Kazuko Shibuya

Shibuya was born in 1965. While in middle school, she began creating illustrations and animations inspired by anime series including Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999. As a high schooler she enrolled in a technical school to study animation and worked part-time for animation studios on popular anime including Transformers, Area 88, and Obake no Q-taro. In 1986, as she was losing interest in animation work, she was recruited by video game company Square.^[1]

Shibuya's first work for Square was providing illustrations for Alpha's game manual and graphics for several games in development. In 1987, prompted by the success of Enix's Dragon Quest the previous year, Square released Final Fantasy.^[2] Shibuya created graphics including characters, spells, monsters, fonts, menus, and the game's opening bridge scene. By Final Fantasy II, she was one of two designers creating all the pixel art for the game.^[1]

Shibuya went on to design graphics for other Final Fantasy games, most notably the iconic chibi versions of characters, monsters, fonts, and menus. She was the primary pixel artist for many well-known games including entries in the SaGa series and Mana series (of which she created all the graphics for the first game).^[3]

In 2019, during a lecture at Japan Expo Paris, Shibuya was invited by Women in Games to be a member of honour.^[4]