FF14's composer, Soken, says doing double time on an MMO and Final Fantasy 16 was 'something beyond your imagination of hell'
Final Fantasy 14 is famous for, as much as anything, its music—and its lead composer, Masayoshi Soken, is very much part of that equation. As someone with one too many hours in the MMO myself, I can testify that this man's orchestration skills have moved me to tears more than once.
He may, however, have been burning the candle at both ends. In a recent interview with PCGamesN, Soken confesses that working on both Final Fantasy 14 and 16 at the same time was hellish—in the literal sense of the word.
"I would be very honest in saying that I never want to do anything like that again," Soken explains. "Every day was a really horrible hell—really something beyond your imagination of hell."
Soken explains that he believed he could take on both games because, well, he did it back in the day. When FF14's disastrous 1.0 launched, Soken worked both on additional music for 1.0 and the tracks for A Realm Reborn, the reboot that saved the world of Eorzea from the brink. "I had the experience of working on two massive games … I just didn’t give up this time either."
As for FF16, the composer obviously pulled it off, but he notes that the experience was "completely different .. all the things I had to make were just completely different in size".
Soken's determination in the face of a challenge isn't anything new, mind. Back in 2021, he revealed that he'd been battling cancer through the majority of Shadowbringer's patch quests, keeping his condition a secret from most of his colleagues while he worked from the hospital and underwent chemotherapy.
Which is both admirable and sort of concerning—work is important, but not at the expense of your own health. Still, Soken at least seems to've realised that he shouldn't work on two major Final Fantasy titles at the same time, ever again.
"If they said, 'Would you do it simultaneously?' I would just say no … If they asked me, 'Is it that you don't want to do it?' I would say no. It’s a difficult, difficult question. If I had two bodies, I would do both."
Unfortunately, as is often said, no-one can be in two places at once—and I'd rather Soken be in one place, maybe with a decent amount of sleep, continuing to make bangers for a game that is full of them. He and his colleagues have done a damn fine job with the new Arcadion raids, after all.
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