Translation by: Lugalbanda (https://xenomira.wordpress.com/2018/05/30/xenogears-20th-anniversary-concert-pamphlet-translation/).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The theme of this concert is: “20 years have passed, and we will relive that day once more”. I had been hoping for an opportunity to revisit this game that has been loved by many for the last 20 years. I hope I can provide a wonderful experience alongside the music.
–Yasunori Mitsuda
Page 1 of the interview with Yasunori Mitsuda
Interviewer: Please tell us how you ended up as the composer for Xenogears.
Yasunori Mitsuda: At the time, we had just finished up Final Fantasy VI (Note: Final Fantasy III for initial North American release) and Chrono Trigger, and we were just about done with Mana and other projects. So, we had started talking about making a PlayStation game. We knew we were going to make Final Fantasy VII, but we didn’t have anything set in stone beside that. When the sound team had a meeting, we talked about how there was definitely going to be a Mana game and a SaGa game, but Mana would best be left for Hiroki Kikuta-san, and SaGa would be best left for Kenji Itō. There were other teams forming, and one of them was Takahashi-san’s Xenogears. I didn’t really care what team I ended up being assigned to, but I was interested in Takahashi-san’s desire to try something new. In addition, Masato Kato, who wrote scenario, was a good friend of mine, so I had a desire to make another game with him. (Note: “I, unfortunately, know him too well/ I’ve tried to get away from him but I can’t” in an endearing way) So, I sent a request saying that I would like to be assigned to Takahashi-san’s team if no one else wanted to do it. At the time the staff had assembled, the game wasn’t called Xenogears yet.
Interviewer: It was a different name?
Mitsuda: At the time the team was supposed to be responsible for a Chrono Trigger sequel; the “Chrono 2” team. But Takahashi-san wanted to make his own world, so it wasn’t going to be “Chrono 2”.
Page 2 of the interview with Yasunori Mitsuda
As a result, the game changed drastically, with a sci-fi theme, and a very delicate plot… Something that Square had yet to make. Some of the depictions and story in the game are quite dangerous; it’s probably not a game we could make today. (laughs)
Interviewer: Did everyone intend for the story and world to be sci-fi from the beginning of development?
Mitsuda: When a new project starts, you analyze the new hardware, and try to absorb as much technology as you can. And when it’s a new console, you want to be able to use all the new technology, and we do that before we even start making the game. Maps used to be one piece of art that characters would stand and move around on, but Xenogears was innovative in that it implemented the ability to move the camera around. The characters are 2D, but the background is all 3D. Because of this, we could try out new gimmicks and new camerawork that was previously not possible. That was what we started with.
Interviewer: So, it was reliant on the technology.
Mitsuda: I think Takahashi-san was working behind the scenes writing up the plot while we were doing that. Around six months had passed when I had started to truly grasp the plot. By then, characters could move a bit, you could move the camera, and Lahan Village was completed. I think it took about a year for all of the plot to be written up.
Interviewer: The 3D map was very innovative.
Mitsuda: Takahashi-san had come from a graphics background, so he really focused on how to show something in a way that hasn’t previously been done before, I think. Using the L and R buttons to move the camera was quite cool! Final Fantasy VII’s map took the exact opposite direction, using 3D characters on a 2D map, and you could say that Xenogears had focused on providing more depth to the background, and I thought “wow, this is great” at the time. Being able to move the camera is nothing special now, but it was new technology at the time and I was very surprised by it.
Interviewer: I remember getting lost quite often.
Mitsuda: Yes! Because everyone had never played a game with camera controls like that, it was common not being able to find where to go next. There’s a compass that shows directions, but it’s not enough. It was a new experience for all of us, and the staff members got lost a lot too. (laughs)
Interviewer: What was the development process like at the time?
Mitsuda: Not very different from the Super Famicom (Note: the Japanese name for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System), but there were a lot more tracks that we could use. Super Famicom could only use eight tracks, but the PlayStation could use twice that amount; 16 tracks. Keeping track of data became very complicated as a result. Back then, you used something called MML (Music Macro Language) to program music. It was a type of program used to compose music for ringtones and the like. We had just been punching in keys into a program, but now we converted MIDI data into a program. You can just convert the sounds you input into the sequencer and then convert it to produce sound, so that was a great quality of life improvement, but because there’s twice as many tracks and data, the workload ended up being around the same as before.
Interviewer: It seems like you were doing quite specialized tasks.
Mitsuda: I come from an engineering background, so I understood how the sound programs worked. So, I asked a programmer to do something different from what we had done with the Super Famicom for Xenogears. Sorry that this is heavy on the jargon, but…
"Note: the remaining answer will be skipped, because as Mitsuda says, it’s heavy on the jargon. I honestly have no idea what he’s talking about. The main takeaway is that there was an effort to make higher quality music. He also says that he used stereo sampling, perhaps being the first game in the industry to do so."
- Lugalbanda
Page 3 of the interview with Yasunori Mitsuda
Interviewer: Did you have any themes you wanted to hit at for the game?
Mitsuda: When I understood the lore, I came up with three themes. Religious music, ethnic music because that was my forte, and orchestra to back up the deep plot of the game. They’re all quite different sounding, but I remember thinking how good the game would be if I could tie it all together to fit Xenogears. Because of that, I didn’t compose much that didn’t fit into those 3 categories, like rock music.
Interviewer: And how long was the development period?
Mitsuda: I was probably involved for about a year and a half. Before Xenogears had started serious development, I was working on a game called Tobal No.1, and that game plays music straight from the recording. That experience made me want to do it again with Xenogears. But we don’t have an infinite amount of space to store the data on, so we decided that we should at least do something for the opening and the ending. That lead to us recording with The Voices of Bulgaria for the opening, and Square’s first ever vocal track for the ending. If I hadn’t worked on Tobal No.1, I might not have thought to do that. I do feel like a lot of my past projects became a positive influence for Xenogears.
Interviewer: So, there were influences on Xenogears that you wouldn’t have expected. Overall, were there more tracks compared to the days of the Super Famicom?
