Hiroki Kikuta :: Biography

Note: This biography was written exclusively for Square Enix Music Online by Chris. The act of using it without advance written permission is regarded as a copyright infringement. It was last updated on September 1, 2006.

Born on August 29, 1962 in Aichi, Japan, Hiroki Kikuta is an influential composer and game producer. Demonstrating multifaceted interests, considerable talent, and a lot of ambition as youngster, he expressed an interest in music after he heard the work of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer at the age of ten. Amazed by the quality of such music, learning that Keith Emerson used a MOOG Synthesiser initiated his interest in working with digital media. Two years later, influenced by the folk and blues movement that had emerged in Japan from America, he attempted to compose his first song for acoustic guitar and vocals. While Kikuta no longer considers this creation to be 'music', he looks back at this experience fondly, as it provided a chance for him to channel his creativity. Considering Kikuta's lack of vocal ability ultimately meant that he couldn't be the professional singer he aspired to be, the availability of new digital technology provided Kikuta with new opportunities, and, after obtaining his YAMAHA SY-77 synthesizer/sequencer, composing became one of his biggest passions. Also an intellectual, Kikuta studied for a three-year degree in Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Kansai in Osaka, graduating in 1984. Describing this as an exciting experience, given it emphasised the fundamental relationship between feeling, thinking, and doing, this education developed his musical inspiration, moulded him as a key voice for the criticism of traditional RPGs and development of more mature projects, and gave him the maturity to express deep philosophical thoughts in an often enlightening way.

Entirely self-taught, Kikuta cites listening to a great quantity of music from a wide range of styles as the principle force for the development of his musical sensitivity, though later referenced books to aid the development of the technical and harmonic sophistication of his works. Stylistically distinct and complex, Kikuta's more mature compositions are characterised by heavy reliance on synthetic instruments, experimental melodies and harmonies, deliberately ambiguous chord progressions, the absence of a firm key signature, and reliance upon simple yet mature melodies. British rock musicians such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd, together with various folk, ethnic, country, pop, disco, jazz, and new age artists all influenced his eclectic style, though film scores from Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, and various Japanese composers were perhaps most important; the great emotional capacity of Katsuhisa Hattori's and the late Akira Ifukube's scores to the Godzilla films demonstrated the power of musical elements of a film synchronising exactly with the visual elements. Indeed, colour is massively important to Kikuta's compositions, as his vision is what inspires most of his compositions, a product of his vast imagination, which developed most from travelling to many places in the world; he directly relates his experiences visiting Hawaii and Fiji as a principle source for his earliest Square works. A firm advocate of experiencing as much as possible, both visually and musically, he describes it as a way to enrich your life and is essential experience for any composer for visual media. It was this relationship between Kikuta's visual inspiration and musical expression that was to be the key to the success of his earliest works.

Kikuta's initial works were as a cartoonist, where he adopted the pseudonym; he was responsible for the manga Raven and contributed an article in the anthology The Ghost in Machine Head 2. His earliest soundtracks were for the 1990 TV animations The Adventure of Robin Hood and The Legend of Snow White. Feeling the need for reliable employment and the chance to musically experiment without being held back by traditionalists and rigid specifications, Kikuta looked to the developing field of video games to do this. His initial big break came in 1991 when he was interviewed for a role at Square by Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito; impressing them with samples of his work and his discussions of Progressive Rock music and the famous guitarist Allan Holdsworth, his application was obviously successful. Considering this the start of his career, at the age of 27 he enjoyed working at the close-knit community at the Tokyo studio, initially creating sound effects for the SNES' Romancing SaGa in 1992, working day and night, creating a lot of novelty sounds with the help of a few people on the graphics team. His true big break came later that year with the score for Secret of Mana, known as Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan, which ranks just behind Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger as Square's most popular SNES RPG. This, along with the three disc successor score to the Seiken Densetsu 3, a game that was never released outside Japan to much controversy, saw the birth of the Hiroki Kikuta style. Both scores were massively influential and popular, noted for the way they provided such a captivated artistic experience through simple yet inspired composition and emphasis upon mature melodies, standing out firmly for their time against the often hackneyed and derivative RPG scores being made.

