One of the winners of the last contest submitted a render of the game's existing Fryevia model with postprocessing effects. Gumi needs to make it clear with the new contest that this sort of entry is a breach of the competition's rules.

I've made a side-by-side comparison of the entry and 3d model without much postprocessing. It's rendered in Unity which explains the low quality, I'm not great with Blender.

https://imgur.com/KC7v3Nz

I haven't been active on Reddit for a while and don't follow the Facebook page so I'm not sure if this was ever brought up. I only found out about the winners when researching the competition for the new contest. However I feel like now is a good time to remind people that your contest entry needs to be original work and that doesn't include photo manipulations of things you don't own the copyright to.

This is really a failing on Gumi's part and isn't about the individual who created this submission. I'm just disappointed that no-one involved in the judging could recognize their game's own character model. What immediately jumps out to me is the clipping of the arms through Fryevia's collar made possible by the low poly rigging.

Now this isn't the first FFBE competition that has experienced this sort of shenanigans. If you followed the 2nd character design competition over at the FFBE subreddit you'll know that three of the shortlisted entries ended up disqualified because they weren't original works. One was a composite of fantasy art while the other two were manipulations of sprites from the game. It took Gumi over a month to respond after being made aware of this. But by that time it was too late to substitute replacements as voting was halfway through. Hiroki & friends addressed the controversy and said they wouldn't tolerate it happening again (also while saying they probably wouldn't hold another character design contest...).

There's really nothing that can be done about the last contest as prizes have been distributed and everyone has moved on. But it is troubling that a photo manipulation came so close to winning first place. I'm not sure what can be done other than to educate people about copyright, encourage everyone to do their best with illustrating and Gumi vetting the entries better.