Why does Amano's art look different from the Final Fantasy games?

Open a Final Fantasy art book beside the game it illustrates and the casts seem related but not identical. That is structural, not a mistake. Amano was an illustrator, not the games' working designer: he painted characters from written descriptions, and Square's sprite and polygon artists then rebuilt those paintings into something a Famicom or a PlayStation could actually move.

From Final Fantasy VII the division became official. Tetsuya Nomura took over character design, a tighter and more reproducible style suited to 3D models and merchandise, while Amano stayed on as image illustrator and logo artist, painting his own impressions of Nomura's cast. His versions are interpretations, closer to portraits of the idea of a character than to production drawings, which is why his Terra and his Sephiroth look like aristocrats from an older, stranger story.

Once, the interpretation escaped the book entirely. His vast cosmic painting Big Bang, made for Final Fantasy XV, was animated in 3D by Square Enix for the game's promotion, issued as a console theme, and hidden in the game itself as a skin for the player's car. Amano later reworked it as a two-panel fine art painting. That round trip, from game promotion to gallery wall, is the subject of this hub's fine-art shelf.