#naoki ikushima

[triangle-strategy-notes]

Happy Triangle Strategy 2nd Anniversary!! To celebrate, here are the translations from the foreword and the first illustration provided in the artbook.

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Foreword translation:

GREETING

Thank you so much for picking up this book! We've put together a collection of art—a war chronicle filled with the “battles and wars” we waged to create the designs used in Triangle Strategy.

I’d like to reflect back on the beginning of Triangle Strategy's art development.  . . . I’ll recall it bit by bit.

The first time I heard about this project was several years ago, when I was working on art and design for Various Daylife and Bravely Default II on a weekly basis.

The first words I received during the early planning phase were Mr. Asano’s, “What if war came to a world like Octopath Traveler?” and Mr. Arai’s, “Salt . . .  Iron . . . ”

They were simple words, but they captured my heart and filled it with excitement. From there, I began to draw, and it was as if those feelings grew and spilled out of me.

And, as is natural, a story about war will have many characters . . .  The depth of the worldview was crucial as well. I had to add a lot of details to really get across the project’s heavy themes! I very much enjoyed the challenge. However, our time was short, and thus it was the beginning of a war for the artists. We were thrilled by the magnificent setting and plunged headlong into drawing each day.

The art team fought alongside me. This included Mr. Urushihara, an old comrade-in-arms who has a cool head, good sense, and substantial analytical and drawing ability; as well as Ms. Yoshiura (a student at the time the project started), who was positive, fun, and worked very hard on everything. Without them, I don’t think I’d have been able to do anything like this. Thank you very much!

Mr. Morimoto, who brought the characters over to neat, orderly pixel art . . .  Mr. Matsumoto, who was over the UI and worked steadfastly through trial and error . . .  Everyone at Art Dink for bringing art and design to life on the game screen and creating a wonderful world . . .  Everyone who has been involved in and supported Triangle Strategy—I apologize for not naming you all. Thank you so much! And Mr. Asano, who always provides me with new opportunities and challenges. It was a great experience for me to be entrusted with the art for this project. I’d like to thank you again! I look forward to making use of this knowledge in my future work.

For those who are interested in this project, we hope you can play the game and find your favorite character!

I hope the world of Triangle Strategy continues to expand. Best regards, and thank you for your support!

- Naoki Ikushima

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My name is Urushihara and I was given the opportunity to serve as an assistant on this project. Thank you very much for your support!

Several years ago, Mr. Ikushima introduced me to Mr. Asano’s team, and the first project I got involved with was Triangle Strategy.

I recall that, as someone who was greatly influenced by Square's games from the SNES/PS era, the chance to work on a project that has the same feel as those classic simulation RPGs had me shaking with excitement.

I've had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects during my career, from background designs to characters, illustrations for advertisements, etc., and this project has incorporated all of my experience! It’s turned out to be a monumental work.

I hope that it will be a profoundly memorable experience for all of you.

I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Mr. Asano, Mr. Arai, the development teams at Square Enix and Art Dink, and above all to Mr. Ikushima for giving me this opportunity and for providing me with so much guidance every day!

We’d also like to once again thank everyone who purchased the game software and this book! We look forward to your continued support of the Asano team's works!

- Tatsuaki Urushihara

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Translation notes, and image ids under the cut.

Translation notes:

"SNES" was actually the letters "SFC" (you can see them in the foreword text in plain English) but it was referring to the Super Famicom, which was the Japanese version of the SNES, so I decided to localize as SNES.

"Salt...... iron......." really was just like that. I'm not sure if there was some formatting/grammatical thing I missed or if Arai really did just send over two words, but. either way it's really funny to me!!

I've recently looked more into Japanese grammar and all the particles that are used, and since I'm feeling a little more confident in what things mean, I inserted more filler words than normal to help things sound more natural. For example, "something along the lines of 'a fleeting instant made up of infinite possibilities'" would probably read more directly as "something that feels like 'a fleeting moment of infinite possibilities'." It's not a huge difference, but I guess I just wanted to make a note that I've taken some liberties with the grammar and the exact phrasing.

