Tetsuya Nomura Is Busy with More than Kingdom Hearts III

For the CG version of Miku, Nomura focused on the design of Miku’s face. “[I focused on] her mouth and eyes.” Nomura noted. “By making her realistic, I expected Miku to end up more adult than people imagine her as, so I added some volume in her cheeks around her mouth and gave her what you might call ‘duck lips’ to give her mouth a sense of youth.” As for Miku’s eyes, Nomura focused on making them seem artificial. “Miku is a Vocaloid, not a human, so I intentionally made [her eyes] that way.”

According to Nomura, Hidemi Matsuzaka, the division executive of the Square Enix Merchandizing Business Division had made a push for Nomura to be able to work outside of Japan, which led to the decision for a Variant series for the Play Arts Kai line of figures. The first move was to dig up the old Batman design and develop a figure out of it. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the original rough designs I made, so I had to recreate the design from memory.” Nomura said with a laugh.

Aside from Batman and Catwoman, there was also a small Joker card on display at Comic-Con indicating further designs to come. “This project is still ongoing, so please look forward to further news.” said Nomura.

Also at New York Comic-Con, Nomura’s collaboration designs for Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate were announced. These designs include original male and female weapons and armor and original Felyne equipment. As these collaboration designs are for regions outside of Japan, they are not available for the Japanese Monster Hunter 4 G that was released last week. “I’ve publicly stated that I love the Monster Hunter series, especially the multi-player.” Nomura stated. “So when I received the offer, I was honestly very happy.”

“I’ve received several other [design] offers other than the recent announcements, and it just a coincidence that some of the announcements happened to overlap.” Nomura said towards the end of the interview. “It’s not that I’ve been focused on work outside of Japan, but people around me are constantly saying, ‘you should target overseas,’ so I guess the offers just came naturally.”

Nomura noted that his calendar is currently booked with projects up to 2019 – something the designer seems very pleased about. “I get bored working one just one thing for a long time, and I tend to like working on all sorts of different projects.” Nomura said, adding, “Of course I’ll be making games as well.”