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Toshiyuki Itahana, a veteran character designer best known among fans for shaping the look and feel of Final Fantasy IX, has officially left Square Enix after roughly three decades with the company. His departure closes a long chapter in modern JRPG history, one defined by bold silhouettes, expressive faces, and character designs that could communicate personality before a single line of dialogue landed.
More than FF9: the quiet influence of a veteran designer
In games, “character designer” can sound like a narrow job title—concept art, turnaround sheets, outfit variants, done. But anyone who’s played the classics knows better. Character design is story design. It’s the visual grammar that tells you who a character is, how they move through the world, and what kind of tone the game is aiming for before you ever pick up a controller. That’s why the news that Toshiyuki Itahana has officially left Square Enix hits harder than a typical staffing update.
Itahana spent about 30 years at Square Enix, a stretch that covers enormous shifts in how RPGs are made: from the late-era pixel and pre-rendered backgrounds to fully 3D pipelines, HD remasters, and today’s hybrid workflows where concept art, 3D sculpting, and in-engine iteration blur together. Fans most often tie his name to Final Fantasy IX, where the cast’s warm, storybook-like proportions and expressive faces helped define the game’s identity. FF9’s designs didn’t chase realism; they chased readability and emotion. Vivi’s oversized hat and glowing eyes tell you everything about fragility and wonder. Zidane’s tail and confident posture communicate mischief and charm. Steiner’s bulky armor isn’t just “knight gear”—it’s a visual metaphor for duty, rigidity, and the slow process of learning to bend.
But calling Itahana “the FF9 character designer” is, as your prompt suggests, only scratching the surface. Long-tenured designers at companies like Square Enix rarely live inside a single box. Over decades, they contribute to character concepts, monster direction, promotional art, UI-adjacent illustration, visual development, and the kind of internal mentorship that never shows up in credits breakdowns but shapes the studio’s taste. RPGs especially rely on that institutional memory: what reads well at a distance, how to balance fantasy detail with silhouette clarity, and how to design characters that still look “right” when they’re translated into models, animations, merchandise, and key art.
His departure also invites a bigger industry read: we’re watching a generational handoff across Japanese game development. Veterans who helped define the visual language of late-90s and early-2000s JRPGs are moving on, going freelance, joining smaller studios, or pursuing personal projects. That’s not inherently bad—fresh blood can be great—but it does change the creative “bench strength” of a publisher. Studios don’t just lose hands; they lose instincts, taste, and the ability to keep a long-running franchise feeling consistent even as technology and audience expectations evolve.
What happens next is the interesting part. Itahana’s style is distinctive, and in an era of remakes, remasters, and nostalgia-forward releases, veteran designers often find themselves pulled into high-profile collaborations—or they become the creative anchors of new IP elsewhere. Either way, his exit is a reminder that the look of the RPG genre wasn’t inevitable. It was drawn, line by line, by people like him.
Itahana spent about 30 years at Square Enix, a stretch that covers enormous shifts in how RPGs are made: from the late-era pixel and pre-rendered backgrounds to fully 3D pipelines, HD remasters, and today’s hybrid workflows where concept art, 3D sculpting, and in-engine iteration blur together. Fans most often tie his name to Final Fantasy IX, where the cast’s warm, storybook-like proportions and expressive faces helped define the game’s identity. FF9’s designs didn’t chase realism; they chased readability and emotion. Vivi’s oversized hat and glowing eyes tell you everything about fragility and wonder. Zidane’s tail and confident posture communicate mischief and charm. Steiner’s bulky armor isn’t just “knight gear”—it’s a visual metaphor for duty, rigidity, and the slow process of learning to bend.
But calling Itahana “the FF9 character designer” is, as your prompt suggests, only scratching the surface. Long-tenured designers at companies like Square Enix rarely live inside a single box. Over decades, they contribute to character concepts, monster direction, promotional art, UI-adjacent illustration, visual development, and the kind of internal mentorship that never shows up in credits breakdowns but shapes the studio’s taste. RPGs especially rely on that institutional memory: what reads well at a distance, how to balance fantasy detail with silhouette clarity, and how to design characters that still look “right” when they’re translated into models, animations, merchandise, and key art.
His departure also invites a bigger industry read: we’re watching a generational handoff across Japanese game development. Veterans who helped define the visual language of late-90s and early-2000s JRPGs are moving on, going freelance, joining smaller studios, or pursuing personal projects. That’s not inherently bad—fresh blood can be great—but it does change the creative “bench strength” of a publisher. Studios don’t just lose hands; they lose instincts, taste, and the ability to keep a long-running franchise feeling consistent even as technology and audience expectations evolve.
What happens next is the interesting part. Itahana’s style is distinctive, and in an era of remakes, remasters, and nostalgia-forward releases, veteran designers often find themselves pulled into high-profile collaborations—or they become the creative anchors of new IP elsewhere. Either way, his exit is a reminder that the look of the RPG genre wasn’t inevitable. It was drawn, line by line, by people like him.
