The Last Guardian director discusses soundtrack

The latest in IGN‘s exclusive The Last Guardian coverage sees director Fumito Ueda discuss the game’s musical score.

If you missed it, Ueda yesterday talked about the game’s design, and before that its development period, transition to PlayStation 4, and more. On Thursday, we got our first new set of screenshots since E3 2015.

The Last Guardian is due out for PlayStation 4 in 2016.

Get the interview and Gematsu-provided transcript below.

“The score for The Last Guardian is composed by a composer that lives in Los Angeles. His name is Mr. Takeshi Furukawa, and I have not worked with him in the past before, but in creating The Last Guardian, we picked up some key words, some screenshots and the title of the game, and we held a competition and asked people to create a song based on the material that we had, and I felt like Mr. Furukawa’s music matched the direction of my image the most.

“At the very beginning, we held a meeting on the direction of the music and it was the same for Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, but we wanted the game music to not be really like game music, and we told him that we wanted something that wasn’t too game-like and too held down by the restrictions of it being a game. However, he was a composer of music for movies, but in movies, the music alone expresses emotion sometimes, but that would make the music too strong in games, so in that respect we asked him to tone it down a bit. The sound was recorded in London in Air Studios, and we used the London Symphony Orchestra. I am very satisfied with the results that have come out.

“As for the frequency of using music, I think it’s the same as Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. I often get the comment that Ico and Shadow of the Colossus use music sparingly, but I actually don’t feel that way. When you compare it to other visual media, like movies or animations, I think that the amount of music used is not that different, and it’s actually rather natural, and I try to create a balance that is like that. However, one thing I can say is that in movies you have a protagonist that the director has full control over, so it’s okay to have emotions be reflected in the music. However in video games players are controlling the character, so there’s a high possibility that you have some kind of discrepancy in the emotions that the player feels, so I’m not really sure whether it’s okay to express emotions a lot in games, and because I have that kind of concern, I try to hold down on the emotional aspect. But compared to other video games, I think we do have very cinematic expressions.

“As for the music of The Last Guardian, it’s the same as Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, but we don’t try to have it too closely linked to the game. We try to have the music appeal to a wider audience. The existence of Trico and the world that is in [The Last Guardian] is expressed through the visuals – it has kind of an ethnic taste to it. So in terms of the music, we try to hold it down a bit and try not to make it too strange or too unique. I think compared to the other two titles it’s more of a traditional kind of game music, whereas the visuals are very unique. We try to create a good balance of those two.”