Hideyuki Matsumoto is the final external designer Takahashi is introducing. They used to be colleagues in a previous company (Both Matsumoto and Takahashi were former Square employees), and Matsumoto helped him on Xenosaga as well. He is a designer who has a profound knowledge of firearms, so for this game he's mainly drawing designs for weapons used by characters in the game (as opposed to mechs I suppose). On reflection, Takahashi gives himself another pat on the back for assembling a top-class team of designers for the game. (lol)
For the backgrounds, they engaged Kusanagi for the design work. It's a company that specializes in background design, and they have a lot of experience on adapting drawn artwork into 3D models, so it was a no brainer. (Kusanagi is a background studio who works on many anime and videogame projects)
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