Final Fantasy 14 and 16 composer says working on the MMO and a action-RPG at the same time was awful: "Every day was a really horrible hell"

Final Fantasy 16 protagonist Clive uses magic in closeup screenshot — (Image credit: Square Enix)

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.

"I can't really come up with a specific example, mainly because of the sheer amount of work that was needed, but in terms of the spirit that went into the creation of 14 and 16, I would say that it was very different," Soken said. "Actually, I expected it to not be that different, but I found that it was, indeed, very different. If I were to put it into very few words I would say that 14 has variety and 16 requires stories."

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"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."