Square Enix’s Tetsuya Nomura on designing characters for Xenoblade Chronicles 2

This week’s issue of Famitsu features an interview with Square Enix’s Tetsuya Nomura. The Japanese magazine primarily talked with Nomura about Kingdom Hearts III, but there was some brief discussion pertaining to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as well.

For those who haven’t heard, Nomura contributed to Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as a character designer. He worked on characters included in the game’s Ira organization.

Nomura considers Monolith Soft boss Tetsuya Takahashi to be like a master. Takahashi acted as a mentor and helped guide him back when they were both at Square Enix many years ago, when Nomura was a new recruit. Nomura said that it was an honor to be offered the role to work on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 since the request came from Takahashi, and he had no reason to turn it down. The relationship between the two developers made sense for the collaboration.

Aside from the two characters we’ve already seen so far, there are even more who haven’t been revealed. Nomura designed them by thinking about the personalities of each character, their weapons, etc.

One final interesting note: the work Nomura did for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 finished quite awhile ago.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is slated for this holiday on Switch.