JEDDAH: Mitsuhiro Arita, the acclaimed Japanese illustrator of the Pokemon Trading Card Game TCG, met with his Saudi fans for the first time in Jeddah at Anime Village in City Walk, one of nine zones of Jeddah Season 2022.

The full-house meet-and-greet sessions on May 27-28 allowed Arita fans to listen to and talk with the artist behind their favorite childhood cartoon and card games.

Arita has illustrated hundreds of Pokemon cards during a 26-year artistic career sthat has also produced “Final Fantasy Games,” “Berserk: The Golden Ages” movies trilogy — a worldwide favorite of anime and Nintendo fans — and “Culdcept.”

“I supervised these three works, but all I cared about at the time was to get an excellent result in all three works, which I love equally. But my admiration goes to ‘Culdcept.’ For me it is art, and I feel proud that it is among my works,” he told Arab News in an exclusive interview while signing cards and autographs for his fans.

“Culdcept” is a series of turn-based strategy video games developed by OmiyaSoft in which the player traverses a map and uses magical, tablet-like “cards” to defeat their opponents by forcing them to land on specific spaces and pay a toll — similar to Monopoly.

Arita was born in 1971 in Fukuoka, Japan, and now lives in Tokyo, where he began his career as a professional illustrator in 1996, with Pokemon TCG as his first project.