belong in perfume commercials rather than on battlefields. Me, I guess I'm kind of on the fence. I make no mystery of the fact that I tend to prefer older RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, but I find if you don't take the heavy-handed melodrama of something like Kingdom Hearts too seriously, you end up having a pretty good time playing it. I admit that most of his work has a kind of very focus tested feel to it, with characters perfectly designed for posters, t-shirts, and action figures. And I've certainly heard a fair amount about how it is his risk-free style of game development that's made him Square Enix's favored son at the moment, with much more talented people like Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yasumi Matsuno being driven out essentially for making more ambitious projects. Nevertheless, Nomura's games have a kind of cheesy appeal to them, made all the more enjoyable because of the total lack of awareness of their own ridiculousness. Some lament Nomura taking the helm of Final Fantasy, viewing it as the death of what was once the greatest of Japanese RPG series. That could very well be true, but it's not exactly like we're running out of JRPGs. The Enix side of Square Enix still regularly turns out a fair number of quality games unsullied by the Nomura taint. And previously smaller companies like Atlus and Nippon Ichi have become much more prolific in recent years, both as publishers and developers. So seriously folks, it's not like Nomura is single-handedly destroying the JRPG genre. Or is he?
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