Tifa character design seems to be inspired by Misao Aoyama from a famous visual novel of the early 90s

KuraudoSeph789

Lv. 1 Adventurer
AKA
KuraudoSeph789
Recently some Japanese players have pointed out the design similarities in design between Tifa Lockheart and Aoyama Misao from the popular visual novel Can Can Bunny Extra particularly her hair, white top, black mini skirt and red shoes.

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The similarities don’t stop at the visual design though, when Tifa was first revealed for FFVII in a magazine as the 6th party member they included her measurements and they are the same as Misao but with +1 added to each (this latter got changed).

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On top of that during a recent interview Nojima talked about the dating mechanics in Rebirth being similar to old dating sims from 30 years ago, adding to the amount of coincidences it’s worth noting that Can Can Bunny Extra became 30 years old in 2023.

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This would be hard to believe if it wasn’t for the Interview, it can be a coincidence that she has very similar character design with Misao but Nojima saying “It reminded me of playing dating sim games 30 years ago” seems oddly specific plus it wouldn’t be the first time there is similarities in design between FFVII characters and outside characters as seen with Red and Cloud.

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This is just talking about character design alone since personality wise they are different, it seems Nomura took inspiration from Misao design when creating Tifa.

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Do you guys think this is just some big coincidences or she could be inspired by the character from the visual novel?
 

Theozilla

Kaiju Member
I mean long black-haired light-skinned pretty women isn't exactly a rare character designed archetype in Japanese media in general.
 

KuraudoSeph789

Lv. 1 Adventurer
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KuraudoSeph789
I mean long black-haired light-skinned pretty women isn't exactly a rare character designed archetype in Japanese media in general.
Yeah but I was talking more about coincidences like Tifa saying the phrase from Misao in the visual novel fight into her own slap fight with Scarlet, also her initial measurements being the same as Misato and her having the same style of clothing (white top, black skirt and red shoes). It is more than the black hair tho.
 

KuraudoSeph789

Lv. 1 Adventurer
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KuraudoSeph789
Also someone mentioned to me that the Misao character has an outdoor s*x scene in the game and that it could be the inspiration for the Highwind.
 

Theozilla

Kaiju Member
Yeah but I was talking more about coincidences like Tifa saying the phrase from Misao in the visual novel fight into her own slap fight with Scarlet, also her initial measurements being the same as Misato and her having the same style of clothing (white top, black skirt and red shoes). It is more than the black hair tho.
I mean until more information is uncovered (like maybe someone will eventually ask Nomura in an interview) I don't think it is possible to determine whether it is a coincidence or a case of having been influenced by the visual novel character.

Sometimes coincidences can eerily share details; for example, a lot of people think that when Kentaro Miura created the character Guts from the manga Berserk, he must have been influenced by the real life historical figure Götz of the Iron Hand, but someone eventually asked Miura, he said no he hadn't been influenced by Götz of the Iron Hand and that he didn't even learn of Götz von Berlichingen until after he had been publishing Berserk for a while.
 

Sorcerologist

Lv. 25 Adventurer
On a related note, I thought Tifa and Liza from Saga Frontier were based on the same concept: similar name, martial artist, short skirt, member of a resistance group based out of a restaurant, and in love with a member of the group.
 

Odysseus

Ninja Potato
AKA
Ody
Given that I've seen this comparison used exclusively to disparage Tifa on Twitter, I'm chalking this up to the usual brand of shipping schizophrenia.
 

Sorcerologist

Lv. 25 Adventurer
Oh yeah, and the guy Liza's in love with? He's the cool, aloof, gun-wielding leader of the resistance named Roufas. Maybe this alludes to a dropped plot point in FF7, where Tifa and Rufus had a thing.
 

Ryushikaze

Deus Admiral Parsimonious, PHD, DDS, MD, JD, OBE
AKA
Tim, Ryu
Oh yeah, and the guy Liza's in love with? He's the cool, aloof, gun-wielding leader of the resistance named Roufas. Maybe this alludes to a dropped plot point in FF7, where Tifa and Rufus had a thing.
If the other heroes and quests of SaGa mapped to FF stories much at all, you might have something, but honestly, it's probably just a coincidence, given the other quests reference spy movies, cop drama, tokusatsu heroes, Utena, etc.
 

