Hitoshi Sakimoto

Can someone tell me what is good about this man, or any of the things he has done.

He is an absolutely TERRIBLE composer. He has no idea of what chord progressions incite emotions, or when to use these emotions, or even what emotion a given piece needs to have. He fails completely in his attempts to write incidental music (he must not have gotten the memo that incidental music usually needs to... you know, go along with the incidents occuring on-screen...) Probably the worst thing about him is that every song he writes sounds exactly the same. I could post a random work of his and most people who have played his games would not even be able to recognize which game it's from, let alone what track it is.

Honestly, I'm trying so hard to like FFXII right now, and he's really, really making it hard for me. I cannot go anywhere without the weight of his terrible music weighing down on my soul.

And yet, I have seen people praise him - so can someone explain to me where the merit is in his unmitigated dreck?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Kanji, please listen to this.

It is an untagged, unnamed track I selected from Final Fantasy XII. It is the background music for one of the locations in the game. Now, without looking it up, try to describe for me what location this song is from. I will paypal you a dollar if you can guess it correctly without cheating.

Quote:

Surely he has a lot of tracks that sound similar, but what composer doesn't?

Naoshi Mizuta. Every track he wrote for Final Fantasy XI, and even for it's first expansion (I haven't listened to the others) sounds uniquely different without being completely inappropriate (i.e. there's no techno battle themes or anything like the stuff Uematsu used to pull. Not that I have anything against that, Uematsu is one of my favorites, I'm just saying.) The only songs that sounded even remotely similar were the various battle themes, and yet even they were distinctly differentiated by things like melody and tempo. The only real similarity would be instrumentation.

With regards to the two songs you fellas posted, I liked Mad Buffoon (a lot actually,) but I found the other to be pretty mediocre. It's certainly different, from FFXII but I definitely disagree as to how catchy you found it. But these were both, I'm pretty sure, vastly different types of games. My major gripe with Sakimoto is... well, I'm pretty sure this is his thought process.

"This game has swords and shields?! ZOMG! MUST OVERUSE SYNTH STRING PATCHES AND REPEAT NONSENSICAL CHORD PATTERNS THAT EVOKE NO EMOTION!!"

Really. I have no doubts that he's made great music. But how can someone listen to Final Fantasy X, with its vibrant Okinawa-inspired melodies that reflected a world full of life and sorrow, Final Fantasy XI with its songs that reflected a world filled with different types of environments to see, and then go to Final Fantasy XII and hear music that sounds so non-distinct and be satisfied with it?

Also, niki, I've been a musician for several years, and I've heard quite a lot of music. I may not necessarily be a professor at a major conservatory of music, but I can tell when something is uninspired garbage.

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Well I disagree about Naoshi Mizuta, I loved his score for FFXI but admittedly that is all I have heard from him. However, certainly you agree, if you have listened extensively to FFXI, that each track was distinctly different from the others, no matter how flawed you found them to be?

Edit: I didn't mean to post a "hate" thread. I really want to know what people find intriguing about this man. I successfully found one song by him that I actually have not stopped listening to yet (Mad Buffoon). I still think his FFXII score is trash, and I'm still dying to see how someone could defend it. Care to take a shot?

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I fear I've made a fool of myself. In an unfortunate accident, I recently deleted all the FF OSTs I had collected on my computer, so I don't actually have the tracklist of FFXI on hand, and I completely forgot that FFXI was done by more than one artist. I did listen to FFXI a lot, but I didn't pay much mind to which composer wrote which song, since I liked them all quite so much. I'll get back to you on this one when I'm a little better informed about it.

