Kingdom Hearts

Tidus is a fictional character from Square Enix's Final Fantasy series, first introduced as the protagonist of the role-playing video game Final... Fantasy X in 2001. Tidus is introduced as a 17-year-old rising blitzball star player from the city of Zanarkand. After a mysterious creature called Sin attacked his hometown, Tidus was seemingly transported to the world of Spira. Shortly after arriving, Tidus meets a newly fledged summoner, Yuna, and her guardians. The summoner is soon to set out on a pilgrimage in an attempt to put an end to the very creature that attacked Tidus' city; and by joining them, Tidus hopes he will find his way home. He has also made appearances in other video games, such as Final Fantasy X's sequel, Final Fantasy X-2; the Kingdom Hearts series, and other crossover games. The character was designed with the intention of having a cheerful appearance in contrast to previous Final Fantasy protagonists, as well as to give him a deeper relationship with the player.
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Sephiroth is a fictional character in the role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII developed by Square. He is introduced there as the main... antagonist. Character designer Tetsuya Nomura wanted his role in the story to be different from the other Final Fantasy villains while his design is intended to contrast directly with that of the main character, Cloud Strife. His Japanese voice actor is Toshiyuki Morikawa; in English, he was first voiced by Lance Bass in Kingdom Hearts and by George Newbern in all his subsequent appearances. In Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth is the result of an experiment by the mega-corporation Shinra, in which they used cells from the extraterrestrial lifeform Jenova. After discovering this, Sephiroth decides to become a god to take control of the planet; Cloud and the game's other protagonists choose to stop him. Sephiroth's role in the story as well as his background are expanded in the titles from Compilation of Final Fantasy VII. Additionally, he appears as a boss character in the Kingdom Hearts series, and other video games developed by the same company.
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is a fictional character from the ''Kingdom Hearts'' series. He comes from Destiny Islands and is the best friend of Sora, and Kairi. Riku is derived... from the Japanese readings of the character for , in comparison with and . He is voiced by actor David Gallagher for the English versions of the Kingdom Hearts games and by Mamoru Miyano in the Japanese versions. Kingdom Hearts begins with Sora, Kairi, and Riku on Destiny Islands, building a raft with which they can explore the worlds beyond the islands. One night, the islands are invaded by the darkness, beckoned by Riku. Sora confronts Riku and refuses his invitation to join him as he disappears into darkness. Sora finds himself possessing a Keyblade, a mystical weapon, afterwards. Riku is randomly deposited in Hollow Bastion, another world, where Maleficent resides. After searching for Riku at other worlds, Sora meets his friend at Traverse Town. There, Riku is able to take Sora's Keyblade without it disappearing from his hands. While Sora argues with his companion, Donald, about bringing Riku along for the journey, the boy disappears.
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Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse... and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves. He is one of the most recognizable cartoon characters in the world and is the mascot of The Walt Disney Company, the world's largest media conglomerate in terms of annual revenue. Mickey debuted in November 1928 in the animated cartoon Steamboat Willie after initially appearing in a test screening earlier that year. He went on to appear in over 130 films including The Band Concert , Brave Little Tailor , and Fantasia . Mickey appeared primarily in short films, but also in a few feature-length films. Nine of Mickey's cartoons were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, one of which, Lend a Paw, won the award in 1942. In 1978, Mickey became the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Beginning 1930, Mickey has also been featured extensively as a comic strip character. His self-titled newspaper strip, drawn primarily by Floyd Gottfredson, ran for 45 years.
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Tetsuya Nomura is a Japanese video game director and character designer working for Square Enix , best known for his work on both the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts series. Nomura was born in Kōchi, Japan. When he was a young man, he graduated from vocational school with a degree in Graphic Design. In the early 1990s, Square hired him to work as a debugger for Final Fantasy IV and following it as a monster designer for Final Fantasy V... and then as the graphic director in charge of monster designs for Final Fantasy VI. Nomura's most notable work came in 1995, when Square asked him to be the character designer for Final Fantasy VII to replace Yoshitaka Amano. It was a critical and commercial success. In 1998, he worked on both Parasite Eve & Brave Fencer Musashi. In 1997, Nomura worked on Final Fantasy VIII, a game that achieved commercial success, where he returned as the character designer.
