Shinobido 2 Developers Discuss The Sounds Of Assassination

Hello again, PS Vita fans! Hoping you enjoyed our premiere of the first Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen details not long ago. As promised, I’m back to share a post with you from our friends on the development team ACQUIRE Corp. Our friend Toshiko Tazaki has more details to share on how they shaped the tension and atmosphere in their upcoming assassin-thriller. Have a look and a listen down below, and stay tuned to PlayStation.Blog as we lead up to the game’s launch on February 22nd for more in-depth looks at how the team brought this killer game together on the PS Vita.

Toshio Tazaki, Sound Artist, Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen (PSVita)

You may not think about it much when you are playing games, but creating tension and atmosphere takes a lot of work on the development side. I wanted to share with you a bit about how we did this in our game, Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen.

Music and sound production of Shinobido 2 was actually started with a mandate from our director, Abe-san, who asked us, “Why not enhance the melody and atmosphere on our music unlike any game we’ve done before?” Every day, I made considerable efforts to adjust the melody balance to make it better than the day before. Composers tend to be desperate to give their music something different when preparing soundtracks for a whole game.

When the project began, I aimed to produce a song each day…but sometimes I got stuck and more than a little bewildered! Once I finished half of the song writing, I came to realize more details of each character by checking each of the key event scenes in the game.

When I listened to the completed songs at first, I was very clear where they would be used in the game…but I sometimes changed my mind and replaced them with more suitable arrangements or created new songs for the parts that needed more emotion. It was quite enjoyable to produce the music for game events, and the more I thought about each character, the more inspired I was to really get the music right!

It is unusual for me to say this, but I enjoyed it so much that I wanted to keep composing and developing the sounds even after the project wrapped! I would like to thank the director for letting me take part in this title. By the way, I’ll show you a photo related to the sound development here. Please have a look at this snap shot of music data displaying what it looks like when the main character is found by enemies in the game.

You may be asking yourself, “What in the world is this?” What looks like just a pattern of .wav files is actually the full song, which I’d love to share with you below. It’s called “Detection.”

Well, that’s it from me. We’ll be back to share more on the development of Shinobido 2, and we hope that you enjoy the sounds of assassination when our game launches this February in the US and Europe. I can’t wait until you can all hear the rest! If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know, and if I can’t respond immediately, our friend FilthieRich can chime in! See you soon!

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