How To Draw Fire Emblem Fates Cover Art

Yusuke ( コザキユースケ Yūsuke) is an illustrator and character designer. He went to a graphic design schoolhouse where he studied publicity oriented design and commercial apply. From in that location he started work as a grapheme designer starting with the 2005 anime serial Speed Grapher and accustomed the job in order to earn money (despite initially wanting to become a 'Mangaka' comic creative person/cartoonist). After trying the chore and finding it interesting, he got more work in that field in the blitheness, film, and videogame industry. For his art he used to draw on newspaper first before finishing the project digitally on the reckoner, simply has since then exclusively produced digital art, mainly using Photoshop.

Kozaki provided the character designs and official artwork for Fire Emblem Awakening and Fire Emblem Fates. Regarding equally to whether specific instructions where present for what each graphic symbol were to look similar in Enkindling, Kozaki stated that he was given the personality of each character from the production company and from this concept could freely design the graphic symbol. He would describe a few designs for each character, with the production company choosing the concluding pattern from these.

Despite his heightened prominence within the Burn Emblem series emerging from his work in Awakening, his beginning contact with the series began back in 2001 where he contributed three card illustrations for the Fire Emblem: Trading Bill of fare Game as office of the Jugdral Anthology set.^[ane] He as well created two Newcomer artworks for Robin, Lucina, and Corrin in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.

Work in Burn Emblem Enkindling

In an interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, Kozaki described how he was outset contacted to work on Awakening when he received an email request from Intelligent Systems to design about lx characters for an unidentified game, to which his commencement response was "Is that for Fire Emblem?"^[2]

In a split up interview with the Awakening English translators, 8-4, Ltd., upon being inquired about the different visual direction Awakening took as compared to previous games in the series, art director Toshiyuki Kusakihara revealed that they had been planning to release the game outside Japan from the start and that part of the reason Kozaki was hired was due to his work on the 2008 Nintendo Wii game No More than Heroes, which was well-received overseas. He further notes that "There was definitely a motion with this project to give everything a fresh new wait, and then we wanted to find a graphic symbol designer who could piece of work in a different management from previous FE games." Kusakihara describes Kozaki's unique direction by saying that he attempts to follow a rule when drawing wherein "his grapheme's basic personalities bubble up to the surface, and then you can look at a character and immediately tell a fair corporeality well-nigh what's going on inside their mind. For example in Enkindling, Gaius is a grapheme who likes sweets, so Kozaki-san drew him literally carrying candy. His final concept art has him with this teddy bear-shaped lollipop attached to his dress".^[3] In the aforementioned interview, Awakening projection manager Masahiro Higuchi states that Cherche was the first character that Kozaki came up with.^[iv]

Relating to specific Awakening characters, Kozaki himself has stated that Lucina was his favorite to design and that personality wise he feels he is almost closely connected with Vaike. When creating the armored characters, the art director really designed the armor, with Kozaki designing the characters in the armor afterwards. Before doing the designs for Awakening Kozaki hadn't played a Fire Emblem game before and he didn't know a lot about the series. He said that because of this he wasn't influenced by any previous designs though, so he was able to work more freely. Concerning some fans skepticism with the new Awakening designs featuring more than eccentric dress and fanservice than previous games in the series, he commented that they were non designed with fanservice or sexualization in listen, and that it was the characters personalities that led to their blueprint. When asked if any characters got scrapped during evolution, he noted that since there where a lot of characters to draw at that place was no surprise when characters had to be dropped. When asked if were there any other legacy Fire Keepsake characters that he would accept liked to illustrate for the Fire Emblem Awakening DLC (in addition to Katarina), he answered that he would have liked to have drawn Ike from Radiant Dawn.

Work in Fire Emblem Fates

In a 2022 interview with Famitsu, Fates developers Maeda Kouhe and Masahiro Higuchi expressed that it was universally agreed amongst the staff for Kozaki to return equally character designer from Awakening at the very offset of developing Fire Keepsake Fates; with an offer for the task being sent to him immediately. Due to at that place being more characters in Fates so in the previous game there were initial worries that Kozaki might decline, so when he agreed to reprise his role the developers were thankful for his return.^[5]

Credits

Fire Keepsake: Trading Card Game: Illustration (Cards AN-015 Lewyn, AN-028 Leif & AN-038 Sara)
Fire Emblem Awakening: Character Pattern & Illustration
Fire Keepsake Fates: Graphic symbol Blueprint & Illustration
Fire Emblem 0 (Nix) TCG: Various card artwork
Fire Emblem Heroes: Grapheme Pattern & Analogy