Mitsuda: Overall there are fewer tracks than Chrono Trigger, but the tracks became longer. Even though people used to say my tracks were long even on the Super Famicom. (laughs) Tracks were typically one to one minute and fifteen-second-long loops, but I didn’t loop the song until at least one minute and a half. Xenogears’ tracks were long; I think Lahan Village takes something like two minutes to loop back. I enjoyed walking around on the map and thought that players would do the same, so I made the song longer than usual. I tried not to make music that just sort of played in the background and tried to make tracks that fit the situation to be memorable. The reason I say that is because as the graphical capabilities rise, there is less and less reason to have any music. In the old days, you had to build the world through the 8-bit designs or the illustrator’s artwork, so the music had to cover for what the art couldn’t. But as the quality on the visual front rises, the music can’t stand out too much or it’ll get in the way. When you walked on the field you could hear footsteps, so I even thought music might not even be necessary. But I did have something I wanted to tell, so I focused on providing tracks that really leave a lasting impression.
Interviewer: Which track did you compose first?
Mitsuda: Lahan Village. My Village is Number One. I got to see the in-game village, and how the story would unravel from this humble village. I got a feel for how the music would actually sound in the game, how much space one track would take up from writing that one track and everything picked up from there.
Interviewer: So, things sped up after that?
Mitsuda: I had difficulty with some of the later tracks. I was writing the track for Solaris, but I didn’t really know where Solaris stood in the story. It’s always cloud nine up there, but there’s also something that’s being hidden. I didn’t know which part I wanted to focus on. It’s a song you hear towards the end of the game so it might be better to write something that gets to the heart of the game, but I thought it would be interesting to stick it to that conventional wisdom and write a totally carefree track. When I was brainstorming for the concert on what track should follow Flight, I was thinking “Solaris is necessary, but…” (laughs)
Interviewer: Were there any other tracks that you had a rough time with?
Mitsuda: There were plenty, but… The ending song was definitely tough. It took me two months to complete that track. (laughs) I’m a pretty frank person, so If I think, “this isn’t good.” I just throw it away in the Mac trash bin. For the ending, I threw it in the trash bin and started from scratch. About ten days later after I had started working on other tracks, I found the track that I thought I had deleted intact in the trash bin, and listened to it and thought, “this isn’t half bad…”
Interviewer: You hadn’t emptied out your trash bin.
Mitsuda: Normally, I would delete it all immediately. Maybe I thought subconsciously that I still had a shot at making it right. But even after that, even if it wasn’t half as bad, I changed my mind and put it in the trash again, and repeated that process over and over again. In the end, that song that was resurrected from the trash bin is the song that made it into the final product. (laughs) If I had emptied out the trash bin, that ending song probably wouldn’t have been born.
Interviewer: Any tracks that were easy to write?
Mitsuda: Bart’s theme, “Traces Left from Warriors’ Dreams”. I knew his position in the story, so it was really easy to write. The same with Aveh, it was the kind of music that I liked, so I had no trouble with it. I wrote the tracks with a focus on what tracks would come before it and what would follow it, so the more details I have on the plot, the quicker I am. Of course, reading all that takes time, but quicker is quicker.
Interviewer: Is it common for the story and plot details to not be decided on yet when you are asked to write the track?
Mitsuda: For modern development teams, you get precise directions about when and where they intend to use the track, with documents that have all the details in it. But back then, we didn’t really have documents like that. Sometimes I would say, “I wasn’t asked to write for this town, but wouldn’t it be better if we had one?” or the other way, “We’re making this event and we want you to come up with something that fits the scene”. There was a lot of that kind of back and forth. Sometimes I would go to see how much progress was being made on the game, there would be new events, and we would decide to have a unique track for it too, sometimes. In those days we made the games through a lot of that intra-team feedback and discussion. I could go peek and ask, “How’s the game coming along?” or, “Mind if I take a look at this event?”, and that helped me to get a grasp of what the game is. But I was often asked, “can we have a track here please” really casually. I would always say, “alright…” thinking in my head, “Do you know how hard it is to come up with one track?” (laughs)
Page 4 of the interview with Yasunori Mitsuda
Interviewer: Specifically, how did the process of the team asking for tracks work?
Mitsuda: “We’re making this event, but there’s not really a track that fits, so, if you would, please.” was how it worked. I would upload tracks I had completed to a company server, and the development team would use a music player to listen to it. They would listen to the newly added tracks and determine where it would belong. At first, there were only about five map songs and no event songs. When we’re making an event, if one of the map tracks fits then we’ll use that but if he didn’t have a sad track, then we would have to write one up. Before I write it, we would come together and discuss if this should be a character’s theme sometimes too. We would follow up with each other and fill in the gaps.
Interviewer: Were there any tracks that you thought, “You used that here!?”
Mitsuda: Flight! Flight! Masato Kato… he just had to use it there. He used it in the scene where Chu-chu becomes gigantic, but that important track was not meant to be played there. For me, that scene should have had a different track. If he would have just told me, I would have remixed the Chu-chu theme! I told him not to use this until the very very end… and he used it behind my back. (laughs) He says that it was the only appropriate track, but everyone else working on event planning was also saying, “Kato-san! Not for this!” (laughs) Everyone was holding in their temptation to use the track until the very end. And that special track was used on Chu-chu just like that. And now that track is most remembered for that scene too. If we’re ever going to do a remake, I hope I can write a remix of Chu-chu’s theme and not use Flight. (laughs)
Interviewer: The use of animation is something that distinguishes Xenogears from a lot of other games. Was there something different that you had to account for, switching over from games to animation?
Mitsuda: It was full-animation right from the opening. Production I.G. was responsible for it, and I think they made something really cool. For the opening, I converted the video to a PlayStation format and wrote up the track in the sequencer with the video in real-time. I worked together with the sound designer and a good friend of mine, Naoko Asari, and we collaborated together, saying things like, “What’s the track gonna be like?”, and “Ok, the track is gonna get loud here, so could you leave out the sound effects?” I thought it was an interesting way of doing things. The opening in the final product is about five minutes, but we realized we were only given a video that was four minutes long.
Interviewer: The music cut off one minute short?
Mitsuda: We were writing the track in conjunction with the scenes of the animation, and we were very proud of what we had accomplished. And then we actually put it together, and said, “Wait… What!?” We found out that the version we received was an expedited version that was not finished. We had it all lined up to the animation, and now it was all off. We were planning on submitting it the next day so it could be used for promotional material, so we had to add and realign one minute-worth of sound in the few hours that we had until the deadline. It was the first time we had tried incorporating animation, so I don’t think we can blame anyone. (laughs) Looking at the footage, I was thinking, “man, this seems a bit rushed.” (laughs)
Interviewer: What would you tell your younger self?