Edit: I'm better informed now. I have a tracklist of the game now, and I found that many of the tracks I liked were by Mizuta, with only a handful of them being from Uematsu or Tanioka (Ronfaure, Gustaberg, Metalworks, Airship.) I don't understand how you could call a song predictable if it isn't a repeat of another tune (which is something they strayed away from in FFXI after using it extensively in previous FF's.) I do find some of Mizuta's pieces to be flawed; for example Heaven's Tower is essentially one big long Bb chord (thanks Sakimoto), Sauromugue Champaign is a great piece but felt really stretched for length, being 9 minutes or something in that range, although it would've made a great 4 minute piece with fewer repeated measures, and there are other pieces that are just boring and unmemorable. But he had several strong tracks, too. How can you tell me you found The Federation of Windurst lifeless or bland? What about Selbina? Though the Kingdom of San D'Oria might fall under "predictable" (what RPG doesn't have a regal castle song?) what other faults could you hold against it?

tl;dr: I don't really see how you can accuse Mizuta of any of the things for which I complained about Sakimoto. Yeah, he laid a few eggs, but every composer does that. However, there are one or two tracks in FFXII that stick out as distinctly different from the rest of the game. With Sakimoto, bland and boring seems to be the rule, not the exception.

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Originally Posted by Crash Landon

In studying various Sakimoto tracks, I've noticed that he has two basic approaches: either place emphasis upon a strong melody; or place emphasis upon a strong mood. I tend to enjoy the "strong melody" work he does a lot more, as he's usually able to hold back on overwhelming listeners with the "wall of sound". I'm a big fan of layered music but Sakimoto can pile it on rather thick.

That's probably the best assessment of him I've ever seen. The biggest problem with it (and I'm going to keep using FFXII as it is the most prominent of his works that I've played) is that there's sooooo many of his "mood" tracks, and I find that they never convey one mood in particular. Part of it, I think, is because of his "wall of sound" technique as you said. His moods, often, are lost on me. And while many of you say things like "it takes repeated hearings to be appreciated," I find that for example scoring a major plot scene witih a "takes repeated hearings" song misses the entire point, because if you need to watch the scene 3 times to appreciate it, then it failed to be an effective scene.

Of his works, I've played Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (only a little, though,) and FFXII. I sadly have not played FFT which you all seem to praise quite highly so I'll have to give that a listen sometime. Of what I've played, FFXII seems far and away the best, although it seems sooo derivative from his Vagrant Story score that it's not even funny. The two major differences I picked up are first, there aren't as many "wow, this is a cave, so here's a quarter note chord, and then 3 measures of rest, and then another quarter note" selections, and that he seems to have backed off substantially on his wall-of-sound bit.

A few more points I wanna discuss about FFXII - this is a game where you do a loooooot of grinding. And even when you're not grinding, each dungeon or outdoor area takes seriously like 2 hours to get through. Really now, after listening for one song for two hours, if it hasn't made an effect on you, then it's a failure. That's more than enough repeated hearing, I'd say. Looking at a track list from the game, I'd say I'm about halfway through the 3rd disc, and I can recall only a handful of tracks (and of those, I can think of only one or two I can sing or describe beyond "oh, that's the one where we're on a snowy mountain, so there's a piano sounding all sad and stuff.") And this is keeping in mind many of the tracks are named after their respective in-game locations. I haven't gotten to some of the tracks you've all named, so I'll reserve my final judgment for when I've finished the game.

Also, I mentioned repeated viewings of in-game cutscenes. This is actually something I did with many of the scenes in the game (just because the voice acting and animation is simply impeccable, and many of these scenes made me want to see them again.) And... I find that those are the only things that stick with me. Everyone can remember the music that played when Darth Vader cut Luke's arm off, or even when Sephiroth stabbed Aeris. Why is it that when

Spoiler:

Gabranth was forced to kill Drace, or even better (and from the same scene) when Vayne took full control of the empire,

all Sakimoto had to say was a really long synth string note? I want to say it wasn't the same note for that full 10-20 second shot with the stabbing, but after watching the scene 3 times, I honestly cannot remember if he even changed the note/chord. 3 times, by the way.

Originally Posted by PiccoloNamek

The Dalmasca Estersand. An absolutely beautiful and emotionally moving track.

I think you kind of missed the point - I didn't want him to name the track, just to describe the emotion to me. I don't really understand "emotionally moving," but it is a good piece, and one of the few that I remember well from the game. (Ironically, it's also one of the places I spent the least time in.) It certainly evokes a sense of adventure, and excitement.

