If you have a discerning taste for fantasy games with cute and whimsical creatures, there's a good chance you will be familiar with Satoshi Matsuura's work. (Read our best retro game consoles guide for more classic gaming.)
Starting at SquareSoft (now Square Enix), where he worked on 1999's Legend of Mana, his career as a character and creature designer has him credited in games like the cult Japan-exclusive Mother 3, and the Bravely Default series for their monster design. Fantastical critters are then something many would associate with Matsuura, something I had also previously highlighted in upcoming dungeon brawler Awaysis. Indeed, he even had a book published dedicated to this craft called Fantasy Characters & Creatures: An Artist's Sourcebook.
Despite those achievements, when speaking with Matsuura about his work, he cuts a rather shy and modest figure as he discusses his distinct style. "When it comes to my art that I draw privately for my own enjoyment, I'm drawing in my own style," he tells me over a video call from Japan. "But at the end of the day, for work, when my boss says, 'I need you to draw a bit more realistic, a bit cuter, a bit shorter, taller,' then that's the order of the day."
While inspired by other legendary Japanese artists, including the late great Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball, Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger) and Akihiko Yoshida (Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics), the early 3D era that Matsuura started out his career in may have also had an influence on his simple yet bold style: "I was very conscious of designing stuff that could be rendered into a low-polygon count. And if I didn't, people would tell me that we can't do anything with that design because it's too complex."
Our meeting is to discuss Culdcept Begins, an upcoming game that might seem outside Matsuura's wheelhouse. Chances are you may not have heard of the series, which started in 1997 on the Sega Saturn, since only a few entries have actually been localised (its one official PAL release, Culdcept Revolt, was also the last entry before the series went dormant for the past decade.
For the uninitiated, Culdcept is a turn-based strategy game that plays out like a virtual board game where you move around to acquire property and summon monsters with cards to defend or take over your opponent's property - it's basically Monopoly meets Magic: The Gathering.
The cards, featuring a variety of fantasy creatures as well as spells, were then what Matsuura was tasked with designing. Intriguingly, in his work beyond games, he had also been tapped for the art design of the physical board game Hidden Leaders, including the visually striking hero cards.
Hidden Leaders, however, wasn't the reason Matsuura was approached to work on Culdcept Begins. In fact, he tells me that when he was contacted by the game's creative director and producer, Akira Nagashima, from Neos Corporation, he wasn't immediately given details of the project, as the company had to secure rights from the series creator, OmiyaSoft.
"Once I heard it was Culdcept, I was kind of taken aback, because it's really well known [in Japan]," he says. "I was concerned initially, as the previous Culdcept games have a much different artistic style from mine, and since I'm going to be drawing the characters, it's going to change a lot. But Nagashima-san basically gave me free rein."
Any series with a legacy risks backlash from fans if there are dramatic changes from what went before. Compared to the previous games' mixture of Western high fantasy and Japanese anime, Culdcept Begins certainly has more of Matsuura's trademark whimsy. Of course, for a series absent for a decade in need of a reboot, such an overhaul seems necessary. Nagashima happened to be on the call too, and confirmed that having Matsuura involved was essential from the start.
"I actually talked to Matsuura-san first, before even talking to OmiyaSoft, because if I was going to do it, I wanted to do it with him," says Nagashima. "It's not even down to a single game he worked on, but as I was looking through his entire work across books and online, I could kind of understand where he was coming from, and I got to thinking I'd really like to make a game setting of fantasy with this guy."
It was also Nagashima's idea to overhaul the art style in Culdcept Begins, where the cards feature simpler illustrations inspired by tarot card designs. Once this was discussed between the two, it gave Matsuura the assurance he needed to interpret the cards in his own style. "I felt that [Nagashima] really respected me as an artist," Matsuura adds. "There were characters and monsters where I referenced the previous designs, but once we discussed what direction we were going to take, by the time it came to the actual illustrations, I wasn't worried; I was just drawing."
Matsuura's artwork is all the more important in Culdcept Begins because, unlike other games where a 2D concept might then be rendered into 3D or another in-game aesthetic, his concepts for this game what you see in the final game, from in-game characters to the creatures on a card that are then summoned onto the board, though the team has also given these some animations so that they aren't just static images.
This is refreshing, given how I tend to bemoan seeing the gulf between a brilliant piece of concept art and its final in-game implementation, though Matsuura is rather humble about this. "Honestly, it's a little bit embarrassing seeing my illustrations in the game as it is," he replies. "But at the same time, I understood that Nagashima has a lot of respect for my work, and that's why it appears in the game. So I'm also, at the same time, very happy to see that my work is being respected in that way."
Even so, compared to Matsuura's other projects, as the sole character designer and artist, this meant drawing a total of 250 different cards, a substantial undertaking compared to similar projects, which even Nagashima expressed concerns about. "It was a lot, but I thought I could do it," says Matsuura. "I think it was just over a year that I had to draw them all. So I was fairly confident I could draw it all in that time."
So what is Matsuura's workflow for designing these characters? First, of course, is having information about the subject; for example, if it is a monster, then the name and some background information. The most important thing is that this is provided to him only in text format, not with any visual placeholders. "If I get illustrations, or other art, then the finished product tends to skew towards that," he explains. "So if I get the information in text, then it gives me the freedom to create."
The next step is just a case of thinking about what to do over time. "I always start off thinking about what I'm going to draw while I'm having a walk, and I walk and think pretty much on a daily basis," Matsuura continues. "When I've got my thoughts together, I tend to pop into a cafe, and I'll sit down, and I'll start scribbling away on paper. And when I've got some rough illustrations, I'll redraw them digitally and send them to Neos and ask them what they think."
So while he says there's a lot of time spent just thinking about what he will draw and how to approach it, once he has a concept and it's been approved, Matsuura finds he works very fast.
That said, when your work is primarily in the fantasy genre with recurring tropes or mythical creatures, what's the likelihood of producing a very similar, if not identical, version of a creature you might have designed in the past? Matsuura admits there are times he has looked back at a design from an earlier game and compared it to the one he's recently worked on, only to find that some look exactly the same.
"I try to make sure there's a difference between them, but at the end of the day, there are some that do look similar," he concedes. This is probably also why more detailed information in a brief can help create more distinctive features. Since Culdcept is part of a long-running series, he has also looked back at the designs of previous games to ensure continuity, even if the art direction is very different.
With card-based games being all the rage in recent years, it's a good time for Culdcept to be making a comeback, and as the first one to launch globally, you would imagine that a new art style is going to be a key way to draw in new players who have never heard of the series to give it a go. But when some of the most popular and acclaimed card-based games in recent years do not really win points on aesthetics - Slay the Spire and its sequel are especially notorious for having an art style that feels like it's just been quickly slapped together in Paint - just how much can good art design elevate a card game?
As ever, Matsuura responds humbly: "For any game, particularly for this one, the first impression you get is a visual. So, in that respect, the illustration of the art is always going to be an important aspect of the game. But at the end of the day, if the game itself isn't fun to play, if it doesn't grab the player, then it's not going to succeed. It's not going to be a hit. So, I think the art is important, but the game itself needs to be strong."
Culdcept Begins releases on 16 July for Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch, with a PC release to be announced later.
