Pokemon series producer Junichi Masuda never expected he'd make video games. He liked taking apart electronic devices to find out how they worked, and that lead him to taking up programming as a hobby. Masuda, however, loved music. He learned to play the trombone and composed songs for music festivals at school. “I just kind of assumed I would graduate college, get a job at a big company as a salaried employee, eventually get married and start an ordinary family,” Masuda said in an email interview. “I actually did work as a salaried employee at a company, completely unrelated to my hobbies, for a year after graduating college.” Eventually, after helping make games in his free time, Masuda decided to make games and music full-time.
As a composer turned game director, Masuda has a unique perspective when it comes to making video games. He has worked on the Pokemon series since the original Red and Green debuted in Japan. IGN asked Masuda a few questions about his influences, how music and games can work better together, and more. Check out his responses below and brace yourself for a musical tour through the Pokemon series.
What are some of your influences as a musician?
I actually listen to all sorts of music. Some of my early inspirations when I first got into music were electronic music groups like YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra), Ultravox, and The Human League. With that said, by the time I was around 20, I already had around 1,300 CDs in a wide variety of genres--music from around the world. Everything from traditional Japanese music called gagaku, taiko music, traditional Indonesian ensemble music called gamelan, all the way to European classical music, rock, jazz, techno and more. It's hard to pinpoint any particular influence on me.
Music elements don't always get intertwined into how a game plays. In Mother 3, the designers used a distinct idea where you can strings attack combos if you tap along to the beat of the battle music. Have you ever considered using similar ideas to make music and gameplay work together?
I've definitely thought about linking music with the interactive element of games in certain ways. For example, maybe having the player’s character dance in tune to the music that's playing when they are in their idle animation after not touching the controls for a certain amount of time. The trouble is, as the technology improves and sound quality rises, it's becoming more and more difficult to link gameplay and music together. Now, in many games, the music just plays like it's streaming from a CD, and while the quality is nice, I'm not sure that's the best direction for the role that music should play in games. It's definitely something I think a lot about.
How has the music for the Pokemon games evolved over time? How would you characterize the direction for each soundtrack you've worked on?
The Pokémon music and how we create it has definitely evolved over time. Originally, we could do a lot more with adjusting the programming directly, but now the music plays more like a streaming CD, so it’s higher quality, but it can be difficult to do some of the tricks we used in the old days. Although we try a lot of new things with each game, we always try to keep some elements very true to our beginnings--stuff like the Pokémon Center music, or the songs that play in the main towns. We want to make sure they all have simple and memorable melodies. Outside of that, though, we do a lot of experimentation.
Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue:
In Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue it was just me making all of the music and creature cries. It was definitely a challenge to come up with all of the sounds and make them fit within the limitations of the Game Boy hardware. I had to do a lot of work to reduce the byte size of each piece to fit the limited space that was available. I really tried to keep everything simple and catchy, but I also did a lot of adjustments with the programming directly to make it so players wouldn’t get sick of hearing the same songs. I’d change the locations in the song that it would loop each time, for example, to keep it sounding fresh and mysterious.
Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver:
After Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue were released and we were moving on, I was getting really busy with directing and programming on other projects. We had a lot going on so I wasn't able to focus entirely on music. For Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver, since it was on the same hardware, and I really knew the ins and outs of it by then, we were able to create new songs very quickly and very early in development.
Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire:
We had Mr. Ichinose join for Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver to help work on the sound, and he also worked on Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire quite heavily. But we did have new challenges working with the new hardware. We had to think more about the tone of the music. We were able to sample the sounds before adding them to the hardware, which was really nice, but it was more work and took more time to figure out the process. Another thing I discovered at the time was using Timpani (a type of drum) to get really nice sounds that we used a lot in Pokémon Ruby and Pokémon Sapphire.
Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen:
With Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen, it was mostly Mr. Ichinose who did a lot of the work on updating it. With these games, we spent a lot of time making sure that anyone could play it, even people in their sixties. So we didn't go too far with new gameplay elements or go too far out there. In that spirit, we took the original songs and added elements to it without changing it too much.
Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl:
With the new Nintendo DS hardware and sounds, we wanted to try something that wasn't so "Pokémon-like" and try to really expand what really represents Pokémon. I think of the visuals and the music as a set. With the visual half, I felt like it really looked like a Pokémon game, and I felt like I had some room with the music to experiment on what was previously considered Pokémon music.
Pokémon HeartGold and Pokémon SoulSilver:
As with Pokémon FireRed and Pokémon LeafGreen, updating the music from the older games was mostly handled by Mr. Ichinose and Mr. Kageyama. But one thing we really kept in mind is that those who played the original Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver wouldn't accept it if we changed the songs, and we wanted to avoid that backlash. We tried to make sure they sounded very similar to how they did in the past, by keeping the same base and adding certain elements to the songs.
Pokémon Black and Pokémon White:
By the time Pokémon Black and Pokémon White launched, we were very familiar with the Nintendo DS system and understood which sounds coming out of the speakers sounded best. We were able to pay attention to these nuances and I think we got some really good sounds as a result.
It was also the first time that the setting wasn't inspired by a region in Japan. It maybe didn't have that same Pokémon feel from a lot of people's perspective. We'd also built up our music creation staff. All this means that for each town we could try a lot of different genres. But for battles and such we really stuck to traditional Pokémon music. This even goes into the name of Unova—there's a lot of different things inside, but it's one big world as a whole.
Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2:
With Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2, we tried updating the music to what it would sound like two years later since the story takes place two years after events in Pokémon Black and Pokémon White.
Pokémon X and Pokémon Y:
Pokémon X and Pokémon Y really depends heavily on the area in the game, but we tried to avoid making it sound too French or European throughout the game. If one of the areas looks very European, and the music matches that, then it's too obviously like Europe. We tried differentiating the music a little bit. We always try to use the music to adapt the player's feelings in different areas—should the player feel at ease, or is there tension? That's more the primary thing we're thinking when developing the music.
Are there benefits or insight that comes from being the director and composer? How has this affected your workload and the direction of the Pokemon games?
Well, game directors are all about creating games, and sound is really just one part of the game, so the top priority is figuring out what the game itself will be. As a composer or music director, you have to really think about what kind of songs and sounds you need to fit certain situations or fill in gaps. You'll find a part that feels like it's missing something and have to come up with a song to fit it. The same type of process exists on the game director side, but instead of thinking about songs with which to fill the gap, you'll think of gameplay situations--for example, you might say, "Let’s have the player ride on a Pokémon through this area." Just ideas like that.
I find that I can't think about both game design and come up with new music at the same time, so if I'm working on both, I'll choose which I will focus on at the beginning of the day and stick to that.
Jose Otero is an Associate Editor at IGN and host of Nintendo Voice Chat. You can follow him on Twitter.