The problem with this, is that it plays in a desert. What is exciting about a desert? What is adventurous about it? On that token alone, it's a confusing selection and seems like a poor decision on his part. But let's compare it with one of the other pieces you mentioned, Giza Plains. Giza pretty much from the get go attempts to create a feeling of uncertainty, of unknown danger (which he does with syncopated string ensemble patches... I don't really see how that works at all, but this post is running a little long so I'll save that for later) The problem with this is that we're talking about, essentially, a savannah. The greatest danger is that there's no water. The only uncertainty is "what's gonna happen when it rains." Certainly the two tracks would be better used had they taken each other's place. While you could argue he meant to go with the emotion of the character, that's not really true - going to the Estersand was something of a chore for Vaan, and it wasn't until he went to Giza that he felt excited and adventurous (because he was going to get a chance to stick it to the Empire.)

Also, for the record, I'm not a Naoshi Mizuta fanboy by any means. I've not listened to any of his work outside of FFXI (although now that Megaman and Bass was mentioned I can remember I didn't like that soundtrack in the least.) I mentioned him only because he composed most of the tracks for the game that directly preceded FFXII. And regardless of the level of musical value or merit of depth of his tracks, they were catchy, matched the locales of the game, and easily hummable. All qualities that are important in an MMORPG, where you could spend upwards of 10 hours in one zone. Being that FFXII is essentially a single player MMORPG, and has many of the same spend-10-hours-here qualities, it's baffling that they chose someone who failed quite so badly at accounting for that.

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Taisai

What tracks from FFX do really have Okinawa-inspired melodies or are composed on the pentatonic scale of the land?

It's pretty well-documented that throughout the composition of FFX, the goal was to create a sound reminiscent of the Okinawan style, perhaps the greatest example of which would be the vocal song performed by an Okinawan woman. It probably wasn't correct for me to say the melodies were inspired by Okinawa, rather than the style, I think that was more of a shitty attempt at artistic English on my part.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Danny D

some of the comments here may only further fuel the conviction of certain academics that game music is nothing but fluff, kids stuff, and plagiarized music from people like Ravel or other composers of whom we'd be better off studying. If it fails amongst the fans, it will fail through the eyes of the academics, and we will never see great game music scoring courses come to fruition, for the sake of those who wish to seek a career in game scoring, or find it artful enough for personal expression.

I... really don't see your point. If you want to write game music... I don't see the process being much more complicated than the following:

Step 1 - Get degree in music composition
Step 2 - Submit resume to game company

In fact, from what I read, you've already completed step 1. What does it matter what those other putzes at your school think?

Even in an alternate universe where you changed the face of academia and inspired professors to teach game music composition courses, it would be quite fruitless. There are like a million game design/programming courses offered at every nowheresville school on the planet now, and not a damn one of them is actually respected by game developers or publishers - what makes you think a VGM composition degree would be any different?

Additional Spam:

Originally Posted by Mr. Maul

Sakimoto is one of many of today's prominent VGM composers that have got to the top partly due to chance circumstances. However, the same applies to Nobuo Uematsu...

Actually, technically speaking, it doesn't really apply to Nobuo. He got his credit because he did a fantastic job pushing what VGM could be with the 5-channel NES sound chip. 3 times. He didn't get to where he is because he worked with Squaresoft; Squaresoft was going to go bankrupt if Final Fantasy failed.

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Originally Posted by Double D

I agree when you say there are many makeshift game development courses out there, but this is NYU were talking about here,

Worcester Polytechnic Institute has a major in Interactive Media and Game Development. WPI happens to be the second best engineering school in Massachusetts (probably in New England, and most of the United States if you exclude schools like Caltech and Rochester), second only to MIT if I remember correctly. I haven't heard of their program being any more successful than any of the every-schools.

I'll give your work a listen, but not at the moment because I am crippled with a sickness that seems to be ending the entire Boston area one person at a time, and so my judgment is probably not extremely good at the moment.

For the record - try to trim down the length of your posts. I don't really have the patience to read them word for word, and given how few people responded directly to you, I doubt many of the others did. I promise I'll listen to your music, though.

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