Who is Toshiyuki Kubooka?
The animator who gave Lunar its face, then came back in 2025 to draw it again.
Toshiyuki Kubooka is the Japanese animator and illustrator who designed the characters of Lunar: The Silver Star (1992), his first character-design job in games. He arrived from the anime industry, with key animation and direction credits in the Gainax orbit (Gunbuster, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water), when scenario writer Kei Shigema, an acquaintance from Gainax, asked him to design an RPG. His layered, northern-climate costumes and expressive faces became the series' visual signature.
THE DESIGNER AT WORK
1992 to 1998Faces first
Kubooka delivered sheets of facial expressions so complete that the writers used them to fix the characters' personalities. His portraits sit beside the dialogue in the original game, doing the acting that 1992 sprites could not.
Director of Event Movie
On the 1996 remake, Kubooka is credited as Director of Event Movie and storyboard artist, working with animators from the young studio Gonzo, including key animation supervisor Takeshi Honda. The remake's look is his storyboards, drawn at feature quality.
The jacket as analog craft
Shigema's liner notes single out the original disc jacket, Kubooka's illustration of Alex with a shining sword, achieved with optical processing on an analog photograph, and the Eternal Blue jacket after it, as masterpieces of the pre-digital packaging era. The swords' glow is a camera trick, not a filter.
THE LONG TENURE
1992 to 2025A designer across every era
Kubooka's designs anchor the Mega-CD originals, the Saturn and PlayStation remakes, the PSP's Harmony (which put his tall dialogue portraits down the full height of the screen), and the remasters. Series art is often a relay; Lunar's is one hand, aging with its audience.
The 2025 return
For the Lunar Remastered Collection (April 18, 2025), Kubooka drew two entirely new key-art pieces, one for each game, used on the physical edition's reversible covers. In Gematsu's commemorative interview he discussed the designs and the 2D/3D cutscene craft a generation later: the face of Lunar, signing the restoration.