The art of Jun Suemi, Wizardry's Japanese Dungeon Master
While discussing talented Japanese videogame artists and character designers among western fans, I think one of the names most commonly (and unjustly) left out is that of Jun Suemi, an industry veteran who has been illustrating JRPG covers since the ‘80s, while also gracing the novel space with his work for series like Ryo Mizuno’s Crystania or the late Kaoru Kurimoto’s Guin Saga.
Jun Suemi, born in Kyushu’s Oita back in 1959, studied Fine Arts at the Musashino Art University, specializing in oil painting at a time where analogic illustration was the only option and digital art was just being pioneered in the West and Japan. It was likely during his studies that he got to know tabletop RPGs, by then a total novelty in Japan, which motivated him to lend his talent not just to cover art and illustrations for fantasy novels, but also for the earliest RPG videogames in Japan, being likely inspired by artists such as Frank Frazetta and Jeffrey Catherine Jones. His wife, which he met during this period and ended up developing her own career as a fashion designer, apparently was also a RPG fan and, like Suemi himself, was interested in the earliest Japanese ports of Sir Tech’s seminal dungeon crawling RPG series, Wizardry.
-REIMAGINING WIZARDRY
In fact, after illustrating the box art for Dungeon Master’s Japanese MSX version, one of Suemi’s early assignments, right in 1987, was revising the monster sprites and designing a variety of awesome promotional posters for the first three Wizardry games’ Japanese Famicom ports, featured on a variety of magazines like Login and sometimes using Suemi himself and his wife as models for some of their characters.
Those ports may confuse Western fans, since, due to some technical issues, Wizardry 3 ended up actually being released before Wizardry 2, making Legacy of Llylgamin the third entry in that instance. Suemi’s work on Wizardry ended up defining his early career, making him popular among the growing Japanese audience interested in videogame RPGs. Albeit with a far smaller role, he also worked on the other main genre-defining WRPG series, Ultima, illustrating the Japanese edition of Ultima IV’s guidebook.
-BETWEEN FORCELIA AND HOME PCs
It isn’t that surprising, then, that Suemi’s work on Wizardry possibly also got the attention of Takeshi Enomoto (better known for his pseudonym, Ryo Mizuno) when he played the series with his friend, Hitoshi Yasuda. Just two year laters, after having founded Group SNE (a company focused on tabletop RPGs, board games and card games) alongside Yasuda, Enomoto\Mizuno would publish the first book in the Record of the Lodoss War series, and Suemi would end up creating the cover arts for a number of books in the Sword World tabletop RPG line by SNE (not to mention a variety of Wizardry-related tabletop products) and Crystania, a Lodoss side-story that also received an OVA adaptation.
Meanwhile, Suemi’s work had already been recognized, receiving the Seiun Award (which, despite translating to Nebula Award, isn’t directly related to the US award of the same name, which was created some years before its Japanese equivalent) for fantasy and sci-fi pursuits in 1988, and he was starting to make even more inroads in the videogame industry with a number of collaborations like the one in 1992 that saw him working on the cover of one of the most interesting (and, as it sadly often happens for home PC Japanese titles, mostly forgotten) JRPGs on NEC’s PC98, Right Stuff’s Libros de Chilam Balam, a western-themed epic predating Wild Arms (and even Live-a-Live’s western scenario) by a number of years.
The same year, he also landed one of his better known works with Nihon Falcom, which asked Suemi to draw the covers for most of the titles in their Brandish series, a long-lasting partnership that will extend to that series’ very last release, PSP’s Brandish: Dark Revenant in 2009. Interestingly, the artist that had previously worked on Brandish’s box arts, Nobuteru Yuki, was also the main illustrator for Mizuno’s Record of the Lodoss War series, showing how intertwined those contexts were back then.
-IN THE WANZERS’ ARENA
In 1994, after illustrating some other projects like Garzey no Tsubasa, a novel series that was adapted as both an OVA and JRPG, Suemi worked on the cover for Arena, the first book inspired by the then-newborn Trading Card Game, Magic the Gathering (his portrayal of Garth, interestingly, is almost identical to the one this early Magic wizard ended up getting when his own card was released decades later, in the Modern Horizons 2 set), Suemi also had a chance to work with Sega on a sci-fi projects, which was far from the first given he had already illustrated the cover of Game Arts’ Silpheed, among others.