Mitsuda: If everything was finished I would say, “well done!” and if I was just about to start, I would say, “give it all you got.” I didn’t need to be told that though, being taken to the hospital and whatnot. (laughs) At the time, it was just so fun for me to write music. I didn’t even want to sleep because I would be wasting valuable time, and that attitude took a toll on me. So it wasn’t tiring for me at all and I thought I was doing fine, but my body said otherwise. So I would tell my former self to try hard, but remember to stay safe.
Interviewer: How hard did you work?
Mitsuda: It’s unthinkable now, but I used to go home about once a month, and just stay at the company every day. Square used to be located at Meguro, and I lived in Nakano, which isn’t that far, but I considered even the time to travel between two locations as a waste of time. I was also just too lazy to go home. (laughs) But there were a lot of people like that around me. The music studio used to be separated from the rest, but sometimes I would hear the sound of water coming from the bathroom and see that someone was washing their hair. “Oh, you didn’t go home?” was a common conversation to have. In the old days, the attitude was more, “if you want to work, work as much as you want”, but I never disliked the company because of it. It was great fun being a part of creating something, and I have nothing but fond memories. But I do think that you can only work that way when you’re young. There’s no way I can pull an all-nighter now. It’s much better to just ask for an extension if you need it. (laughs)
Note: I have decided to skip this next part of the interview because this pamphlet is something that is still actually being sold, and this part of the interview only deals with the concert itself, which is not of much value for those who did not attend it. There also seems to be a page missing. So I will skip most of it, except for two exchanges:
Interviewer: I would like to ask about the guests. Joanne Hogg has been a part of the game since it first came out. How did her joining the team come about?
Mitsuda: We were first planning on having the song be in Japanese. But we were talking about how it’d be cooler if we got it in English with Takahashi-san and Masato Kato. The hard part was deciding who would actually do the singing because if we used a famous artist, while it might be good publicity, there would be a lot of money necessary that we didn’t have, and all the legal work that would have needed to take place would have been a bit too much for us to handle. So, we were looking for someone who had good talent and was known in their region, but not so much in Japan. There was a small appliance store where I used to live. There was a small corner of the shop that sold CDs, and I saw “Iona” and thought, “What’s this?” I thought the Celtic cross on the cover was interesting, so I just bought it based on that. All the description said was that it was Irish music, and I didn’t know anything else about it.
Interviewer: So, you discovered her in the corner of an appliance store.
Mitsuda: It used to be a furniture store, so it was a really tiny section of the shop. About one meter wide. I think whoever was responsible for putting that CD there out of all the possible options was a genius. I think it was fate that I picked up that CD from all the others, too. (laughs) I bought a few CDs, and when I heard Iona, I thought, “This is it!” I thought it matched Xenogears perfectly, and I wanted to get in contact with them, so I called the record label responsible for selling it in Japan, and they contacted Joanne for me. I was surprised because she gave me a very frank response, saying, “I’ll sing. Give me a demo.” So I wrote up a demo and sent it to her, and she really liked my song. She was like, ” I’ll sing, but why does a Japanese person know me?” (laughs) So I end up traveling to Ireland to record, and the first CD I bought there was by ANÚNA.
Page 7 of the interview with Yasunori Mitsuda
Interviewer: What is Xenogears to you?
Mitsuda: Xenogears is a representation of the amount of skill I had at the time, and a game that has a lot of the things that I’ve always wanted to do, and a defining moment for my music career. And so, I have a lot of fond memories of it. I caused a lot of trouble for some people and was told, You take things too far”, but it’s a game where I felt that I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I went that far. And I can only attribute the popularity of the tracks after twenty years to all the fans who liked it. The game is a part of who I am.
Note: The next part of the pamphlet deals with Joanne Hogg, the singer for Small Two of Pieces. The image is extremely blurry, and I cannot make out most of the text on the first page, only the second, which is mostly about promoting her material and a message for concertgoers. I will skip this part as well. Additionally, there is a small interview with ANÚNA that will also be skipped.
Page 1 of the Interview with Hiromichi Tanaka
HOW THE PROJECT STARTED
Interviewer: I would like to ask about the Xenogears development process. How did the project start?
Hiromichi Tanaka: It was just around the time when we were shifting from the Super Famicom to the PlayStation. A game we were working on in conjunction with Final Fantasy VII. At the time, Takahashi-kun was with the FFVII team, and he was tasked with building the world along with Tetsuya Nomura. It looked to be a story that was about robots, an extension from Magitek Armor, but it was so drastically different from the world of FF, so we decided to do it as a different game. I had just finished Seiken Densetsu 3, and I was tired of working on games with multiple storylines. (laughs) We decided to rearrange all the teams, and Takahashi-kun and I ended up working together.
Interviewer: After working on Seiken Densetsu 3, you worked on a radically different game, Xenogears. Was there something that went through your mind as you were going through that?
Tanaka: For me personally, I had given it all I had in me as a developer with Seiken Densetsu 3, and I was done working on the frontlines. I was focused on how to reflect the world and lore of Xenogears that Takahashi had envisioned into the actual game. I would do some of the conceptual and structural things, and not interfere with anything other than that. As a producer, I wanted to focus on staff management, but when it came to UI, it was easier to just do it myself rather than explain it to someone, so I did that. Thinking back, I interfered quite a bit. (laughs)
Interviewer: I guess you could say it was inevitable as a creator. (laughs) So you ended up working on it too.
Tanaka: Yes, I let Takahashi-kun do the plot, and I did the combat system. I ended up doing the menu, the combat UI, and the camera regarding battle events. To get even more specific, I worked on things like the status screen, punching in bits for the battle UI, and the map compass. Because the graphical capabilities were so much higher than the Super Famicom, I decided it was better left to the designer to do the actual designs of the game. I end up working on Chrono Cross and FFXI after this, though. (laughs)
AN EPIC STORY AND A LENGTHENING DEVELOPMENT
Interviewer: Was there any difficulty you experienced with the new hardware?
Tanaka: With the new console, we studied how to use the CD-ROMs as we developed the game. Up to that point, we had been working on Super Famicom games, or ROM cassettes before that, so we learned how to work with a limited amount of space. Put it simply, if we used CD-ROMs, we could just keep tacking on discs if we needed more, so we had virtually an infinite amount of space. That changed how we approach development.
Interviewer: Ah yes, Xenogears was a two-disc game.
