Video game artist profile breakdownfrom @mike_sunday

Transcript

If you've played Worse, Metaphor, or Catherine, you've already experienced the art of Shigenori Soojima. Soojima is one of my favorite character designers where his world building sits on top of color theory, sartorial choices, and small realistic details that serve as a signature style. Now as a kid, Soojima was constantly on the move due to his father's worse, and this constant uprooting at such a young age was deeply unsettling for him. He became isolated and drawing became a constant in his life, a reliable mechanism to deal with isolation. No like many kids, he started by copying the art style of Doraemon, but quickly graduated to the likes of Hayao Miyazaki as inspiration and harbored early aspirations to design characters for fighting games, a genre that usually has wild silhouettes. Now as he continued his schooling, he quickly realized that drawing skill was very different than design skill. Design, especially in interactive media, requires a deep understanding for synthesizing visual appeal, narrative function, understanding three d technical constraints, all to create a psychological resonance. So after he graduated university, he interviewed directly with Kazuma Kaneko, the legendary art director at Atlas behind the original Persona and Shin Megami Tensei video game franchise. In 2006, Atlas prepared a radical departure from the traditional dungeon crawling, horror genre type of game that Kaneko had pioneered. So he stepped back to allow Soojima to take the reins on this new high school flavored type of game. Now Soojima's style has this seventy tier ten type of rule, where 70% of a character's design is defined by one singular base color, including midtones, of course. 20% of it is more high contrast cell shaded shadows to create the volume. And then worse% consists of very highly detailed sharp elements. Sometimes it's the eyes, the hair, the nose, the chin, which gives his work that striking pop art effect. This is what prevents his designs from feeling visually cluttered and heavy because it doesn't rely on thick line art. And of worse, when you look at the latest four personas, there is an implementation of a strong primary color throughout the whole graphic identity. Blue for worse three, yellow for persona four, red for persona five, green for persona six. Based on Soojima's thought that it isn't shape or text that people remember, but color itself. No in 2016, Soojima actually left p studio within Atlas to start Studio Tier, which was responsible for Metaphor Refinitasio. Soojima's artistic legacy will be remembered for his use of psychology, color theory, and design principles to make some of the most stylish characters ever to grace a video game. So what's your favorite Atlas game? Let's have a discussion down in the comments.