Sorcerologist

Lv. 25 Adventurer
I don't think there's one-to-one mapping of plot points, but that there was a lot of sharing of ideas that made it into various Square games at the time. I did think Saga Frontier and FF7 had other similarities, though - Trinity is Shinra, Emelia getting held hostage by a Corneo-like character, etc.

Here's concept art of Cloud, Yuffie, and Vincent in the Essence of Saga Frontier artbook.
 

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X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
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X
After meandering through the comments on the Reddit thread version of this to get some additional context on what's been shared about this, while I do think that there's almost certainly some direct inspiration from that title, especially in terms of the catfight probably inspiring the Tifa & Scarlet slap-off to be a bit, I don't think it's really that big of a deal. That sort of prolific cross-pollenation between (at the time) contemporary Japanese media character designs is basically just par for the course of artists being inspired by the themes & ideas that they found compelling from games or media that they played. Most of them started making their own stuff because they were inspired by various works and wanted to tell stories that captured those types experiences that they had. Plus, it's not like they stopped consuming media when they started making their own, and oftentimes just became more & more surrounded by it.

The cumulative density of that influence in Japan with a huge media market in a very population-dense collectivist culture specifically is a big factor to how & why Japanese media has a very consistently recognizable visual design language for its storytelling. That collective influence builds a strong resemblance across multiple works of media that don't have direct ties to one another nor do they share a setting, but instead those things serves as a means to implicitly reinforce an underlying character theme more as a sort of visual design language.

For example: The emotionally-charged, unnaturally-strong rebel berserker vs. the emotionally-detached, elite-warrior establishment leader present in the designs for Cloud & Sephiroth follow design elements that can easily be found in the portrayal of Sasaki Kojiro & Miyamoto Musashi, Yasha & Taishakuten, Conan & Thulsa Doom, Guts & Griffith, Gohan & Cell, etc. because there are parts of FFVII's story that touch on ways where those characters' conflicts have echoes that reinforce the audience's emotional connection to the experiences in this story. That's a character dynamic that's got roots in Japanese history, Hindu mythology, Western cinema, & Japanese pop culture, so there's an inextricable level of syncrotism which you're bound to find in the visual designs in ways that are inextricably intertwined to the character themes they represent when exploring what those individuals are like in their respective narratives.

It's why things like Sarutobi Sasuke as THE quintessential hero ninja places that recognizable legacy of a character like that into the "elite-warrior" category, so that when Naruto positioned its ninja hero as the "brash unnaturally strong rebellious teen spiky blonde hair" archetype, his foil & rival was "Sasuke" named after that same individual in its setting. I bring this up as it makes for an easier way to point out the emphasis on the classroom setting dynamic – because not dying your hair dark to match others & being bad at school activities is the type of signature rebelliousness that kids in Japanese society are familiar with in an everyday setting that's not limited to fantasy and which defines the same type of real-world societal pressures that are why this type of storytelling has a particular impact in Japan.

So, even while those blonde spikey haired designs with Cloud ALSO align to the sort of Super Saiyan elements of Gohan facing off against Cell are echoed in the way Cloud faces off against the multi-form mutating Jenova-Cell-Sephiroth, it's equally important to look at how those dynamics are equally linked into a deeper part of the sort of every day culture of teenagers in Japan beyond just anime/game pop culture media. This is a point that a commenter in the Reddit thread pointed out about Aoyama Misao & Tifa's looks both being like those of the popular musical artist Shizuka Kudo, something which we also know is true of artists like Gackt having a visual influence on Final Fantasy protagonists like Cloud & Squall just as much as any fictional character did – because visual music artists have a strong overlap as a bridge between those elements in Japanese society.

The looks of characters aren't just from a singular piece of media, but rather they're built of a cumulation of things that were present at the time that shared elements of them along with various unique details that the creators came up with. This culmination of influences also allow the audience to easily recognize the differences between various series' similar characters & relationships that they have with one another but especially ones which are unique to those stories. Essentially the similarities form a foundation to permutate from, while any differences strongly reinforce what the important parts of those characters are which make them into someone unique to that story – because they're not just knock-offs or a copy/paste from other preexisting media the way that posts like this will often try to frame them as in a diminishing context.

