Tetsuya Nomura is a character designer for Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Belt apocalypse incoming

On Tuesday, the Twitter account for Xenoblade Chronicles 2 revealed that Tetsuya Nomura, know for his work on the Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts franchises, would be a guest character designer for the game.

The account went into further detail about how the character design was being handled. Masatsugu Saito, who did the redesign of Celica for the Fire Emblem Awakening DLC, would be handling the character designs for the majority of the games cast, including main characters Rex and Pyra. Nomura on the other hand will be handling the designs for Torna, an organization found in the game. Two characters he’s responsible for have been shown, but no names or further details were given.

The concept of bringing in a different designer to make unique designs isn’t something new. It can be used to help bring a foreign feeling to certain items within a world, like they don’t belong. It’s a feeling that the anime Turn A Gundam went for by bringing in Syd Mead, an American designer who worked on Blade Runner and designed the light cycle in Tron, to do the designs for the Mobile Suits. It will be interesting to see what angle the story of Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is going for with this, given it’s a night-and-day difference between the designers at the moment.

@XenobladeJP [Twitter]