Hiroki Kikuta

Hiroki Kikuta (菊田 裕樹) is a Japanese composer and game designer.

His major works are Secret of Mana, Trials of Mana, Soukaigi, and Koudelka, for which he also acted as producer and concept designer.

He has composed music for seven other games, and worked as a concept designer in addition to composer for the unreleased MMORPG Chou Bukyo Taisen.

He became interested in music at an early age, but earned a degree in Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology from Kansai University.

Kikuta went on to earn an interdisciplinary degree in Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology from Kansai University, which he attended from 1981 to 1984.

He never received any form of formal musical training, and instead taught himself by reading music theory books and listening to a wide variety of musical genres.

After graduating from Kansai, Kikuta worked first as a manga illustrator under the pseudonym and later as an anime composer.

The manga he illustrated, including one titled Raven, were done under the pen name Yūki Nijūroku (結城 二十六).

As an anime composer, he worked on The Adventure of Robin Hood and The Legend of Snow White.

He spent the next few years working first as a manga illustrator, then as a composer for anime series, before coming to work for Square in 1991.

After composing the soundtracks for his first three best-known works, he formed his own video game production company, Sacnoth, for which he was the president and CEO.

In 1991, Kikuta was hired by Square (now Square Enix), as a composer.

After being rejected by his first choice, Nihon Falcom, he applied to Square without expecting to be hired, as they had many applicants for the job and he had never played any of the company's games.

At the interview, however, Nobuo Uematsu was attracted to their shared love of progressive rock, and he was chosen over 100 other applicants.

He started off debugging Final Fantasy IV and creating sound effects for Romancing SaGa, as there were not enough game projects in development to open up new jobs for Square's new hires, but Kikuta was soon given game soundtracks to compose.

During his seven years at Square, Kikuta composed the soundtracks to only three games: Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Soukaigi for the PlayStation.

Kikuta says that he was given complete freedom to compose the soundtracks, in that he was given no direction at all as to how to compose the music; he began working on the music before the design of the game was finalized.

This freedom was helped by the fact that Uematsu ran the music group as a separate division in the company from the game developers.

Kikuta was originally chosen for Secret of Mana after Kenji Ito, who had composed the first game in the Mana series, Final Fantasy Adventure, was forced to drop the project due to other demands, such as the soundtrack to Romancing SaGa.

Rather than create MIDI versions of his compositions, like most game composers of that time did, and hand these over to the sound engineering department, Kikuta made his own samples that matched the hardware capabilities of the Super Nintendo.

This way he would know exactly how the pieces would sound on the system's hardware instead of having to deal with audio hardware differences between the original composition and the Super Nintendo.

Kikuta spent nearly 24 hours a day in his office working on the soundtrack, alternating between composing and editing.

Secret of Mana led to an arranged album, Secret of Mana+, which is composed of a single 50-minute track made up of "experimental" sounds like waterfalls, bird calls, and cell phone sounds.

For Trials of Mana, Kikuta was assisted by a sound programmer, Hidenori Suzuki, which allowed him to compose over three times the amount of music he had created for Secret of Mana.

The move to the PlayStation for Soukaigi allowed Kikuta to focus on creating live music for the soundtrack, rather than tweaking the synthesizer instruments to make the music files fit in the game cartridge as he had to for the Super Nintendo.

He used the added audio processing power to expand his musical creativity, including pieces such as songs in unintelligible Thai and Malaysian by Japanese singers.

The game itself, however, was not a success, and Kikuta decided that he wanted more direct control over the next project he worked on.

After Kikuta finished Soukaigi, he left Square and founded the video game development company Sacnoth, assuming the position of the president and CEO from 1998 to 1999.

During this time, the company created Koudelka for the PlayStation; Kikuta was credited as the concept designer, game planner, scenario writer, producer and composer.

His philosophy in designing video games is that the best projects have a limited number of people designing the overall experience and making key decisions.

He tried to follow this philosophy in creating Koudelka, and tried to bring a sense of "obsessive passion" to the project, reading what he claims were over 100 books on British history and taking the design team on a trip to Wales to study the country.

After producing and composing Koudelka in 1999, he left to become a freelance composer.

Since his departure he has formed his own record label, Norstrilia, through which he produces albums of his own compositions and collaborations with other artists, as well as his previous scores.

The game was released in December 1999 to poor reviews which criticized the game's combat system, though they praised the concept, art direction, and music.

In March 2001, Kikuta founded Norstrilia, named after the novel of the same name.

The company serves as his private record label, and publishes his albums.

Kikuta left Sacnoth soon after; the company changed its name to Nautilus and went on to produce four more games including the Shadow Hearts series before folding in 2007.

His music has been performed in concerts such as the Symphonic Fantasies concerts in Cologne, Germany in September 2009, and selections of his works have been published as piano arrangements in sheet music books.

Kikuta was inspired as a child by music from movies.

It was not until he got a synthesizer, however, that he began to feel his potential as a composer.