Image ID

[Image id: The first image is a picture of the foreword (written in Japanese), which includes a small drawing of Serenoa, Roland, Frederica, and Benedict's faces. The second image is a drawing of Frederica, Benedict, and Roland standing with their backs facing Serenoa, who holds the Scales of conviction, along with the illustrator's note in Japanese. The third image is the translated illustrator's note, which reads, "Frederica, Benedict, Roland… Serenoa has to determine the path he should walk while knowing that the three of them each have their own individual desires concerning what should happen. In this picture, I wanted to illustrate a weighty moment, something along the lines of 'a fleeting instant made up of infinite possibilities.'' (Naoki Ikushima)" /end id]

[sorenblr]

thoughts on Akihiko Yoshida? hes done several greatest game of all time contenders but I still don't know how 2 feel about him tbh

I would rank him highly, although I do think his best work belongs to a bygone era. I've always had a lot of affection for Yoshida as the Square-affiliated artist most likely to describe form with profuse hatching. The original Tactics Ogre cover is one of my favorite pieces of game art:

I think he produced his most compelling work around this period, in collaboration with Hiroshi Minagawa, and more generally prior to the onset of HD development. I don't know how deeply involved he was with the process (Minagawa is credited as supervisor in both cases), but between Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII, his designs have been treated to the most compelling applications of texture mapping in the medium.

I also love the lush storybook style he adopted for Four Heroes of Light, and I wish that quality had carried more cleanly into Bravely Default.

His contributions to FFXIV are obviously accomplished but they don't really stand out in my mind due to their proximity to so many other artists on that project working in a style that roughly approximates his own. I think that's something that has muddled my impression of his work over the past decade, the glut of designers seemingly trained in his style, or the new prominence of those who simply came up in the industry working in a comparable idiom, usually in the Ivalice games. The deliberately abstracted faces contrasted with baroque or luxuriously rendered dress, the almost exclusive use of earth tones etc. It's evident everywhere from certain of Kazuya Takahashi's key art in FFXVI to Naoki Ikushima's entire corpus of Yoshida-lite emulations, even Hideo Minaba's work on Granblue Fantasy.

At one point this was a perfect triangular complement to the sectors defined by Amano and Nomura, but as we recede further and further from any remaining stylistic imprint of the former and all the appealing extravagance is bled from the latter, a sort of repetitious sameness sets in. It's no fault of Yoshida's, and I think his own work still consistently outshines his "imitators", but it probably accounts for my cooler feelings of late.

As an aside, the guy has definitely indulged his predilections to a greater degree as time goes on. He's settled on an anatomical template for his female characters that I find vaguely disquieting, as evinced in this Tomb Raider illustration. That one has especially chitinous proportions, but most of it is basically just, like... hippy zettai ryoiki shit. A fetish so mild that it's one step removed from being really 'into' big titties. Guys with active accounts across multiple booru image boards will be cranking their shit to 2B for long and silent aeons, when even the memory of man is only a shadow over the wine-dark sea.

I would still like another game where he's allowed a fuller reign over design responsibilities. Like Nomura, he's reached a position of seniority that precludes him from designing anything beyond a few core characters and some key art, leaving the heft of the work to younger artists or middle-talents like Roberto Ferrari. Hopefully he'll be on tap for something other than Nier Automota phone games or FFXIV package illustrations or whatever the fuck Little Noah: Scion of Paradise is supposed to be. Damn, videogames are rough! This shit is not cooking!

[fancypantsrecords]

Yasunori Nishiki - Octopath Traveler -Recorded Journey- | Square Enix Music | 2022 | Black

[randomisedgaming]

Promotional artwork for the 2018 Nintendo Switch title from Acquire Corporation and Square Enix:

Octopath Traveler

Art by Naoki Ikushima

Follow Randomised Gaming on Tumblr, for video game, art, reviews, features, videos and more. You can also find us on YouTube, Twitch & Twitter for even more gaming & video content! Buy us a tea on Ko-fi

[saikyo78]

[smilepebble]

Happy 6th anniversary, Octopath Traveler! Here's to the journey ahead~

[slimereader]

Visuals from the Japanese website for the Roto Trilogy!

[unparalleledfocus]

Sometimes I think about the concept art for the original idea of/beta Octopath

[mw-537]

DragonQuest III HD-2D / I & II HD-2D Remake Key Art by Naoki Ikushima

[jeffwiggins]

via DragonQuest on Twitter: “Please enjoy the full key art for Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake. Square Enix designer Naoki Ikushima, who has worked on numerous packaging and character designs for HD-2D titles, was commissioned to create this artwork to signify the Erdrick Trilogy’s new direction.”

[happiighost]

I’ve just realized I’ve been mixing artists up.

