/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5200006
>"Objectively" it served it's purpose as concept art.
If you consider concept art as simple "inspiration" pieces this could be true, but it certainly didn't cover all the bases of what visual development for games was supposed to be. Amano's work was a good way of adding an artsy highbrow layer for packaging and promo artwork that helped the series stand out from more functional but less classy visual styles (>>5199787), but it always required somebody to then go and make actually implementable designs from that mess (I mean "mess" in a good way, I do love the guy's work, but it's like the less appropriate kind of style imaginable for extremely low resolution games)

Less so for the monsters, since those were just higher resolution floating billboards, but the field/battle appearance of the characters had almost nothing to do with the original designs, even in terms of basic color schemes.

Nomura owes a lot to the guy though, since he got started as a "translator" of Amano's designs into stuff actually usable by the sprite artists