Tetsuya Nomura's character design inspirations come from an early high school memory that he's carried with him through designing some of Square Enix's most iconic Final Fantasy pretty boys like Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart.
In a recent interview with YoungJump, and translated by the Twitter account Shinra Archaeology Department, Nomura recalls watching his high school classmate play a video game with what Nomura considered a particularly unattractive protagonist. According to the story, the classmate asked why he had to be "ugly" even when playing a game. Of course, this would have been around the late 80s, so developers were working with the limited number of pixels they had to flesh out character models the best they could.