The considerable popularity of Kikuta's Seiken Densetsu works led to his involvement in two arranged projects. Perhaps most remarkable of these was the Secret of Mana + image album, an arranged album for Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 that was easily the most experimental work to have come out of the Square music team at that time. Released in October 1993, two years prior to the actual official release of the Original Sound Versions, the album opened with an atmospheric rendition of "Angel's Fear" before incorporating a wide variety of other popular themes into a single 50 minute track. With seamless transitions, reliance on synth use, and use of various sound effects from both nature and technology, the album reflects Kikuta's progressive rock roots with ELP and his favourite band Pink Floyd, whose album Wish You Were Here reportedly directly influenced the project. The score has been met with both criticism and alienation, partly the result of most Seiken Densetsu fans not being familiar or appreciative of progressive styles and also the result of a 50 minute track being difficult to navigate through, though many fans view it as one of Kikuta's most valued contributions to game music's diversity. As well as this, Kikuta was involved in the Game Music Concert series; charming orchestrations of Secret of Mana's "Angel's Fear" and Seiken Densetsu 3's "Meridian Child" appeared in 1993's Game Music Concert 3 and 1995's Game Music Concert 5 respectively. The fact his music appeared alongside classic themes the Dragon Quest, Nobunaga's Ambition, Final Fantasy, and The Legend of Zelda series is a firm testament to Kikuta's popularity across Japan.

Having already demonstrated more experimental tendencies than most other Square employees, many Kikuta fans regard his final album for the company, 1998's Soukaigi Original Soundtrack, to be his most breathtaking and accessible innovation. Accompaying an ambitious Japan-only action-RPG that blended aspects of many other games together while standing in a genre of its own, Kikuta's score reflected the diversity and intended profoundness of the project by utilising live instruments in an inspired way. Manipulating symphonic forces principally, Kikuta cut any clichés by making the music firmly his own, referencing aspects of his Seiken Densetsu works yet with more sophistication and an often melancholic mood. In conjunction with progressive rock battle themes, a variety of ethnic influences, direct inspiration from the Finnish band Värttinä, and references to modern dance music movements such as trip-hop, Kikuta created a symphonic fusion unparalleled for its time and a highly regarded artistic masterwork, topped off by one of the earliest inclusions of a vocal ballad in a Square game, "Lovely Strains," sung by Kotomi Kyouno. The Soukaigi project wasn't just a turning point in the development of video game music, however, as its wider failure, due to its designers' lack of comprehensive insight and a integrative interpretation, not only produced what Kikuta considered a potentially inspiring game with major structural defects, but was a notable example of his wider dissatisfaction with the stangnation, juvenility, and disjointedness of Square's RPGs as a whole. An innovator who had constantly been hindered by his colleagues' traditionalist and thoughtless approaches to games and philosophies in life, Kikuta departed Square shortly after the Soukaigi project to continue production of a new project.

While still working at Square, Kikuta created the company Sacnoth in 1997, assuming the position of President and Chief Executive Officer, aided by funding from investor SNK. Intending to create a magnum opus, he released the PlayStation horror RPG Koudelka in 1999, intending it to revolutionise the RPG world by providing a mature, accessible, and unique visual and gaming experience set in the Welsh Nemeton Monastery in 1989. Kikuta was the concept designer, game planner, scenario writer, producer, and composer for this project, drawing inspiration from a variety of movies and books, notably the Italian 1980 murder mystery The Name of the Rose written by Umberto Eco, adapted into a film in 1986, and photographs from Bob Carlos Clarke, Jan Saudek, and Holly Warburton, which provided the visual origins of the Koudelka world. Unfortunately, despite providing a grand innovative scheme, internal quarrels greatly compromised the project, as a result of many of Sacnoth's employees disagreeing with him and attempting to create a game that was in the spirit of Square RPGs. With much of the team failing to accept any real change, Kikuta was progressively undermined and micromanagement problems became evident, leading to the production of an altogether inferior game being produced. Suffering especially from its grid-based battle system, the only major aspect of the game that Kikuta had no direct involvement with, the game received highly critical reviews that considered the game promising yet massively flawed. Its score, simply entitled Koudelka, utilised live performances once more and had numerous highlights, though is generally regarded as Kikuta's weakest score, perhaps less diverse, artistically inspiring, or original as its predecessor, frequently criticised, in particular, for its somewhat repetitive main battle theme.