Tanaka: We had initially planned it as a one-disc game, but we ended up having two discs thanks to Takahashi-kun’s ever-expanding world. Even with that, two discs didn’t seem enough to him, and he wanted to separate it into a part one and a part two, it looks like.
Page 2 of the interview with Hiromichi Tanaka
However, because the development process was pretty long for a game at the time, a lot of the staff were exhausted. We managed to complete the game, and we disbanded our team to see what we would do next.
Interviewer: There was a deadline, but the plot wasn’t done yet, it seems.
Tanaka: Takahashi-kun seemed to come up with parts of the world as he went along making the game, so there were times when we didn’t know when we’d see the exit. It might have been better to write up something first, clean and tidy, and go from there, but I think Takahashi-kun had a vision of seeing everything in action, and further expand the world from there. We could’ve just ended it at disc 1 and released part two as something else, but we had never made a game that was split into parts, and it was a taboo among the industry. I think for Takahashi-kun, it was really disappointing that he had to end the game in two discs. With that being said, I think that feeling of not being able to do everything he set out to do leads to what he will do later, so I think it worked out in a way.
Interviewer: Was there anything you found difficult to put in the game?
Tanaka: It was hard to have an RPG combat system that had both regular and gear battles, which were totally different in scale, and making that all come together to form one cohesive RPG system. We ended up splitting it up, having a regular battle system and a robot battle system. This can be said about Seiken Densetsu as well, but the battle system is what we had been using at Square since the original FF.
Interviewer: Xenogears also has animation as part of the cutscenes.
Tanaka: Takahashi-kun insisted that we do animation, and so we decided to go ahead with it. At the time, however, there was not that much precedent for having animation in a game. For FFVII we used CGI made by the company, but we didn’t have anything within the company for 2D animation, so we had to outsource it to an anime company. The animation was half CGI, one of Production I.G.’s strong suits.
Interviewer: Were there any memorable scenes for you?
Tanaka: Yes, the ending. The industry was very strict at the time, and a nude woman was considered a no-go for the PlayStation. They wouldn’t even allow a silhouette… We had already drawn Elly, but we couldn’t be able to release it the way it was, so I personally trimmed it as to not show her breast. As a fun fact, I gave the original animation to Takahashi-kun on a special disc. I hope he’s still holding on to it. (laughs)
Page 3 of the Interview with Hiromichi Tanaka
THE MARK THAT XENOGEARS LEFT
Interviewer: Xenogears was a game that was in the midst of a change of consoles, and there were new endeavors like using animation. Where do you think Xenogears stands in the video game industry?
Tanaka: It was a game that was developed as we had switched over from Nintendo to Sony, and the CD-ROM changed the way we approached development. For ROM cassettes it was key to come up with a way to work with the limited data space available, but with the advent of CD-ROMs, I felt that we had to start making games that were more artistic and creative. The data structure and management aren’t that different, but we started shifting to C from assembly language, so we didn’t have to compress data bit by bit. We couldn’t follow debugging and bugs, so that was difficult. In addition, game development usually took a year and a half to two years max, but since Xenogears three-year development has become the new normal.
Interviewer: And how about as a work of art?
Tanaka: Xenogears was a philosophical work that touched on a lot of psychological themes, so I think there was something important in doing that in the form of a game. At the time there was the anime “Neon Genesis Evangelion”, but it was hard to do something like that in a game at the time. I think it would have been better to make a movie out of what Takahashi-kun wanted to do. But I think it honorable to try to do it in a game anyway as an experiment. In a game, you control your character, so it’s easier to grow an attachment to them and sympathize with them.
Interviewer: What is Xenogears to you personally?
Tanaka: Up until that point, game development was something where I felt like I had to do everything, but with Xenogears, I was in my newfound role as director, and I wanted to pull out the best out of my staff, and I changed my methods accordingly. The game was a turning point for me; one that I have fond memories of. There’s another reason why I have fond memories of it. My first RPG at Square, “Genesis” was actually based on Revelations, and even had mechs. I don’t think Takahashi-kun knew about Genesis, but there were similarities between it and Xenogears. Genesis was a game that was released ten years before on the PC, so it didn’t have any amazing graphical expression, but it was the first game I had produced. So, I was personally looking forward to the game as I was making it.
REGARDING THE 20th ANNIVERSARY CONCERT
Interviewer: This Xenogears concert is to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the game. Are there any tracks in the game that you have fond memories of?
Tanaka: I’ve attended many game music concerts, but I’ve been blown away by the quality that an orchestra can produce. There are a lot of unique tracks in Xenogears. I love the dungeon track that plays for the Soylent System because it’s dark. The events that unfold are also shocking, and that’s why I remember it so much. I don’t think it’ll be played at the concert, though. (laughs)
Interviewer: The concert will be lead by Yasunori Mitsuda. During development, what were your interactions with Mitsuda-san like?
Tanaka: For the music, it was between Takahashi-kun and Mitsuda-kun, it seems. Mitsuda-kun was someone who had his own world and didn’t need to be asked to write tracks. At the time Mitsuda-kun was working very hard, and he fell over. (Note: “fell over” here has multiple interpretations here, either that he became ill, or that he had to be taken to the hospital for something) The same can be said about Takahashi-kun, but I think artists tend to really push themselves to their limits. For music especially, a lot of the work is done independent of the studio, and it’s easy to get isolated. I think it was a rough time for him so I would like to tell him that he did an excellent job.
Interviewer: Any messages to concertgoers?
Tanaka: With the 20th anniversary, we have an opportunity to listen to Xenogears’ music. I hope you can go down memory lane as you listen to all the music.
Page 1 of the interview with Tetsuya Takahashi
THE EFFECT OF MUSIC ON THE GAME
Interviewer: Before we begin, can you please tell me your initial reaction to the 20th-anniversary concert?
Tetsuya Takahashi: I first heard about it when Michan (Yasunori Mitsuda) and I were involved in another project. I thought, “Huh. 20th anniversary already. So, we’ve come this far.” I wasn’t that surprised by it.
Interviewer: What are your thoughts on the concert commemorating the 20th anniversary?
Takahashi: I think music is something that is easy to grasp, and a medium that’s easier to set up. If we were to do a remake, it would be much harder. Sounds are memorable, So I think listening to music is a great way to revive distant memories.
Interviewer: How do you view Mitsuda-san as a musician?
Takahashi: He always tries to understand the game we are working on. He isn’t the kind of guy to write up the track and say he’s done. For example, he always asks about what kind of scenes the tracks he is writing are going to be played in, and even how the in-game scenery looks. If we give him detailed documents, he always reads through all of it. All of us in the studio are always grateful for that.
