2025 Preview: Omega 6 – The Triangle Stars marks the return of an influential Nintendo artist

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Takaya Imamura is very much a proponent of playing to one’s strengths. Speaking to VGC in August, the veteran art director told us that his new project, Omega 6, has similarities to his past work because its ‘retro future’ style is “the only thing I can draw”.

It’s a rather humble comment from a man whose previous character designs are among the most iconic in the history of video games. If you’re not familiar with his name, you’ll certainly be familiar with his work: over the course of his 30 years working at Nintendo, Imamura was integral to some of the company’s most iconic games, including F-Zero, Star Fox and the Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

He was responsible for the creation of such beloved characters as Fox McCloud, Captain Falcon and Tingle, and he designed large chunks of F-Zero X and Star Fox 64 as well as the bosses in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Imamura left Nintendo in January 2021, the Covid-19 lockdown ensuring his send-off wasn’t the grand company-wide celebration he deserved, but rather saw him quietly clearing his desk at the mostly empty building and having a brief chat with personnel department staff on the way out. It was far from the ideal way for one of the industry’s most influential artists to bow out of video games, and that’s why his return with Omega 6 is all the more special.

After landing a job teaching at the University of Technology in Osaka, Imamura created the Omega 6 manga during his break times. He was then asked if he was interested in making a video game based on the story. The result is Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, a narrative adventure developed by indie studios Happymeal and Pleocene, of which Imamura is the story and art director.

“It was far from the ideal way for one of the industry’s most influential artists to bow out of video games, and that’s why his return with Omega 6 is all the more special”

We went hands-on with the English language build – which has since been confirmed for a February 28, 2025 release – at Gamescom, and it’s an interesting release for the West because it’s a 16-bit inspired game based on a type of narrative adventure that we didn’t really get on our shores at the time.

While we were no stranger to text adventures, the visual novel style big in Japan – in which your interface is a series of menus with options – didn’t really make its way over here en masse until the 21st century.

As such, Omega 6 is curious because the combination of the game structure and Imamura’s artwork makes it feel like a visual novel from the Super Famicom era that’s only just been translated, rather than something that was actually created three decades later.

When we spoke to Imamura at Gamescom, he told us that developing the game felt like a nice way to bring his career full circle, because it reminded him of simpler times. “For the longest time I’ve had this desire to be more like an indie studio, and develop games more in an indie style,” he told us.

“While I was at Nintendo, this was something I was always kind of battling with internally. As the team got bigger, the games got bigger, due to this need to scale from the initial core team up to a full production team. When I joined I was working on SNES titles, where it was just a much smaller team, and this suited my style of working and what I wanted to do. So working with Happymeal and Pleocene on Omega 6 feels like harking back to those days.”