Lastly, this also means that there are a lot of times when there is a strong correlative link between things that genuinely don't have any direct influence, but they often still end up being similar because unique works can share external influences coming from so many different directions. Other times there are just flat-out pure coincidences like Theozilla mentioned with Guts in BERSERK which also happened to that character having similarities to Ash from Evil Dead. There are plenty of times when themes or ideas can come from a totally different place and still have a startlingly aligned number of details.

That all being said, do I think that the timing of Can Can Bunny Extra coming out in 1993, the particular game genre for the dating mechanics and other things that Normua has mentioned influencing FFVII, and the shared character design themes & situations make it fairly likely that some elements of Tifa were initially inspired by Aoyama Misao? Almost certainly.

Is that significant in any meaningful way...? Not any more than any of the other references I mentioned for Cloud & Sephiroth. (Which is that it's a good excuse to consume the original media and try to pick up on some of the shared themes as a fun way to better understand more about which particular moments feel significant to making their overlapping design when portraying something that they share as characters, and which differences emphasize what makes them distinct from one another).



X :neo:
 

FFShinra

Sharp Shinra Shill
I'd even go further out than just Japan on how much games used to crib from other works in the 90s. Starcraft was always cribbing from Warhammer and Aliens, Sonic cribbed the design of Robotnik from Teddy Roosevelt, etc...hell, FF8 later would crib Dollet from a combination of The Rock and Saving Private Ryan so...
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Oh, absolutely! It's why D&D has heavy Lord of the Rings influence that seeps into all the early CRPGs, just as much as in the 80s when Aliens came out, basically every video game had a build-up to some type of Giger-inspired final boss level, or how there was a wave of Barbarian hero games when Conan the Barbarian came out, or how you get things like the UK with Warhammer's Chaos Gods & Japan with BERSERK's God Hand both being mutually full of instantly recognizably influenced by the Cenobites from Hellraiser.

It's one of the things I enjoy most about some of the retro streamers I watch is that I get to see a lot of really obscure early era games from all over different global markets, and you can ALWAYS tell around when they came out, because whatever cool thing had kicked off a cascade of themes in titles locally, or if it's a Hollywood film it'll have that happen in markets that didn't always have any huge awareness of each other. Even by the early 90s that was still largely pre-internet for a vast majority of people when it came to media sharing, and so anything that made a huge impact in media still influenced EVERYTHING it reached, because the global media market as a whole was still pretty small, even if it had local flavors to those influences.

Before that point, I think that growing-but-not-yet-as-back-and-forth established sharing was a contributing factor to why JRPGs had a different feel to them at the time, as while both Star Wars & Blade Runner had a lot of interconnected Japanese influence, it wasn't really until the works of that era of games like Ghost in the Shell & Akira shaped western films like The Matrix in 1999 that the anime-type of hyper-real live action really started to be shared both directions in a way where audiences had a bigger volume of cross-pollenating references that obscured how direct some of that "let's make a cool slightly different version of ____" was ALWAYS happening back then, but especially because that was successful as – that's the cool stuff we all wanted to see that games could just do.

That's all the backbone of what generally creates this shared design language that really hits home in why FFVII leaning extremely heavily on the presentation directly meant to parallel to Hollywood with the mind-blowing 3D graphics had designs that all felt so universally recognizable and not feel like it had a density of mostly Japanese influences. I also think it's why the "Midgar as America & Wutai as Japan" themes in the game work perfectly within the simultaneous "Midgar as Japan & Wutai as China" themes that are present – and also why the later aren't as easily picked up on by Western audiences.

The other reason that I expect that this in particular has a high likelihood has to do with its proximity to the other references in that image and what was going on at the time: The SS2 Gohan with Cell arc in Dragonball was Feb-May of 1993, Can Can Bunny Extra was released in June of 1993, and The Lion King came out in Japan in July of 1994. As a grouping, that puts it all firmly AFTER the release of Final Fantasy V (December 1992), and filtering directly into the later parts of work on Final Fantasy VI which was released in April of 1994. That's when Nomura was taking over doing design work on the bosses & he has a bunch of concept art of themes that fed directly in to ideas that he used going into to working on all the designs in Final Fantasy VII.



X :neo:
 

Ryushikaze

Deus Admiral Parsimonious, PHD, DDS, MD, JD, OBE
AKA
Tim, Ryu
Speaking of DnD, it should be pointed out that the cribbing is far from limited to just FF7. Even as back as the first FF, they were pulling in monsters from DnD and other RPGs, notably the mindflayer and sahagin.
 
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