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In Revenant Wings news, we've got another translation of an interview with the production staff. This time, it's the sound and music team: composer Hitoshi Sakimoto, composer and song arranger Kenichiro Fukui, and synth operator Keiji Kawamori.

I'm not much of a music person myself, but I was surprised to learn all the complicated things they had to go through to convert the Final Fantasy XII movie to the DS, and the team seems like they had a really good time working on it. Also, this is the one interview that's spoiler-free, so if you're enjoying the game's music and want to learn more about how it was made, feel free to dive right in!

Q: It surprised me to hear so much of FFXII's music being used throughout the game.

FUKUI: The director, Toriyama, wanted to use FFXII's music as the basis for the soundtrack from the start.

Q: Was it difficult having to adapt those songs to the DS, which has more functional limitations than the PS2?

SAKIMOTO: Yeah. In order to create a usable song, Mr. Fukui had to reduce the number of sounds in the songs and determine what tones could be used to create the MIDI data, then Kawamori would take that and manipulate it. That's how you did it, right?

FUKUI: That's right. Then Kawamori returned it to me, and I made the final adjustments.

SAKIMOTO: I've actually done manipulation work on DS games before, but for this game I really can't believe how good they made it sound. I could never have created something that sounded that good within the limitations.

Q: That's Mr. Fukui and Mr. Kawamori showing their strength, then?

SAKIMOTO: Yes, you won't believe how good it sounds.

FUKUI: Thank you. (laughs) The big hurdle we had to clear when starting out is that the FFXII music was composed without any limits on the number of tracks you could play in a song. So we had to think, how could we reproduce the same sound on the DS? When we actually started creating data, we just made one song and I was impressed by how well Kawamori did with it. When you're dealing with a song that has 40 or 50 tracks, and you need to reduce that to 8 or 10, including sound effects, you start wondering what tracks should stay... you feel like you're just focusing so single-mindedly on that. You take out each track one at a time, and when you get down to the last four or so that you have to cut, you think "this is going to be really hard..."

Q: Are there some songs that were harder or easier to convert?

FUKUI: Oh, definitely. The hardest one was the battle theme. There were so many tracks in the original, so we had to try out a lot of DS-specific modifications to thin it out enough that it could be heard cleanly on the DS, and then from there, to add in data details that would preserve the breadth and depth of sound in the song.

Q: And on top of that it has to work well with the sound effects, I guess.

FUKUI: Yes, there are so many sounds that play during battle too, it's terrible.

KAWAMORI: On the PS2, it's a simple matter to group music and sound effects separately, so you can push as many as you want. Developing Revenant Wings for the DS meant that all of the sound and music were sort of lumped together as one sound. It was hard to maintain the balance so that it didn't feel like the effects and the music were taking away from each other.

FUKUI: During development, we had versions where the music would be choked out and stop playing whenever there was a sound effect. It goes without saying that that's bad, so we always had to use our judgment as to what had to be heard first for the final program. It's like, you've got your army and the enemy army fighting on the game screen, and then behind the scenes, the sound effects and the music are fighting, too. And us on the music team, we're getting into fist-fights with the sound effects supervisor... well actually, we weren't, but still. (laughs) We'd joke about that while we were working on it.

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Insider Production Secrets

Hitoshi Sakimoto: "The songs that I composed for FFXII had so many tracks, which made it really hard on Kawamori. For Revenant Wings, I knew I was going to be producing music for DS hardware, so I planned ahead to use fewer tracks."

Kenichiro Fukui: "I'm the one who ended up writing the airship theme. The morning after I pulled an all-nighter at work, I went outside to get breakfast, and it was a wonderful day. I looked up at this beautifully clear blue sky, and the melody came to me just like that."

Keiji Kawamori: "Some of the staff from Basiscape who joined in the arrangements had an extremely aggressive arrangement style. If you check out the staff credits, it's really fun to speculate different people who were in charge of each song."

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Q: Mr. Kawamori, what did you concentrate on when creating the songs' tones?

KAWAMORI: The definitive tones from the original songs' choruses obviously had to be reproduced as they were. Everything else I tried to just make as easy to play on the DS as possible. I used sampling to create almost all the sounds, but doing that ate up all our capacity, so trying to wring that back out into a very small amount of memory was always a bit like playing a puzzle game. (laughs) Then, the music switches back and forth based on whether you're in battle with enemies or not, so I wanted to reduce the data-loading process as much as possible. That meant I had to put the two songs on the same wavelength data, and that was an extra limitation.

FUKUI: This is my first time being in charge of a DS game, so I really felt the pressure of the detail and sound limitations. It reminded me of creating music for arcade games 15 years ago. (laughs) But moving to the DS from the PS2 and Xbox where you have no limits, the work was actually unexpectedly refreshing. When you can just say "I can make as many as you like, no problem, here you go" isn't very exciting, but working within the limitations really invigorated my passion as an artist, you could say.

Q: In practice, it really does feel like FFXII's soundtrack is coming out of the DS's speakers.

FUKUI: That's thanks to the great effort of the Synth Manipulator. Mr. Kawamori decided that the main tone of the orchestral songs would be strings, so he took about 10 types of various string tones, and tried out each one to determine which one would represent each song best, and which one would sound prettiest coming out of the DS's speakers. You get that great feeling from the music because he worked so hard on it.

