Kingdom Hearts II

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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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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Yoshinori Kitase is a Japanese game producer and former game director that has been working for Square Enix since April 1, 1990. He is mostly known for his work on the role-playing video game series Final Fantasy. He currently serves as the producer of the Final Fantasy games developed by Square Enix 1st Production Department. Kitase wanted to become a film director after seeing the movie Star Wars at the age of 12, when it was released in... Japan. After earning a degree in cinema from the Nihon University College of Art, he worked for a small animation studio, producing animated cartoons for commercials and television programs. In 1990, after one year of employment, he decided to join the video game company Square, despite having no computer knowledge. Kitase is best known as the director of Final Fantasy VI , Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy VIII. Kitase described his first ten years of work at Square as that of an "event scripter", directing the characters' movements and expressions on the game screen as well as setting the timings and music transitions.
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Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd. TYO: 9684 is a Japanese video game publisher and distribution company best known for its role-playing video game franchises, which include the Final Fantasy series, the Dragon Quest series, and the action-RPG Kingdom Hearts series. Its headquarters are located in the... Shinjuku Bunka Quint Building in Yoyogi, Shibuya, Tokyo. The original Square Enix was formed as the result of a merger between Square and Enix. The merger occurred on April 1, 2003, with Square stockholders receiving 0.85 shares of stock in the new company compared to Enix stockholders receiving a one-to-one trade. Enix was the surviving company of the merger. At the time, 80% of Square Enix staff were made up of former Square Co. employees. As part of the merger, many of the top officials within Square Co. assumed the leadership roles in the new corporate hierarchy, including president Yoichi Wada, who was appointed president of the corporation. The original founder of Enix, Yasuhiro Fukushima, is currently the honorary chairman and largest shareholder of the corporation.
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