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Daisuke Watanabe is a Japanese video game scenario writer that has been an employee of Square Enix since September, 1998. He is mostly known for his work on the role-playing video game series Final Fantasy and the action role-playing video game series Kingdom Hearts. Watanabe says that he has no fixed writing style. From drama to comedy, romance to politics, his writing style is broad. The way he writes for a specific video game is dependent on... how the original story writer wants their story to be portrayed in a script. He believes that his strength is his ability to create a screenplay that portrays the exact vision of the original story writer. Final Fantasy X was the first Final Fantasy game that Watanabe worked on. Kazushige Nojima has stated that he was assisted by other staff to create the scenario for the game. Watanabe was initially not part of the Final Fantasy XII development team. However, he was brought in to finish the script when the original scenario writer Yasumi Matsuno left Square Enix three quarters into development of the game due to sickness. Watanabe joined the development team in November 2004.
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Yoko Shimomura is a Japanese video game composer. She has been described as "the most famous female video game music composer in the world". She has worked in the video game music industry since graduating from Osaka College of Music in 1988. From then until 1993, she worked for Capcom, where she composed wholly or in part the scores for 17 games, including Final Fight and Street Fighter II. From 1993 to 2002 Shimomura worked for Square , where... she composed for a further eight games, including the popular Super Mario RPG, Legend of Mana, and Kingdom Hearts games. Since then she has worked as a freelance composer, writing for over a dozen titles. Her works have gained a great deal of popularity, and have been performed in multiple video game music concerts, including one, Sinfonia Drammatica, that was focused half on her "greatest hits" album, Drammatica: The Very Best of Yoko Shimomura, and half on the music of a previous concert. Music from several of her games has been published as arranged albums and as piano scores. Yoko Shimomura was born in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan on October 19, 1967.
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Square Co., Ltd. was a Japanese video game company founded in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto. It merged with Enix in 2003 and became part of Square Enix. Squaresoft was also a brand name used by Square to refer to their games, and is often used incorrectly to refer to the company itself.... Square was founded in Yokohama in September 1983 by Masafumi Miyamoto after he graduated from Waseda, one of Japan's top universities. Back then, Square was a computer game software division of Den-Yu-Sha, a power line construction company owned by Miyamoto's father. While at the time game development was usually conducted by only one programmer, Miyamoto believed that it would be more efficient to have graphic designers, programmers and professional story writers working together on common projects. Square's first two titles were The Death Trap and its sequel Will: The Death Trap II, both designed by part-time employee Hironobu Sakaguchi and released on the NEC PC-8801.
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Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. is a major video game company specializing in a variety of areas in the video game industry, and is a wholly owned subsidiary and part of the Consumer Products & Services Group of Sony. The company was established on November 16, 1993 in Tokyo, Japan, prior to... the launch of the original PlayStation video game system. Sony Computer Entertainment handles the research & development, production, and sales of both hardware and software for the PlayStation line of handheld and home console video game systems. It is also a developer and publisher of video game titles and is composed of several subsidiaries covering the company's biggest markets: North America, Europe and Asia. The North American operations, Sony Computer Entertainment of America, were established in May 1994 as a division of Sony Electronic Publishing. They were located in Foster City and headed by Steve Race. In the months prior to the release of PlayStation in Western markets, the operations were restructured: All videogame marketing from Sony Imagesoft was folded into SCEA in July 1995, with most affected employees transferred from Santa Monica to Foster City.
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Square Electronic Arts L.L.C., also known as Square EA, was a joint venture between console video game developers Squaresoft and Electronic Arts. Announced on April 27, 1998, Square EA was based in Costa Mesa, California and operated under the supervision of Square president and CEO Jun Iwasaki,... and was responsible for publishing and marketing all games produced by Square in North America. Conversely, Electronic Arts Square, K.K., formed at the same time and based in Japan, was responsible for publishing and marketing games produced by Electronic Arts in Asia. Under the terms of the agreement, Electronic Arts owned 30 percent of Square EA, and Square owned 30 percent of EA Square. Square EA proved to be very successful, and during its five years of existence released a higher proportion of localized Square titles to the American market than ever before. EA Square, on the other hand, was somewhat less successful, and struggled to make an impact on the Asian videogame market, which has been traditionally difficult for American game developers to break into.
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