Interviewer: For this concert, the Joanne Hogg will be making an appearance to sing “Small Two of Pieces”. Can you tell me why you decided to put a lyrical song into a video game?
Takahashi: In animation and movies, music and songs go hand in hand. I thought it was weird that video games didn’t have that. For the ending, I wanted to have a chorus before getting into the song, with a religious painting feel, and then get to the vocals.
Interviewer: So, it was just obvious to you that it needed both music and a song.
Takahashi: Yes. There’s another song, “Star of Tears”, and we made it like what you’d see in an anime opening with the upbeat music. But it was a little too cheery and didn’t fit Xenogears. There weren’t any events that would have fit for it, and we can’t use it for the actual, rather dark intro of Xenogears… So we didn’t use it in the game, and it’s only in the official soundtrack.
HOW THE WORLD OF XENOGEARS CAME TO BE
Interviewer: I would like to ask about Xenogears itself now. Can you tell me how the project started?
Takahashi: I was assigned to the FFVII team at first, and I had pitched an idea that I had. I talked to Sakaguchi-san (Hironobu Sakaguchi) about it, and he told me that it might be cool to work on it as a new title. In the final product, humans are 2D and gears are 3D, but gears were initially 2D. We found out mid-development that there was a limit to the amount of 2D objects the PlayStation could display, but we were lucky because one of our staff members, Hiroshi Yamauchi (Currently Monolith Soft Kyoto Studio chief, not to be confused with the former president of Nintendo with the same name) had already familiarized himself with 3D, and he liked mechs. That’s why the gears are 3D if I recall.
Page 2 of the interview with Tetsuya Takahashi
Interviewer: How was the world of Xenogears born?
Takahashi: I liked mechs and pop culture characters, and I wanted to make a game combining the two. And if I was going to do it, I wanted it to be better than FF, too. I wanted to try my hand at the popular fad at the time of littering the plot with foreshadowing and having all of those storylines coming together for the central story, too.
Interviewer: I can see a religious aspect to the games as well; did you think about that as you worked on it?
Takahashi: Yes… Compared to other countries, I think religion is something pretty foreign to Japanese people, but I think religious concepts as it pertains to living your everyday life is something closer than you might think. I myself am not particularly reliant on that kind of thing, so I remember part of my motivation being to try and see what I can do with an outsider’s perspective.
Interviewer: Does this motivation also apply to the philosophical aspects of the game?
Takahashi: Humans want a reason for their existence. If someone defines it for you, you think, “So this is why I feel the way I do.”, and you’re comforted by that. I wanted to deliver that philosophical message in a way that could be understood easily.
Interviewer: Xenogears is a massive epic, and it’s only one of many episodes. Was this your intention from the beginning?
Takahashi: I had come up with a basic structure of the world from the beginning. Like human history, I want people to see Xenogears as just one piece of the entire history of that world.
Interviewer: So, you came up with the foundation first and proceeded with development?
Takahashi: I was coming up with it as development proceeded, but that was really inefficient, looking back. For a typical RPG, for the sake of efficient you would work on the foundation while you wrote the script, and then everything would be made after that. Everything started at the same time for development at the time, so that’s pretty inefficient. If the script is lagging behind, everything slows down with it, and you have to keep on making the game without having a feel for what kind of game it is that you’re making. This was not a good structure, and I have bitter memories of it.
Interviewer: It doesn’t sound easy with the extensive amount of worldbuilding that would be necessary for a game of this scope…
Takahashi: No, it was fun. The ideas in Perfect Works were things that I had already thought about, but that book was the first time I had written it all out on paper. I only started working on it after the game had released. If I was going to release an artbook, I wanted it to supplement parts of the main game.
Interviewer: Is the “fantasy to sci-fi” transition something you wanted to do for Xenogears and Xenosaga?
Takahashi: I don’t know if I can call it the Xeno series, but these games are all sci-fi to me. For example, Xenogears is a story that branches out from the Zohar. I always come back to sci-fi, so I think that influence is strong in my work.
Interviewer: I remember it being exciting that you would start off in a humble town, and by the end of the game you were surrounded by futuristic architecture.
Takahashi: I think games were particularly conservative at the time. Regarding the story, if we just plop in a mech and say this is a sci-fi game, it would have been hard to succeed. If we raise the hurdle at the beginning to high, we lose out on customers who can’t keep up. So, I wanted to start off with something that was easy to get into. And thus, you begin with a pastoral setting, and that slowly begins to change as the game progresses… I had planned that from the start.
Interviewer: Please tell me what you consider the most memorable scene.
Takahashi: There’s too many… But around the transition from disc one to two. When you lose to Ramsus in disc one, and the dream sequence starts. I put a lot of effort into that scene, so I remember it the most. I’m sure for the players the most memorable scene was the canned food factory. (laughs)
KEEPING MORALE HIGH
Interviewer: What did you put the most effort into?
Takahashi: The way in which we created the events is most memorable to me. FFVII had a pre-rendered map screen with polygon characters, but Xenogears put characters onto a 3D map, and that resulted in a more free camera. The process of making a map so that you can use a camera for events is pretty much the origin of 3D, so I really focused on that.
Interviewer: Were you thinking about the possibilities that 3D graphics would bring in the future?
Takahashi: The PlayStation was a console where you always had to choose 2D or 3D. I knew that 3D would eventually replace everything, so it was a test run to get used to it. I heard later from staff that I used to work with that our effort contributed to making games with graphics like Vagrant Story.
Page 3 of the interview with Tetsuya Takahashi
Interviewer: Was there anything difficult or stressful you encountered during development?
Takahashi: The event planners of Xenogears, like Masato Kato, and Makoto Shimamoto, among others, were quite the bunch to deal with… (laughs) They were really rough around the edges, even among the Square event planners, and it was hard to control them. I heard from Honne (Yasuyuki Honne, current president of Monolith Soft), who was directing for the map and graphics, that Kato-san was about to build a theme park in Lahan Village. Apparently, he didn’t even talk to Honne about it and just went to the people who can get it done, and Honne found out about it and convinced him at the last second that it wouldn’t work out for the kind of game that Xenogears is. Everyone is skilled at their craft, though, so I wasn’t worried about the quality, though.
