Who Did the Art for Kartia?

Kartia's character designs and art are by Yoshitaka Amano, who by 1998 was famous as the illustrator of the first six Final Fantasy games and of Vampire Hunter D. Atlus built the presentation around him: the story plays out in novel-style scenes carried by his full-screen portraits, pale figures in ink and watercolor that no other strategy RPG of the year resembled.

That mattered because of the hardware. On earlier consoles Amano's paintings had lived in manuals and on boxes while the games themselves were drawn by other hands. Kartia's makers worked in 2D sprites over polygonal fields so the sprites could mirror his designs, and his portraits do the emotional work in every scene. Reviewers on both sides of the Pacific singled the art out even when they quarreled with the systems underneath it.