Presumably, you reference the storyboard of the game while writing the music… But it worked, didn’t it? I still get shivers thinking back to the staff meeting where people were murmuring, ‘Huh? Did the length change?’. In particular, at the ‘Honeybee Inn’, which is mostly rooted in dance music, it was quite challenging to make a four- or eight-bar song work in six or seven bars. Working with the lengths of the cutscenes was probably the hardest part. Saying that, I’m good at this kind of work, so it was also an opportunity to showcase my skills. Writing the music wasn’t much of a problem per se, but I did break a few bones trying to fit these three disparate musical styles within the frameworks of the same arrangement and tempo. I worked on three patterns of music for the scene, which I loosely defined as funk-based, ethnic-based and country-based, all sharing the arrangement, tempo and melody lines. It works kind of like a DJ mix, as when you move through the environment, the music changes to reflect the changes in that environment. The background music in that scene is what we call ‘interactive music’. Was any track particularly problematic when it came to keeping that balance?
Composers Nobuo Uematsu, Masashi Hamauzu, and Mitsuto Suzuki were able to take full advantage of everything modern music technology has to offer, including, of course, software and hardware by Native Instruments.Īlthough usually closed to the public and media, we were recently lucky enough to be granted exclusive access to SQUARE ENIX’s Work Room 3 (WR3), where we grilled one-third of the aforementioned trio, Mitsuto Suzuki, on the story behind Final Fantasy VII Remake’s in-game soundtrack. As well as its lovingly crafted story and outstanding gameplay, 1997’s original FINAL FANTASY VII was lauded for its ambitious genre-hopping soundtrack, which saw composer Nobuo Uematsu push the PlayStation’s onboard sequencing, synthesis and sampling systems to their limits.įor this new version, running on the far more capable PlayStation 4, the sky was truly the limit on the audio side of things.
Released in April 2020 to broad critical acclaim, SQUARE ENIX’s highly anticipated PS4 title FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE reimagines the most beloved in the triple-A Japanese developer’s ongoing series of epic sci-fi/fantasy crossover RPGs for a new generation of gamers.