FF5 character designs?

So, what’s the story behind all of the character design changes from the actual sprites, and Amano’s art? Everyone had blonde/white hair in his art, yet in the sprites are given brown/pink/purple.And the overall look is changed for most of them.

Why did this happen? Who came up with the final designs and colors? Is there any art for it? (Other than the big looking sprites like my avatar)

I’m sure there probably is, I suppose the reason they have multicolored hair is to make them standout or give them more character. Amano’s art is usually like that with no distinct hair colors or anything. If you look at his art for FF6 and FF9 you’ll notice Dagger (Garnet) has blonde hair in his design but in the game she has black hair. Also characters such as Locke who has sort of a grayish hair color in the game has blonde hair in his design.

This all comes down to the old style 8-bit/16-bit consoles only having a limited colour pallette to work from (if you’ve ever mucked around with RPG Maker 2k or 2k3 you’ll know what I mean).

NES and Super NES graphics use 8-bit colour which due to some maths I won’t mention allows a maximum of 256 colours on screen, a tiny amount compared to the several billion colours modern HD TVs are capable of displaying. The sprite artist has to make all the colours in a game from this tiny pallete, a difficult task to be sure.

Additionally, because of the Job system where the character’s outfit changes depending on that Job, giving each character a unique hair colour is the only way the sprite artist can give the carhacter individuality and personality on screen, allowing the player to identify each character regardless of what Job they’re currently as (i.e. Faris’s purple hair, Krile’s flower in her hair, Galuf’s grey beard etc).

Incidentally, it was Yoshitaka Amano who designed the original character concepts, and if you know anything about Amano, he has a tendency to use light tones and washes in his character designs. Ironically enough, I heard Tetsuya Nomura got his first job working on sprite design on FFV, so if you’re angry with the discrepancy of colour between Amano’s artwork and the in-game sprites blame Nomura. :p

I’m not upset about it, I like both versions actually. I kinda forgot about the job system for a second there. That would be extremely confusing if they all had the same hair color and changed into so many jobs.

I do hear about people complain about Nomura’s designs/style alot lol.

In the actual game programming stages though, it’s the art director, or something, that desides what the characters sprites look like, right? Amano was just the artist; was Nomura the one who decided the color changes, or would that be someone else?

Amano’s art is a lot more realistic than whats in the video games.
I suppose he draws them with lighter colors to make them look more natural, meanwhile the game gives them multicolored hair to tell them easily apart. I could care less as I’d rather see a FF4, FF5 and FF6 remake.

Rather… meaning, as opposed to what? No one suggested a remake in this thread…

And btw, there IS an FF4 remake. It’s the DS.

Thinking about it though, if/when they get to remaking FF5 on the DS, I hope they use the multi-colored hair. All blonde and white would almost pose the same problem as the original, due to the DS’s limited graphics. If they remake it, say for, PSP or PS2 and up, then it wouldn’t matter because they could bring in enough facial features and clothing detail to tell them apart.

I have also always wanted to know who did the redesigns for the in-game sprites, I actually prefer those rather than Amano’s designs.

I don’t think Nomura drew them, he did design some sprites for ff5, but they were those of monsters, not the main characters; and ff4 also had those Chibi redesigns before Nomura came along. I may be mistaken, though.