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Xenoblade, the new Wii RPG designed by veteran game producer Tetsuya Takahashi, is more or less complete -- the Japanese version, that is. With most of the hard work behind him, the man behind the Xenosaga series sat down with Famitsu magazine this week to talk about his newest game's soundtrack -- and composers Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts) and Yasunori Mitsuda (Xenogears and Xenosaga Episode I) joined him for the interview.
"I wanted the soundtrack to have a different atmosphere from the games I've worked on up to now, and that's why I asked Shimomura to be our main contributor," Takahashi said. "Once development began to gather steam, we got to a point where we had to pick a title from a list of candidates. In the end, we decided to include 'Xeno' as a sort of symbol for the game. I wanted it to have some sort of aspect in common with the Xeno games of the past, and around that time I also realized that the ending wouldn't work without a vocal song. All that combined meant that Mitsuda was the only person I could really ask."
"It definitely feels like high fantasy, what with all the pristine nature and clear blue skies," Shimomura said about the game. "Yet, at the same time, you look at the tentative list of track names and there's titles lke 'Shoulder Map' and 'Shin Meadow,' and I thought someone was joking with me at first! I remember how odd it all seemed when I learned about how the game takes place atop the bodies of giant gods."
Xenoblade's score consists of around 90 tracks, with Shimomura leading a group of composers for the in-game music and Mitsuda producing the ending tune, which is sung by one Sarah Lim. "The game was mostly complete by the time I came along," Mitsuda commented. "The feel of the game was already set in stone, of course, but I still asked if I could read the script first, which turned out to be absolutely huge -- I didn't know if I could get myself to read through all of it, but I managed it anyway. It's a really epic tale, very much a Takahashi production."
For Shimomura, Xenoblade was a chance to experiment with sounds that don't normally appear in her work. "The game's structured around this clash between man and machine, so I'm putting in a lot of sounds I don't normally use alongside electric guitars to give the music a confrontational nuance," she said.
The toughest track to make? According to Shimomura, a piece that plays near the start of the game, through the tutorial. "I had a request from Takahashi for this incredibly long track -- long for me, anyway; around nine minutes," she recalled. "It had to match up with a movie, too, so I was all 'No way I can do nine minutes!' Then his request changed; he said to me 'I still need nine minutes, but change it up in the middle,' so now he was basically requesting two songs from me!"
Xenoblade is due out in Japan on June 10; no US date has been confirmed yet.
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