When I heard Gallery Nucleus would be hosting a special art exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of Final Fantasy I thought that it would make great content for another awesome post.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that I had a dentist appointment that couldn’t be pushed back I ended up missing the opening reception. Luckily the exhibition is going on for about a month so I had plenty of time to go check it out later. I do regret missing the opening reception since there were so many things goings on that day but honestly there’s not much I can do dwelling on it.

Looking over the pictures unfortunately there’s not much I can tell you about them. Unlike other exhibitions I’ve been to in the past Gallery Nucleus did not have little title cards on display with the piece’s name or artist and the listings on their website is just as ambiguous. Other than signs indicating which pieces were influenced by which game there wasn’t all that information I could get about them. I’m guessing the reason for this is because most of the pieces on display looked like concept art done by the designers and in this case I doubt they would bother giving their pieces titles.

Photographing the pieces was quite an interesting practice. The lighting at Gallery Nucleus was a bit of a pain to work under. Combine this with artwork that’s displayed under glass resulted in me trying to get pictures from weird angles where I could avoid the glare. I wish I brought a tripod with me to do this so I could do slow exposures and minimize hand shake but in my head I thought that would be a bad idea. Gallery Nucleus is pretty picture friendly and also there wasn’t that much foot traffic so I doubt I would have been that much of a bother but I just didn’t want to be some asshole trying to look all professional by bringing a bunch of unnecessary crap with him.

Anyway, here’s the artwork that I saw. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy II

Final Fantasy III

Final Fantasy IV

Final Fantasy V

Final Fantasy VI

Final Fantasy VII

Final Fantasy VIII

Final Fantasy IX

Final Fantasy X

Final Fantasy XI

Final Fantasy XII

Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XV

As part of the exhibition there were also several tribute pieces on display as well.

That’s it for the artwork. After putting this together I didn’t realize how many pieces there really were, but I guess if you’re doing artwork for a videogame series that spans 3 decades and 15 chapters that stuff builds up.

As part of the exhibiton they also had a Final Fantasy release timeline but I think I’ll save that for another day.