Thus, Suemi ended up illustrating the box art for Hybrid Front, an extremely interesting sci-fi tactical JRPG on Mega Drive. Unfortunately, this Oniro-developed title ended up as one among quite a number of Mega Drive JRPGs left in Japan, a sad fate shared by a lot of Sega-published titles in this genre on both Game Gear, Mega Drive and Saturn, which explains its lack of notoriety despite it predating Squaresoft and Tsuchiya’s Front Mission series (which, itself, ended up staying in Japan until its third entry on PS1).
Amusingly, Suemi also ended up working on Front Mission’s second entry in 1997, with Squaresoft asking for his character design expertise, a daunting task considering how the first game and its spin off, Gun Hazard, had featured none other than Yoshitaka Amano in that role (not that it was the first time: a few years ago Suemi was tasked with the cover for Kure Soft’s First Queen IV, right after Amano penned First Queen III’s box art). This new collaboration ended up being a one-off, with Suemi being replaced by another incredibly talented artist, Akihiro Yamada, for Front Mission 3’s character design. Even then, Suemi would be credited again in Front Mission 2’s remake in 2024, but it doesn’t seem he had any direct involvement with either Forever Entertainment or Storm Trident, who handled this effort.
Front Mission aside, 1997 was a pivotal year for Suemi for a different reason, unrelated to the videogames he had mostly pursued so far: it was late this year that he debuted as the cover artist for Guin Saga’s 58th volume, and he will keep working on this fantasy novel series until late 2002, when she will illustrate the cover of the 87th volume.
While Guin Saga is mostly unknown outside Japan, with just a few novels being translated alongside its anime and manga adaptation, the late Kaoru Kurimoto’s high fantasy epic is actually incredibly popular in Japan, selling some thirty million copies across its long life and also holding the breath-taking record as the longest single-writer work in world literature, with Kurimoto having penned some 130 volumes, plus 22 Gaiden (side-story) novels and a number of shorter pieces. Suemi’s work was so appreciated by both Kurimoto and Guin Saga’s fanbase that the artist who replaced him in February 2003 for the 88th volume, Shinobu Tanno, himself incredibly talented, was chosen because his style actually resembled Suemi’s and gave the franchise some sort of aesthetic continuity.
During those years, despite the sheer amount of Guin Saga illustrations he had to work with Suemi also worked on smaller projects like Asuncia, a freeform PS1 JRPG, not to mention the box arts of some Wizardry ports for fifth generation consoles, a callback to his early work on that storied franchise.
As mentioned, he was still illustrating Falcom’s Brandish franchise, with its fourth entry being released in 1998 while he was pursuing a number of other projects.
In 1999, he started yet another long partnership, this time with Koei, which saw him work extensively as both character designer and box artist on Zill O’ll, a unique PS1 title that repurposed the sandbox elements featured in Koei’s Rekoeition line in a more traditional turn based JRPG format, without most of the simulative, economic and strategic elements found in series like Uncharted Waters or titles like Progenitor.
Soon after, Koei asked Suemi back for the cover of Apsaras, an ill-fated MMORPG, while also tasking him with more works for Zill O’ll’s PS2 and PSP ports, not to mention Trinity: Souls of Zill O’ll on PS3, which tried to repurpose the series as a Musou-flavored action JRPG developed by Omega Force. Trinity, with its more advanced graphics and oil painting-like graphical filter, tried to imitate Suemi’s own style, with the in game cutscenes sometimes passing for an in-engine rendition of some work she never actually did.
After this, having built a very successful career throughout the decades in every form of Japanese media, his videogame-related work gradually became more sparse, mostly focused on promotional art for titles with different character designers, like with his pieces for Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen or Fire Emblem Three Houses (he also did a promotional artwork for Last Rebellion, a game that likely saw a noticeable part of its budget devoted to those endeavours rather than on the development itself).
Despite his relative lack of notoriety outside Japan, in his country he can count on his legacy living on in a wide number of series and games, not to mention the work of the artists he inspired with his art over all those years.
Nothing like an artist that makes you involuntarily go 'hell yeah' when you scroll down to a new piece.
I've been playing Hybrid Front over the past few months, you can tell that's a really special game, and the character art is very well done, even butchered by the Genesis color pallete.