severance , uematsu worked at squares / square-enix until 2004, When he started Smile Please his production company.
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6111914.html

probably making tons more money. while composing less... though FFXIV's sountrack is gonna be long as hell

Ah, thanks for checking, I thought so!

Took me less than 30 seconds to find...wasn't hard.

Ooo, and it's even of him brooding after committing war crimes. Good pick.

he is more of an artist, but nomura proven that his characters are more likeable and his style or bold lines animesish look more popular

khuutra... i remember you asking at the top what he's doing nowadays... but we talked about character emoness, instead of what amano's doing

it has him listed at wikipedia as character designer for Beyond Good and Evil 2... do you know this was ever correct?

though I know that games in limbo. and I would rather have him be character designer of a game that didn't already have good art design without him :P

I actually read an interview between him and some gaming magazine, they asked him why he didn't do the concept art for Final Fantasy VII and his reply was pretty much that he doesn't work there and they asked him to do work for the first 6 Final Fantasy games, when 7 came around they didn't ask him to do the work.  It's as simple as that.  If you wanna know why they didn't ask him to do it then you gotta send a letter to Kitase and ask him why.  Or someone should ask Kitase anyways.

Who did the drawn character portaits in-game in the menu in FF7? I'd assume Nomura, because they don't look like Amano. but I could be wrong.

Keep in mind I love both. However thinking about it, FF6 was the most successful FF (commercially) (I believe) to that point. So it's not like he was commercially unsuccessful. So it would seem innapropriate to replace Amano without atleast asking or talking to him.

If I remember correctly (correct me if I'm wrong) Nomura was the graphic designer in FFVI (while amano did the character designes) and did the monsters in FFV I believe. And a lowly debugger in FFIV (haha) So it's not as though he came out of nowhere. And probably deserved a shot (other people probably did as well) at being a character designer for a game, though not necessarily at Final Fantasy. Parasite Eve for example, which he did, and would have been a good choice.
 
I could throw guesses as to why Kitase didn't ask Amano. As there are logical reasons. But they would just be guesses which aren't really useful.

But with Nomura being so busy (at being things more than just a character designer). I think SE should use Amano, if not on FFXV (which I hope he does) but something FF esque, like a new IP. which they might not and probably won't do unfortunately.

I'd really want to see more of his work in this generation.

Here's an illustration of FFXIII characters from Amano

Much much better! Defitnetly puts the "fantasy" setting on the game. This is what i call japanese art.