Interview with Manabu Namiki

[emphatic]

http://www.squareenixmusic.com/features/interviews/manabunamiki.shtml

Cool stuff.

[ookitarepanda]

Thanks for the post.

My favorite part:

When Cave came to me afterwards asking if I could "remake all of the music from scratch for a 'Black Label' version", I was astounded. I had already done everything I had needed to. Once again, the schedule was tight, so, after puzzling it over, I came up with the idea of taking a postmodern deconstruction/reconstruction approach to my ideal. As a simple analogy, if you think of the White Label as the straight-A students, the bad students who mock them are the Black Label, I decided.

[Blue_Rei]

Awesome interview! Thanks for posting this!

[yosai]

Thanks for the link.

It was an interesting read, especially the part below about the DOK/Ketsui soundtracks.

The target hardware was a somewhat old piece of foreign-made equipment, and the documentation was written in a foreign language, making it hard to understand. The data for the music needed to be produced in the Amiga MOD format (Protracker compatible), and everything had to be compiled onto a single floppy disk. It was very difficult working under these restrictions. This is a bit nerdy, but I had to compose the music in 8 voice, 8-bit PCM without any envelope follower. Do you know how hard that is? (laughs) After having spent my time in this process of trial and error, there was very little time left in the production, so I produced the soundtrack by entering the data directly using ModPlug Tracker while composing.

After going through all of that trouble for Dai-Ou-Jou, I thought that Ketsui would allow me a bit of a rest, but that turned out not to be the case at all (laughs). In both games, the music is based on that game's individual qualities, from my own personality and know-how, so they resemble each other closely, but I stressed the delicate aspects of the former and the wilder aspects of the latter. I remember Cave would capture images from the game in development onto video tape and deliver them via bike, and inspired by the video I had seen, I turned to ModPlug Tracker and composed meticulously, as if drawing a blueprint. I am very grateful that shooting game die-hards from around the world have supported a soundtrack produced under such unusual circumstances; it is truly an honor.