Interviewer: Looks like it was a unique group of people. (laughs)
Takahashi: It was also rough that all our graphic designers were mostly new to the job. Even Honne had just started working for Square, so he hardly had any experience with 3D or game development. So, we were training our staff as we went along with the project. Even though it was a painful process, we found good talent like Honne that has stuck with me at Monolith Soft to this day, so I’m glad we did it.
Interviewer: When did development heat up the most?
Takahashi: The rule for Square at the time was that development was a year and a half max, but Xenogears took two years and one month. So, it headed up most when we got confirmation that we would get that half-year extension. But we couldn’t make the deadline even with that, so we have to cut something. I think things were heating up most when we were deciding how to cut it. Nowadays, a two-year development for an IP like Xenogears would be considered short, and three, four years would be considered normal, so even if two years have passed, team morale won’t start to die off. But back then, when you start crossing that year-and-a-half line, I remember people started losing some motivation. We were in a real pinch trying to figure out how to make it through the next six months.
Interviewer: Did you do anything to keep morale high?
Takahashi: Now, I would be able to do something to keep everyone’s spirits up, but I just didn’t have time for that back then because we were in such a dire situation. This might be a little rude, but I think I thought a little bit that if the people that “get me” were doing fine, that’s all I needed. I just thought if I did everything I could, everyone would naturally follow me. I guess I didn’t even have the luxury to think about any of it.
THE FORTUNE THAT CAME FROM ALL THE LIMITATIONS
Interviewer: What is Xenogears to your writing career?
Takahashi: Because it was my first experience as a director, I just remember all the struggles I went through. (laughs) It was like my first hike was on Mount Everest. It was a mountain that was way too tall for me to climb, but I think that it’s also become one of my strengths. Xenogears had a lot of new staff, and we trained and formed an organization as we went along. We couldn’t have done it without all the helping hands we got, and we later go on to start Monolith Soft, and hire new staff and train them as we worked on Xenosaga. That experience we had with Square was a real plus for us.
Interviewer: What is Xenogears to you personally?
Takahashi: Where it all started; a representation of myself. A defiant game that is representative of who I am.
Interviewer: A lot of fans are celebrating the 20th anniversary on social networking sites. Xenogears seems to be a game that is remembered by many to this day.
Takahashi: I think it’s memorable because there’s something incomplete about it. Disc two was made with the absolute determination to continue it, and you can see it in the game. I think if I gave up and just cut some stuff off, I would have had nothing, and Monolith Soft probably wouldn’t even exist.
Interviewer: Please give us a final message for all the Xenogears fans that are at the concert.
Takahashi: As we approach this 20th anniversary, I’ve been stuck between thinking about how it’s been twenty years, but also that it’s only been twenty years. Either way, it is quite very moving. I think everyone has their own memories of Xenogears music that has ripened over the last twenty years, and I hope this will be an opportunity to be able to revisit some of that, and also to serve as a new memory to add.
Regarding Michan, Yasunori Mitsuda; Over the course of twenty years, he has only gotten better at what he does. This concert is a sort of new challenge or approach for him, and I want people to enjoy the culmination of his twenty years-worth of work.
Page 1 of the interview with Kunihiko Tanaka
THE MEMORIES THAT ARE AWAKENED THROUGH THE MUSIC
Interviewer: How did you first hear about the concert?
Kunihiko Tanaka: Through Mitsuda’s Twitter. I thought, “oh they’re doing it? That’s amazing!”
Interviewer: When did you start thinking about the 20th anniversary?
Tanaka: For the 19th anniversary, I had uploaded Chu-Chu art, and I had started thinking about next year already. Before getting to the 20th anniversary, though, I was struggling with artwork for Xenoblade 2. Something was chipping away at me, and I couldn’t get any work done. I couldn’t be this way for long, so I started uploading little doodles for past works I had a hand in on my blog. I was just having fun with it at the beginning, but then I thought, “I gotta draw Xenogears”, and I drew a doodle of Elly and Fei with their backs turned while listening to Mitsuda-san’s music. And before I knew it, I was crying while I was drawing it. I’m a little embarrassed by it, but I was totally bawling… (laughs)
Interviewer: You got emotional remembering how it was back then?
Tanaka: After I was done with doodling, I realized that I had left behind something way back when. The day before the 20th anniversary, I uploaded rough sketches of Xenogears from back then. I was surprised at the kind of doodles I was doing back then, thinking, “This is how I used to work!?”, because there were so many doodles. It was hard to find rough sketches that were worth the effort of uploading. I want to beg my past self to teach me the fun I used to have. No, not teach… I think I’m more grateful that there remains a game that reminds me of that joy.
Interviewer: Like how your desk was inside the development studio?
Tanaka: I was fearless back then. (laughs) It wasn’t that I had confidence or anything, I was just extremely naïve. I went to Square and borrowed a section of the studio and worked… I might have been considered a nuisance. (laughs)
Interviewer: How was it like working with all the staff in one room?
Tanaka: At first, I was sitting with Takahashi-san while I do my work. Although that’s just a technicality, because it was a looooooong desk, and I sat in one corner, and he sat in the other. (laughs) As you would expect, you get a lot of inspiration being so close to the team, so it was a lot of fun. Like the event planner Masato Kato, everyone had so much passion and tried to put as much content as they could into the game. I think it was hard for Takahashi-san to control that, but Takahashi-san competed with everyone else and tried to put in as much as he could of what he wanted, too.
Interviewer: Did you know Takahashi-san prior to Xenogears?
Tanaka: We knew each other from the Nihon Falcom days. When I became a freelancer and Takahashi-san had moved to Square, he asked me if I could draw for Live A Live. The game has a lot of different worlds, and I drew with that in mind, but none of my artwork was used. In the final product, there are different settings that are written by different writers, so I thought the way I went about it was right from a game design perspective as well.
Interviewer: Any specific memories you have of Xenogears development?
Tanaka: When I doodled in the development studio, I would often get a doodle by Takahashi-san right next to it. (laughs) I would look later and think, “hey, something’s different…” I think he sometimes doodled on my doodles, too. (laughs)
HOW THE CHARACTERS CAME TO BE
Interviewer: How did the characters of Xenogears come about?
Tanaka: I started with Fei and Elly and worked on characters with the highest priority. Of course, Takahashi-san had specific requests for the art direction. There were mini art contests at Square within the company, so sometimes I would absorb what other people did and use some of their ideas. There are designs I worked from scratch, but there were indeed some designs done by other people within Square that I thought was good. While it is in my style, Bart, Margie, and Billy were all designs that I felt like would be wasted if I had altered it, so I tried to leave as much as I could of the original art. Billy especially is mostly unchanged. It’s a very delicate and wonderful design.
