As the sound director and lead composer for Final Fantasy XIV and the lead composer for Final Fantasy XVI, Masayoshi Soken says that his experiences in composing music for an MMORPG and single-player action RPG are quite different. Considering that Final Fantasy XIV is a live-service title and Final Fantasy XVI is a contained experience (save for DLC), Soken gave the former’s score more variety while giving the latter more story-oriented tracks.
In an interview with PCGamesN, Soken says that his experience working simultaneously on the original 2010 version of Final Fantasy XIV and A Realm Reborn made him think he could handle composing music for Final Fantasy XIV and XVI in a similar way. The differences in the titles made things difficult, however, and Soken found himself dreading the amount of work he had to do each day.
“I would be very honest in saying that I never want to do anything like that again,” he says. “Every day was a really horrible hell – really something beyond your imagination of hell. But there is a reason why I was able to achieve it. I had the experience of working on two massive games [at once], so I just didn’t give up this time either.”
Soken attributes his increased workload to technological advancements. Considering Final Fantasy XIV and A Realm Reborn first launched on the PlayStation 3, Soken says the amount of work he did in 2013 is much less compared to his contributions to Final Fantasy XIV and XVI, both of which were released on modern consoles and PCs.
“The amount of work that I had to do was completely different. You can imagine before it was on PS3, but now we are on PS5, so all the things I had to make were just completely different in size.”
Despite successfully releasing new tracks for Final Fantasy XIV and an original soundtrack consisting of over 300 songs for Final Fantasy XVI, Soken says he wouldn’t want to work on a Final Fantasy XVII project given he is still busy with Final Fantasy XIV. Considering the gap between Final Fantasy XV and XVI was seven years, Soken could still have enough time to change his mind.
