Sumio Mondo
Member
Kaneko's work on early Atlus games is underrated too, I feel. That pixel art in SMT1 was pretty much all done by him, I believe.
Kaneko is probably the very last member of the founders of Atlus still left at the company now.
So I take it that Atlus are now going to rely solely on Doi from here on in to do all of the demon designs, since Persona 5 is still using Kaneko's designs from the PS2 era.
End of an era, I guess, sad to see Kaneko "retire" but at least we got so many games with his art (and will continue to do so, seeing as how Atlus don't seem to want to diverge from his work seeing P5 as the example of that).
That series (the later entries at least) were all done by Masayuki Doi, who worked under Kaneko's tutelage for years on mainline SMT as "additional artist" whilst Kaneko did the main character designs, demon designs and art direction. It's no wonder people get Doi's art mixed up with Kaneko's, the most notable difference is that Kaneko's is more gothic and tends to use a darker palette whereas Doi's is more colourful (or as some like to say, "more anime", I tend to dislike such generalisations).
Whilst Doi's work on SMTIV Apocalypse seems to be very good and very much a good impersonation of Kaneko's design, I will miss Kaneko art and his sheer brilliance on art direction. Next to Akihiko Yoshida as my favourite game artist.
Kaneko is probably the very last member of the founders of Atlus still left at the company now.
So I take it that Atlus are now going to rely solely on Doi from here on in to do all of the demon designs, since Persona 5 is still using Kaneko's designs from the PS2 era.
End of an era, I guess, sad to see Kaneko "retire" but at least we got so many games with his art (and will continue to do so, seeing as how Atlus don't seem to want to diverge from his work seeing P5 as the example of that).
That series (the later entries at least) were all done by Masayuki Doi, who worked under Kaneko's tutelage for years on mainline SMT as "additional artist" whilst Kaneko did the main character designs, demon designs and art direction. It's no wonder people get Doi's art mixed up with Kaneko's, the most notable difference is that Kaneko's is more gothic and tends to use a darker palette whereas Doi's is more colourful (or as some like to say, "more anime", I tend to dislike such generalisations).
Whilst Doi's work on SMTIV Apocalypse seems to be very good and very much a good impersonation of Kaneko's design, I will miss Kaneko art and his sheer brilliance on art direction. Next to Akihiko Yoshida as my favourite game artist.