For the longest time I thought the lead character designers/art directors for bravely default and octopath/triangle strategy were the same person... They did work together on the first two  bravely default games. Which may explain some similar rendering styles. 

Akihiko Yoshida was behind character designs for bravely default, bravely second and nier automata.

Naoki Ikushima is the artist behind octopath and was passed the baton with bravely default ii. Though Akihiko Yoshida still did the main four character designs before leaving the team. 

This might explain why the 3d models look kinda off in bravely default ii. I’m used to seeing them in a different style! I guess the dead give away was the inclusion of noses lol. Also turns out some of the defunct gacha games show the difference pretty well! (Poor Elvis and Olberic though he looks very bad as just costume for the avatar in fairy’s effect!)

bonus! octopath outfits from fairy effect

[triangle-strategy-notes]

Benedict concept art! Translation notes under the cut, text versions of the captions in the alt text.

I ended up having some mix-ups with the words "Benedict" and "Utility" because Benedict's name and the word that was eventually translated as "Utility" are really similar. "Utility" is ベネフィット, and the characters are pronounced phonetically as "Be ne fu ~i tto" (i.e. a direct Japanese spelling of the English word "benefit"). Benedict is ベネディクト, and the characters are phonetically pronounced as "Be ne de ~i ku to". There's a solid chance I made some mistakes throughout the pages on which word I was supposed to use, but they're both referring to Benedict either way.

On a related note, there was one place (the note about the gun being able to fold) where I made "utility" lowercase. Japanese doesn't have capital letters, so that was just sort of a guess at what version of the word they meant.

"The neck muscles are hidden" was one that I couldn't make sense of. I'm sure there was something about neck/muscles, but the sentence (as far as I can tell) is something like "Hudan muscles of the neck," so I'm not really sure what it's supposed to say in its entirety. I'm going with the idea that Hudan was a slightly-off phonetic spelling of "hidden," but I might be completely wrong.

The word for "squeaky clean" was lit. defined as an onomatopoeia for scrubbing (ゴシゴシ or "gon gon"). I couldn't think of a good English equivalent that sounded nice within the sentence, so I went with "squeaky clean" instead, since I think that was essentially the meaning they were going for.

"Looks like father..." might have had some nuance that I didn't manage to get down. The word for father was probably something more like "the father of this household" but it wasn't super clear. The overall meaning I took away from it was, "Serenoa looks like the Wolffort family father," but that wasn't really the wording they used, so I decided to just leave it vague.

There's some text in the tiny little box at the bottom of the expressions page that I wrote as "From the setting." The actual text seemed to be shorthand for something, and I wasn't exactly sure what the intention was. It might have meant "this is a style that fits within the setting [of Norzelia]," or it might have meant something more like, "this was from the original setting up of Benedict's character." There's also just a chance it meant something entirely different--I feel pretty unsure about this one.

[sentofight]

E.dea's new art by Naoki Ikushima!

[sulan1809]

Live a Live Remake - Remake de um clássico perdido do SNES

Live a Live foi lançado em 1994 no Japão pro SNES, mas em julho de 2022, a Square Enix lançou exclusivamente para o Nintendo Switch um remake de Live a Live, aplicando é claro o estilo de gráfico HD 2D já presente em Octopath Traveler. Interface gráfica e sons foram modificados, e o sistema de gameplay foi rebalanceado. Os designs de personagens ficaram a cargo de Naoki Ikushima. O enredo é o mesmo da versão original: Em sete eras distintas - Período Pré-histórico, China Antiga, Japão Feudal, Faroeste Selvagem, Futuro Próximo, Futuro distante e Presente - cada um dos protagonistas das storylines separadas, deve encarar um inimigo que é a encarnação de um espírito do ódio. Quando todos esses capítulos são fechados, o capítulo medieval, intitulado “O Rei das Trevas” ou o “Rei dos Demônios”, é desbloqueado. Quando o oitavo capítulo é fechado, um nono e último capítulo é desbloqueado, para obter o melhor final, jogadores devem escolher um dos sete heróis, exceto o antagonista principal, Oersted, e unir forças com heróis de outras eras, para derrotar um inimigo em comum, o “Rei do Ódio”... Dependendo do seu desempenho, você pode pegar um final bom ou ruim...

[sandmandaddy69]

Octopath Traveler — Artwork by Naoki Ikushima

[lord-tiki]

Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent “Antagonists” 2019 Square Enix