Interviewer: Can we get some information on each of the designs? Let’s start with Fei.
Tanaka: There was a request for Fei to be a martial artist, so that’s where the design comes from. I thought he should have something that stands out about his design because he’s the protagonist, so I exaggerated the front part of his hair a bit.
Page 2 of the interview with Kunihiko Tanaka
Interviewer: Clothing in all, it has a very oriental feel.
Tanaka: There ’s good variety in all the character designs, so I’m glad Fei ended up being able to stand out in all of that. I thought Fei would be someone who would be meditating at a temple at first, but there were some details that Takahashi-san decided to change, and so we actually couldn’t change the design for Fei in time. (laughs) I think the only change between the rough sketch and the finished design is that he was wearing sandals at first. It was an open-toe sandal, but Takahashi-san said, “He’s going to have a hard time pushing the pedals on his Gear”, so I hid the tip of his toe. (laughs)
Interviewer: Was there anything you considered while trying to differentiate between Fei and his alter-ego, Id?
Tanaka: I was drawing it as a completely different face first, but I was asked that the design at least have some resemblance to the original face, so I designed that with that in mind. While maintaining a hint of Fei, I focused on the kind of colors I used so it wouldn’t be immediately obvious who Id actually was. At first, I had an idea in my head of Id having flames in both of his palms, so I don’t know if it’s because of graphical limitations to animate the fire, but it’s not in the game. I thought it was cool.
Interviewer: How about the heroine, Elly?
Tanaka: As I was designing Elly, I decided to depart from my usual style a bit. I don’t remember if it was Takahashi-san or me that said it, but my style didn’t fit the atmosphere of the game. We wanted designs that could withstand a hardcore game. I had barely actually studied art before, so it was hard to change things like body composition. I looked at pictures and just studied and practiced over and over. I think it turned out well in the end.
Interviewer: The doodle titled “practice run” in Perfect Works looks a lot like your usual style, very cute. (Note: Not sure which he is talking about, but I assume he is talking about the art that’s on this page)
Tanaka: Yes, that was my default art style back then. It screams the 90’s. For hair, Takahashi-san wanted it very long. She was first wearing a coarse, black jacket. But Takahashi-san wanted something like a race queen, and that’s when the design started to change. She wore something that showed her curves. For the colors, I went with white, as that matches Solaris well. Takahashi-san and I both really like Star Wars. If I was asked who I would be in the Star Wars universe, I would say Storm Troopers. That’s how much I like the black and white mechanical design that it has. So I designed Elly’s military uniform with that in mind.
Interviewer: And Citan?
Tanaka: It was very easy to design him. The only difference between the final design and rough sketches is that he’s a bit more shady-looking. (laughs)
Interviewer: Is there anything unique regarding his design?
Tanaka: This is the same for all my designs, but like how I tried to get Elly to have a Storm Trooper design, I tried to incorporate something that I thought would have been cool into the design. For Citan, that’s the glasses. Like the mech Scopedog from Armored Trooper VOTOMS, I thought it would be cool if he had three monocles, and I thought it would interesting if I designed the shoes the way I did.
Interviewer: Please tell me about Bart.
Tanaka: The original art drawn by another Square employee was really good, and I thought there would be nothing better than this. So, I just redrew that in my style. What I wanted to do with Bart was have a jacket that was red on the outside but blue on the inside. I wanted to use a warm and cool color to distinguish each other. It’s not really a color representative of him or anything.
Interviewer: I think of blonde hair and red when I think Bart.
Tanaka: Yes. But I remember thinking that if we only used a “character color”, you would end up with a blob that is less memorable, so I used some different colors.
Interviewer: And Rico?
Tanaka: Another character that was easy to design. Not much changed from the original art. A human beast.
Interviewer: regarding human beasts, what exactly were you considering as you designed it?
Tanaka: Blanka from Street Fighter II. Takahashi-san is a huge fan of the fighting genre, and in the Falcom days he would often bring the arcade system board for Street Fighter II and play all night. I think from those memories, I just have an image of human beasts= Blanka. By the way, Takahashi-san was super strong, so I could never beat him. (laughs)
Interviewer: And Rico has the choker as per the story?
Tanaka: Yes. There’s a movie called Wedlock, a prison break movie set in the near future… In that movie, prisoners wear a choker, and it has a bomb in it. When I asked Takahashi-san, “Wedlock?”, he responded, “I’m surprised you knew!” Rico has other chokers on his arms, and the story for that is that he has the chokers of the people he defeated. I like metal parts, so I designed with a focus on that. The leather jacket with metal parts might have had some influence from Michael Jackson’s “Bad”.
Interviewer: Tell me about Chu-Chu, Xenogears’ mascot character.
Tanaka: I didn’t know what to do with Chu-Chu, so I drew a lot of patterns. As I was drawing, my designs started looking more and more like Ewoks from Star Wars.
Page 3 of the interview with Kunihiko Tanaka
I had a pet hamster at the time too, so I thought it would be interesting to have a design that combines hamsters and Ewoks. I thought the black part of her feet, legs, and the inside of her ears might be a little scary at first, but I think the pink and white alleviated that. I didn’t think Chu-Chu would get that big in the game… (laughs)
Interviewer: So, you didn’t know that Chu-Chu was going to get big when you were designing it. What did you think when you first saw it?
Tanaka: I was shown it during development and thought, “Wow, she gets this big!” Even her bag gets bigger. (laughs) I personally think the design turned out really cute. I want a plushie. Please make merchandise! (laughs)
Interviewer: Tell me about Maria.
Tanaka: To be upfront, he’s a female version of Daisaku Kusama. (Note: the Main character of a tokusatsu series called Giant Robo. It was localized in the US as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot, and the main character’s name in the localization is Johnny Sokko.) In Perfect Works, Takahashi-san says the curly hair and fluffy dress are my fetishes, but… I feel like I’m being blamed for something I shouldn’t be. (laughs)
Interviewer: Her curly hair is very unique.
Tanaka: Maria had a design that was done by another staff member as well, but I decided to add the curly hair to make her stand out more. To contrast from the royalty look, I gave her pilot goggles… But I guess she never even boards a Gear because she just stands on top of it. (laughs) Looking closely, I guess it is my fetishes, sorry. (laughs)
Interviewer: Seibzehn means 17 in German. Why did you give it that name?
