The Last Remnant Preview

VideoGamer.com: How do you decide what kind of music to have in the various parts of the game? Do you compose each area's music, like a track, or do you compose an overall soundtrack then fit it in where it feels best?

Sekito-san: I did create the piece for each area, the dungeons or cities.

Yamanaka-san: When you're making music for a dungeon you really want to have a certain tension in there, so you're going through and you're playing and you feel the tension, and maybe a little bit of fear as you get into situations. You don't want to have too many different musical themes so that you do get that feeling of unity, that you're in the same game and the same world and same place. I wanted to simplify the music so that it doesn't have too many sounds.

VideoGamer.com: In film the soundtrack is static but in games it can be dynamic and respond to what's happening on screen. Does that require a different approach in the composition and which do you prefer?

Sekito-san: For the event scenes, the cut scenes are more or less like a movie, so they're scored more or less in the same way. One thing about the battle music is that depending on how you are doing in the battle the battle music will change. So if you are doing really well and everybody is like, 'yeah!' the song will change to something that's pretty much like, 'yeah come on you can get them!'. But if you're doing really poorly and everybody is not doing so well the music changes to something more tense and kind of like, 'oh oh, look out!'. But the approach to films and games aren't so different. They just change depending on the scene.

VideoGamer.com: During the process of taking the music and putting it onto a DVD, is it compressed? Does it lose quality? Does that have to be taken into account when creating it?

Mikoshiba-san: In general when we make the music we make it at CD quality, and so it does get compressed a little bit to put it onto the DVD. But we don't necessarily do something thinking that it will be compressed, or we don't need to use a sound, because we are releasing it on CD as well, we just create it at CD quality. But for voice and sound effects it's completely different. We're constantly keeping in mind that those sounds will be compressed, so we won't target CD quality.

VideoGamer.com: Traditionally JRPGs would normally come out in the West after they are released in Japan, but with The Last Remnant it's coming out on the same day in all territories. How much of a challenge was it to get all of the voice over work for all languages done in time?

Isogawa-san: We did the English voice recording first, so it made it difficult for the Japanese side of things. Things like having the ad libs in the script, in the Japanese it's OK just to say 'ad lib', but for the English script we needed to write down exactly screams or mumbles or whatever, and write that out and so figuring out, 'oh my gosh, we're missing all this stuff!' and putting all of that together, that took a while!

VideoGamer.com: What do you look for when casting Japanese voice actors?

Isogawa-san: When we were casting for this game it wasn't one person making the decisions. We actually got a bunch of people together, the character designer, the scenario writer, the director and others and we all threw out this is what we're thinking for the character so this is who we think would be a good idea, and put that all together. It worked out because everyone seemed to have more or less the same idea for the characters so we were able to get things done pretty smoothly. So we weren't actually looking for named actors.

VideoGamer.com: How do Western voice actors differ from Japanese voice actors?

Isogawa-san: The Japanese version is a little bit more towards a Japanese taste. There will be differences in nuances of certain lines.

VideoGamer.com: Do you ever play the Western version of your games? One of the most important things from a Western fan point of view is the quality of the voice acting. What do you think of it?

Isogawa-san: For this game we matched the facial movements, the lip movements and everything to the English, so obviously everyone for a while listened to the English voices. Because the mouths are done to match that the quality is maybe a little bit higher in general. The Japanese was lip matching to the English mouth movements, a reverse of what usually happens in games. As for thoughts on the actual performance and line delivery, I think it's pretty good!