Tamaki Yoshitaka, the original character designer of Sega’s long-running Shining Force series, has died, according to a social media post. He was 55.
The post Thursday night on X, formerly Twitter, was on Yoshitaka’s own account, apparently written by an unnamed person with control of the account. It said he died on July 13 from lung cancer and included photos of a memorial service for him attended by family and close friends.
“He had continued to receive medical treatment in accordance with his wish to continue working until the end, but he passed away from the disease,” the post said via machine translation from the original Japanese. “I hope that the work that he devoted his life to as a game creator will always be remembered.”
While Yoshitaka never worked on any of the Shining games that appeared on the Saturn, there is one game on the console with his name on it — “Feda Remake!: The Emblem of Justice.” It was a Japan-exclusive tactical RPG released in May 1996. Developed by Yanoman and published by KID, it was a remake of a 1994 Super Famicom game.
Not only did Yoshitaka work on the character designs for Feda, he also wrote its original story. He was the director of the Super Famicom version as well.
The Feda series clearly was close to his heart until his last days. His final posts on X before this week’s announcement were in February, and in two of them, he posted comic pages he’d created that seem to continue the Feda story.
“Most people will probably say, “What the heck?” but I just want to at least give back to the people who played “2” so this is fine,” he said in a post, referring to the 1997 PlayStation-exclusive sequel “Feda 2: White Surge the Platoon.”
Western Sega fans probably know Yoshitaka best for his character designs in Genesis games like Shining Force, Shining in the Darkness and Landstalker. While his artwork is iconic, he also wrote the stories for Shining Force and Landstalker.
He hadn’t forgotten about Landstalker in recent times, either — he posted new art of characters from that game in January.
He later was credited with character design in the 1999 Dreamcast crossover game Time Stalkers as well as several continuations of the Shining series in the early 2000s: Game Boy Advance titles Shining Soul 1 and 2 as well as Shining Force: Resurrection of the Dark Dragon. He worked on monster designs for PlayStation 2 games Shining Force Neo and Shining Tears.
His non-Sega work included Alundra on the PS1 and Lady Stalker on the Super Famicom.
In an interview posted to Sega’s website in 2014 — it’s gone now, but still can be accessed via the Internet Archive — Yoshitaka said that when he was a child, he didn’t think about drawing. But he loved making things, and “with paper and pencil, I could give shape to what I had in my head, and drawing was the quickest way for me.”
When a standalone Pong-like console called TV Tennis released around the time Yoshitaka was 8 years old, he said his uncle bought it right away and played it with him, hooking him on video games for life.
In college, he entered some art into a contest Enix was running and won, leading to a freelance gig drawing pixel art and designing monsters for the company.
That led to being recruited by Hiroyuki Takahashi, who was leaving Enix to start his own development studio, Climax. He designed storyboards for Climax’s first game, Shining in the Darkness, and the rest is history.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
I’m very heart broken to read this news. Tamaki’s artwork and the games that featured his illustrations are huge long time inspirations to my own artwork.