Tanaka: There’s a tokusatsu series called Daitetsujin 17, and that’s where it comes from. The giant robot 17 has an attack called Graviton, and I remember asking for Seibzehn to have an attack called with the same name as a reference to it.
Interviewer: How about Billy?
Tanaka: Mostly unaltered from the original concept art, done by another staff member. I tried doing something that went in the opposite direction, but it didn’t really ring with me. So, I thought this was best left as is, and that’s what I did.
Interviewer: The combination of a priest with a gun is rather interesting.
Tanaka: I didn’t know much about guns, so I bought modelguns and used that as a reference. I guess I don’t have much to say, because most of the design isn’t by me.
Interviewer: Tell me about Emeralda.
Tanaka: I was requested to design a character like Key from Key the Metal Idol. Key the Metal Idol was important to me, so I was happy about it. I designed her thinking she was going to be like Key and not be very emotive, but when I saw her in the game I was a bit surprised at how she was very emotive, saying the name Kim over and over. I thought it was a bit different from what I had imagined her to be.
Interviewer: Were you aware that Emeralda would grow up from when you were first requested to design her?
Tanaka: Yes. I was thinking to myself, “What am I gonna do about her outfit? Does she even change clothes?”, but I thought she wasn’t the type of character to do that. So I designed her outfit in a way so that it would be fine if she became bigger. I designed it thinking she must be in an environment where there are only adult clothes laying around, and she just picked out what she liked out of that. She has big metal shoulder pads, but Emeralda herself is heavy so I thought it was alright and put it on her.
Interviewer: And Margie?
Tanaka: She was initially supposed to be a playable character, so she has a lot of weapons in her clothes. She ended up not being a playable character… but I still wish she had joined the party to this day. But she’s not going to be able to use bazookas and hand grenades. It was in one of her doodles, though. (laughs)
Interviewer: Was Myyah designed to be a contrast from Elly?
Tanaka: Yes. Myyah appears in the intro, so she was designed very early on, but I didn’t design the form she appears in with Ramsus until much later. I think of Maetel from Galaxy Express 999 when I think of a manga character for a beautiful woman. And I think you can see that in Elly and Myyah.
Interviewer: You can see a lot of rough sketches for her.
Tanaka: I had to draw nudes, so she was good practice for getting used to the Xenogears art style. It was tough, but it was a blast getting better and better at it. I was young so I could absorb all of that experience up like a sponge.
Page 4 of the interview with Kunihiko Tanaka
Interviewer: It looks like you had a hard time with Grahf. What were you having difficulties with?
Tanaka: I was asked for him to look like Darth Vader from Star Wars, but I didn’t even know how to start off. There was something another staff member had come up with, so I was trying to come up with something working off of that, but I really wanted something that could make it stand out. So, I decided to elongate the head. I liked Batman at the time, so although you can’t see it at all in the game, I had an idea that he would have bats come out from his chest when he took off his cape. I can say the same for Id, but it’s really difficult to come up with a three-dimensional design. But once things start coming together, you start having fun drawing in so many details… forgetting that you’re going to have to draw it a few more times. (laughs)
Interviewer: Tell me about Fei’s dad, Khan.
Tanaka: He’s Fei’s dad, so I just drew him as if Fei grew older. Another staff member did the original concept art, but I think he went the same route too. I like that back-and-forth.
Interviewer: And Karellen?
Tanaka: The request was, “someone who had lived very long, and was very handsome”, but I wasn’t really good at drawing handsome young men, so I remember feeling nervous about what to do. They don’t look alike, but I designed him with Michael Jackson in mind. But I think the pupil was influenced heavily by his.
Interviewer: How about the four Elements?
Tanaka: They’re a goofy bunch in the game, so I was designing them in a cheery way, but the development studio was very tense then. So, there were a lot more half-assed rough sketches… I was drawing thinking I can do the face now, and I’ll worry about the body later. At the time, I was young enough to be able to get by with that kind of attitude.
Interviewer: Their hair and their overall form are very unique.
Tanaka: I agree. I remember focusing on not having any overlap between the designs. They would end up being in-game sprites, so I really focused on making sure it was easy to tell who’s who just by the form. Same goes for the colors. Looking back now, I feel a bit bad for Tolone, with the bolts on her face just screaming, “I’m a robot!” I have fond memories of Seraphita. She’s influenced heavily by Roomi from Galaxy Fight: Universal Warriors, and I combined that with a pet rabbit I owned at the time. The Elements all have similar chest pieces and sleeves, but I designed the pattern on the inside of their sleeves differently for all of them.
THE JOY OF BEING A PIECE OF THE GAME
Interviewer: Tell us your impression of Mitsuda-san.
Tanaka: I’ve never actually seen Mitsuda-san. If I get to see him at the concert, I would like to say hi. (laughs) Maybe I saw him at one of the meetings, though. Maybe we passed each other by in a hallway. Regarding the music, I did hear it in the sense that it was playing in the development version of the game, but I didn’t really listen to it until the game came out. Listening to the Xenogears soundtrack made me interested in Irish and Celtic music, and I would go on to listen to CDs by Enya, Iona, and The Corrs.
Interviewer: What kind of image do you have regarding the game’s soundtrack?
Tanaka: I feel like the game and the music are very close. When I listen to the tracks, I remember various scenes of the game. When I was little, our on-hold song for the home telephone was a music box version of Greensleeves. That tune is very nostalgic to me, and I when I hear Faraway Promise, I feel the same way I do when I listen to Greensleeves now; a feeling of yearning. I notice myself playing it in my head sometimes.
Interviewer: What is Xenogears to you?
Tanaka: A very precious game that gave me the opportunity to be known by many people. It is an honor to have been a part of a game that has been loved by fans for so long, and I feel like I was able to be a part because of various connections I had. My existence is only a tiny piece in the massive epic that is Xenogears, but I am proud of being a part of it.
Interviewer: Send us off with a message to those attending a concert.
Tanaka: I think everyone is looking forward to how their favorite tunes are going to be arranged for the concert. I love “Small Two of Pieces” and am very much looking forward to hearing it live. I might cry remembering the past again. (laughs) I hope you all can enjoy it too.
And Mitsuda-san, please keep letting us listen to your music that reflects the ever-changing human soul! Congratulations on the 20th-anniversary concert!
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