Tetsuya Nomura Talks About Designing Gilgamesh; Final Fantasy V 30th Anniversary

December 6, 2022December 6, 2022 Orpheus Joshua

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Final Fantasy V, the franchise’s official website published a post discussing the most iconic character originating from that title, Gilgamesh.

Further, the article’s conclusion contains a lengthy message from this entry’s monster designer, Tetsuya Nomura.

You can view the full quoted message below:

FFV’s 30th anniversary means it’s been 30 years since I first got my start in game development. To think it’s been that long… I struggle to wrap my head around it. Recalling my memories of the time, I didn’t care about being a big character designer or director.

I was just a monster designer worrying over how what I was working on compared to the wildly popular monsters of the DQ series. I created things like cactuar and tonberry hoping they’d bring some popularity to FF monsters, and amongst them was Gilgamesh himself.

The development process was entirely different back then, and most monsters had visuals proposed first with their backstories handled after the fact. Personally the monster I most wanted to push for in my FFV sketchbook was this multi-armed magical being of sorts named Gilgamesh who carried a different weapon in each hand.

And there was another monster called “Benkei” on a different page of my sketchbook, with many weapons on its back. It was proposed that these two monsters be used as Gilgamesh’s forms pre- and post-transformation. From there he was added to the scenario, and even given exciting extra dialogue and scenes in battle.

As a new member of the team, I remember being really impressed by the way my colleagues skillfully integrated my design into the title. With that, Gilgamesh was born, not just as some grunt to hack away at but with his own unique personality.

By the way, in those days implementation of visual designs into the game programming was done first, so it was later on that Gilgamesh’s visuals came to be based on Mr. Yoshitaka Amano’s art.

A number of years later Gilgamesh appeared again in FFVIII, and since then he’s become very popular as he continues to wander the space between dimensions. At first he was simply one of many monsters, but he’s now grown to the extraordinary position of being his own fully developed character.

Someday I hope he will come to be valued as a lucky charm of sorts, and eventually be able to find his way back to his own world.

In case you missed it, an official acoustic arrangement of “Battle at the Big Bridge” was shared by Square Enix.

We also reviewed the Pixel Remaster version of Final Fantasy V.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion is set to be a modernized retelling of the original Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, a prequel to the game that initiated this beloved sub-franchise. Players control Zack, a hyperactive and determined SOLDIER yearning to become not only First Class, but also a hero in his own right.

Combat utilizes real-time action elements alongside the innovative “Digital Mind Wave” system, used to perform special attacks called Limit Breaks and achieve other notable feats.

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion is releasing for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on December 13, 2022.

Final Fantasy XVI is releasing for PlayStation 5 in the Summer of 2023.