Yusuke Kozaki

Yusuke Kozaki ( コザキユースケ Kozaki Yūsuke) is an illustrator and character designer. He went to a graphic design school where he learned graphic design for commercials and publicity oriented design. He started work as a character designer with the 2005 anime series Speed Grapher and accepted the job in order to earn money (initially wanting to become a Mangaka (comic artist or cartoonist)). After trying it and finding it interesting, he got more work in the area in animation, film, and videogames. He used to draw on paper first, but he now draws directly with the computer mainly using Photoshop.

Kozaki provided the character designs and official artwork for Fire Emblem: Awakening and it's sequel Fire Emblem If. Regarding as to whether specific instructions where present for what each character were to look like in Awakening, Kozaki said that he was given the personality of each character from the production company and from this concept could freely design the character. He did a few designs for each character, and the production company chose the final design from these.

In an interview with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, Kozaki described how he was first contacted to work on Awakening when he received an email request from Intelligent Systems to design about 60 characters for an unidentified game, to which his first response was "Is that for Fire Emblem?"

In a developer interview with Awakening's 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 Awakening 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 Heroes, which was well-received overseas. He further notes that "There was definitely a movement with this project to give everything a fresh new look, so we wanted to find a character designer who could work in a different direction from previous FE games." Kusakihara describes Kozaki's unique direction by saying that a rule he would always try to follow is that "his character's basic personalities bubble up to the surface, so you can look at a character and immediately tell a fair amount about what's going on inside their mind. For example in Awakening, Gaius is a character 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 clothes..." In the same interview, Awakening project manager Masahiro Higuchi states that Cherche was the first character that Kozaki came up with.

Regarding specific FE13 characters, Kozaki himself has stated that Lucina was his favorite to design and personality wise he feels he is most closely connected with Vaike. With the armored characters, the art director actually designed the armor, with Kozaki designing the characters in the armor afterwards. Before doing the designs for Awakening he hadn't played a Fire Emblem game before and he didn't know a lot about the series. Kozaki 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 eccentric dress and fanservice than previous games in the series, he commented that they were not designed with fanservice or sexualization in mind, and that it was the characters personalities that led to their design. When asked if any characters got scrapped during development, he noted that since there where a lot of characters to draw there was no surprise when characters had to be dropped. When asked if were there any other legacy Fire Emblem characters that he would have liked to illustrate for Fire Emblem Awakening DLC (in addition to Katrina), he answered that he would have liked to have drawn Ike from Radiant Dawn.

Despite his heightened prominence within the Fire Emblem series emerging from Awakening, His first contact with the series was in 2001 where he contributed three card illustrations for the Fire Emblem: Trading Card Game as apart of the Jugdral Chronology set.

Credits

 * Fire Emblem: Trading Card Game: Illustration (Cards AN-015 Lewyn, AN-028 Leif & AN-038 Sara)
 * Fire Emblem: Awakening: Character Design & Illustration
 * Fire Emblem If: Character Design & Illustration