Famed Square Enix composer Masayoshi Soken says working on both Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion was his own personal hell.
Soken created the score for the Final Fantasy 14 base game along with Nobuo Uematsu, Ryo Yamazaki, Tsuyoshi Sekito, and Naoshi Mizuta, but for Final Fantasy 16, he took on the role of lead composer. At the same time, he was hard at work on the score for Dawntrail, and in an interview with PCGamesN, he said he'd "never" work on two Square Enix games at the same time again. It seems the main issue is the fact that the action-RPG Final Fantasy 16, with its dark and moody setting, has a very different vibe musically than the bright and colorful MMO Final Fantasy 14.
"Every day was a really horrible hell – really something beyond your imagination of hell," he said, adding that the reason he was able to pull off this seemingly daunting feat is because he had already "had the experience of working on two massive games" when he was scoring the original, now-defunct Final Fantasy 14 1.0 and its replacement, A Realm Reborn, at the same time.
Looking forward, Soken is dead set on never putting himself in that position again, saying he would turn down Square Enix if they ever asked him to score Final Fantasy 17 while he was still working on Final Fantasy 14. "I would just say 'no, I don’t want to'... If I had two bodies, I would do both."
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