SAKIMOTO: He'd never admit it, but Kawamori is very skilled. When I think back on my own experiences, I know I couldn't create a sound like this on my own. Even when I was working on FFXII, if you'd come to me for MIDI data with a track count that large, I would have gotten pissed. (laughs) But, handing it over to Kawamori meant that it really sounded proper.

KAWAMORI: It's funny that you say that. I'm kind of a masochist, aren't I?

FUKUI: The harder the job the happier you are? (laughs)

KAWAMORI: Yeah. I'll just say "Look at this track count!" and squeal happily. (laughs)

FUKUI: That does happen. I said earlier that I feel more invigorated when I have limitations imposed on me, so maybe I'm really happiest in a crisis too. (laughs)

Q: You didn't just work with the tones, but you also arranged some songs yourself, didn't you?

SAKIMOTO: He did change some of the songs. Some of them seem like Mr. Fukui just wrote them almost completely by himself. (laughs)

FUKUI: There had to be two derivations within a song: one when it's playing normally and one when you're engaged in battle. Fans of FFXII's music can listen and compare and notice that new parts have been added on.

SAKIMOTO: I had the role of supervisor, but that basically just meant I listened to the arrangements and said "oh, that's good." (laughs) I rarely had to give any input. Past that, there were some new songs added, and I just had to write those.

Q: Was it hard writing the new songs?

SAKIMOTO: I had to keep the tone and track counts down. I wondered how I was going to accomplish that, but it was surprisingly easy to do. I think it also helped that I had a little more free time than on my last job. On FFXII, I would have to use a single musical motif many times, so after a time I just got sick of them. Using them again after such a long time, though, I'd start thinking "wow, that was a really nice motif". (laughs)

Q: The new song that plays over the ending is a medley of FFXII songs, isn't it?

SAKIMOTO: That song is broken up into the first half, which is the movie part, and the second half, which is the credit roll part. The movie half still feels a bit like "That's our Penelo!" (laughs) I liked Penelo in FFXII, but the Revenant Wings version also feels very proper to me. The credit roll for the second half was so long that the song I originally composed didn't cover it, so I had to find ways to extend it. I kept sticking in more phrases I used in FFXII, I kept thinking "hey, maybe I can use this motif again." (laughs)

Q: What's your favorite song from this game?

FUKUI: Well, I like them all, since I've always loved Mr. Sakimoto's orchestral scores. But there was that one really sad song that left an impression on me. What was that song's name again? (laughs) There was this one song that I just titled "So Sad" during development. Every time I was working on it it made me feel really sad.

Q: So you were really influenced by the songs as you were working on them?

FUKUI: Yeah. Maybe not as much as songs that have lyrics, but whenever I'm working on a sad song, it just makes the whole world seem gloomy. When I'm working on them and I have to listen to them over and over again, I feel my eyes start to droop. If something's going on and someone comes into my booth they'll keep asking me "Are you okay?" (laughs)

KAWAMORI: I like "Dalmascan Estersand." I'm also a fan of Mr. Sakimoto's work, and to be involved with the FFXII music one more time was a great experience. Before now, when I finished work on a game, it took me a while before I would listen to that game's music again. So getting to hear the music from my earlier work again on the actual machinery was an experience like no other.

SAKIMOTO: I think the song that's left an impression on me is Garamsythe Waterway, which was incomplete and which Mr. Fukui did a great job of finishing. The original song was very short, without much undulation, so I thought he'd have to add a lot to it in order to extend it, but the part that he added preserves the integrity of the original and it just fits like a glove.

FUKUI: I was working on it while thinking, "What would Mr. Sakimoto do?" (laughs)

SAKIMOTO: Yeah, that's a way of thinking I don't have. I just figured it was "Oh, I could do it this way. So I will."

Q: It sounds like you really pulled all your skills together on this one.

SAKIMOTO: It was so motivational. It's a precious thing to have people who think differently than you. Instead of just telling people what to do, I got to learn a lot from this project.

FUKUI: When working on the arrangements, I just wanted to try to preserve the image of those songs from their original FFXII arrangements. Even though we had such hardware restrictions, I wanted to recreate the feeling of a real orchestra performing. I want each person playing the game to get that feeling and feel good while they listened.

KAWAMORI: I really wanted to somehow transfer the FFXII experience onto the DS, too. The songs in Revenant Wings and FFXII have the same tone; I really liked searching for ways to get that to happen, and on the other hand, to make it sound different from FFXII. That made me happy.

SAKIMOTO: When you look at the functionality of simple hardware, it's going to be on a smaller scale than your previous work, but I really think music should be simple. I think that making it more complicated and adding more sounds can only make the work suffer. The sound staff on this game also have such a positive attitude. They'd say "No matter how low the hardware restrictions, we'll make it as good as the original." I think that's the reason we have such amazing sound, because everyone packed so much love into their work.

I have to say (music geek though I'm not), I personally loved the job they did with Revenant Wings' soundtrack. The transition was so smooth that until I listened to the original tracks again, I didn't even notice how sparse the DS soundtrack was in comparison. In some ways I even like the simplicity better... maybe there's still a part of me that just prefers that old 16-bit sound to the booming choruses of today's game music.

What about all you people out in internet-land. Which sound is better: simple or complicated? Does working within limitations inflame your artist soul, or does it just stifle your creativity?

Stay tuned for our next interview with the story team, featuring director Motomu Toriyama!

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