Japanese · 1997 – present
A self-taught illustrator whose painterly, gothic portraits for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night redefined the look of the series — her first work in games.
Ayami Kojima was born in Tokyo and is self-taught as an artist. Her first work in the video game industry was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997), for which she produced the character art, and her elegant, gothic images of Alucard, Dracula and the game's cast changed the visual identity of the series. Earlier Castlevania games had used conventional anime-style or Western horror illustration; Kojima's portraits were closer to fine-art painting, with slender, androgynous figures and rich, dark detail. Her technique is unusually hands-on. She works with molding paste, Conté crayon, acrylics, India ink, gloss polymer medium, stumps and finger smudging, and her style draws on classical Japanese painting. That texture made her illustrations distinctive in an era increasingly dominated by digital art. Kojima became the defining artist of the series in the late 1990s and 2000s, contributing character designs to Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (2002), Aria of Sorrow (2003), Lament of Innocence (2003) and Curse of Darkness (2005). When Koji Igarashi launched Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the spiritual successor to his Castlevania games, Kojima said she could offer only a small amount of time, and illustrated packaging artwork for some backers.