Takayasu Morisawa

Takayasu Morisawa is a graphic designer working for Nintendo. Morisawa joined Nintendo in 2001, working as a graphic artist for the R&D1. He has contributed to the background graphic design of Metroid Fusion, was a game designer and art director for Metroid: Zero Mission, served as one of two art directors for Metroid: Other M (alongside Yutaka Saito from Team Ninja) and was a design supervisor for Metroid Prime: Federation Force.

In an Iwata Asks interview regarding Other M, Morisawa detailed his role in the game's development. He was responsible for creating the game's characters and stages, and supervised the game's world design. Being the art director meant he was also in charge of 3D models and motion capture. Having only worked on the Game Boy Advance Metroid titles prior to Other M, Morisawa lacked the experience to create 3D CG, but he sought to serve his "home console apprenticeship" with Team Ninja. Despite his inexperience, Yoshio Sakamoto came to him one day and said they were leaving the game design to him.

Morisawa created many documents describing the environments explored on the BOTTLE SHIP from materials he had already conceptualized. He described the stack of documents as being "thick as several phone books". While Morisawa was left with a lot of creative freedom on the project, there were certain elements that Sakamoto was vehemently opposed to. For example, the Gravity Suit was originally its signature purple color, but Sakamoto believed that in the more serious cutscenes in Other M, a purple suit was out of place, and requested the change to a purplish aura in the final game. Morisawa stated that he felt the Metroid games were "like the sauce at a long-standing eel restaurant", in that while some eel restaurants claim their sauce is over 100 years old, it does not mean the sauce has been untouched for that amount of time. In actuality, the chefs have added new sauce to the pot, matching the tastes of the age at the time, which affects the flavor. In the same manner, it was all right to change elements in Metroid little by little, adapting it to modern tastes.