The combined effects of Koudelka's initially comprimised nature, bad press, and lack of word of mouth led to it become a disappointment in all senses for Kikuta. It also put the long-term future of Sacnoth at risk, as SNK's bankruptcy and Koudelka's commercial failure led to its financial position being insecure, while the internal frictions within the company had already sacrificed much of its integrity. By his own choice, Kikuta resigned in 1999, feeling incredibly bitter towards many of his collaborators, who he described as being 'already dead' because of their inability to accept change, and temporarily disappeared from the gaming industry as he recovered from this depressing loss. Sacnoth lived on for a time producing the first instalment to the Shadow Hearts series, which was vaguely related to Koudelka's storyline, and, despite the series' production being taken over by Aruze and later Nautilis, the series' trio of games were regarded as great successes and their scores, principally created by Yoshitaka Hirota, were cult hits. Despite being unheard of by international audiences all the way till 2004, after setting up Norstrilia Corporation is his private office in March 2001, Kikuta started work on an ambitious three year project, the Chinese MMORPG Bukyo, where he was the concept designer, game planner, and composer, despite not producing. Developed by Square Enix, the game's development was abandoned after a closed beta testing period in Taiwan during 2004, meaning neither Kikuta's concept nor score was ever released to the world. Compromised by those he was working with for the third time in as many projects, this project's failure was devastating, especially considering many audiences simply assumed he had retired because of his lack of productivity of new games and scores for an entire five years.

Kikuta's return to being involved in actually published projects in June 2004 was a shock for most of his international fans. Instead of the rich RPG soundtrack or new game release some had hoped for after the many years of silence, it was revealed that Kikuta had created a hentai game score with a promotional soundtrack release, Ciel's Sora no Iro, Mizu no Iro for the PC. Referred to as his 'dirty secret' by some fans, many were understandably alienated, given that hentai is often viewed as perverse and disgusting in the Western world, and the project was certainly a remarkably degrading contrast from the magnitude and intended profoundness of the Koudelka project. Nonetheless, some fans, particularly his Japanese audience, generally more tolerant to hentai than international audiences anyway, welcomed Kikuta's involvement in such a score, especially given that the hentai genre allows for considerable expression of musical versatility, several other respectable game composers have worked in such fields (e.g. Yasuhisa Watanabe and Shinji Hosoe), and there was an apparent niche in the hentai world for a composer with Kikuta's aptitude and experience. Having since worked on two more hentai scores, Puzzlebox's Sakura Relaxation and Ni~dzuma wa Sailor Fuku, and highly anticipated to work on the same company's Oba no Shinshitsu, it seems the genre has provided both reliable employment and his three promotional scores for the album have generally been viewed as musical successes, despite their meagre availability. Somewhat comparable to his Seiken Densetsu works, these scores are synonymous with lightness, simplicity, and creativity, and each includes a few vocal tracks, generally enjoyable, though obvously less emotive than "Lovely Strains."

Those with the misconception that Kikuta is either a retired composer or someone stuck in the hentai field should use his 2006 album, Lost Files, as evidence that he is still very much alive and is aware of his considerable international and Japanese fanbase. As its title implies, the album, his first commercial release in seven years, is principally a scattered collection of tracks from various projects that haven't been heard before, including the original versions of the demo tracks he submitted to Square to be recruited by them. While the synth quality is variable throughout, the Kikuta style is very evident and there are number of tracks that are reminiscent of compositions from previous albums. Though a disappointment for those expecting a true 'solo' album, an image album on the lines of Secret of Mana +, or something as profound as Soukaigi, when viewed for what it is, the experience should satisfy those particularly fond of Kikuta's early works. As an attempted revolutionary who has failed in his biggest projects, the promising nature of his ideas and the fact he aimed for accessibility largely meant he has largely been a victim of circumstance and the perhaps dated nature of colleagues' intentions. However, his long-standing dream to create a successful magnum opus may just happen; now known to be working on another major project, the creation of a novel, Tennin-so Story, Kikuta's expression of inspiration is anticipated to reach new levels and, by working alone, he will not be compromised by others. Prior to the novel's release, a CD was released in August 2006's Comic Market 70 event, based on the same world. At last, Kikuta has created a brand new major work that will actually be published.