Fear of the Heavens

Hiroki Kikuta was twenty-nine, and he had never written music for a video game before. His path to the work was not a musician's at all: he had studied religion and anthropology at Kansai University, then made his living drawing manga, teaching himself music along the way. When Square handed him Seiken Densetsu 2 — the game the West would come to know as Secret of Mana — they gave him something almost unheard of for a first-timer: complete freedom. No brief, no direction, no template to follow. He began composing before the game's design was even finalized, scoring a world that did not yet fully exist. He has said that what he wanted was a score that was neither pop music nor 'game music' as the term was then understood — something that held two contrasting voices at once: his own, and the world he was being asked to imagine.

He paid for that freedom with his life, in the literal sense of the hours that make one up. During development Kikuta practically lived at Square's offices, going home only twice a month, alternating around the clock between composing and editing. The game around him was in trouble. Seiken Densetsu 2 had been conceived as a launch title for the Super Famicom's CD-ROM add-on — a format promising hundreds of megabytes of space. When Nintendo cancelled the add-on, the project was forced back onto a standard cartridge, and the team had to compress a CD-ROM dream into roughly two megabytes. Release slipped from April to July to August of 1993. The one strange mercy of all that delay was time: Kikuta later noted that the prolonged development let him revise and perfect not just the music but the sound effects, far past what a normal schedule would have allowed.

To get the sound he wanted out of the Super Famicom's Sony SPC700 chip, Kikuta refused to use the instrument samples Square's sound programmers had prepared for everyone else. He built his own from scratch, hand-crafting each voice to push the eight-channel chip further than its presets could reach. 'Fear of the Heavens' is the first thing you hear, and it does something audacious for 1993: it opens with the recorded-feeling cry of a whale, drifting over near-silence, before a single echoing piano line steps in. The whalesong was deliberate — Kikuta has tied the game's opening calm to the image of the Mana Tree standing over the land, and the whale as its counterpart in the sea, the largest, most solitary voice in a vast quiet. His ear was tuned to places far from Tokyo: the score draws openly on Balinese gamelan and the textures of natural landscape. The SPC700's built-in echo is not decoration here. It is the room the whale is singing in.

Think about what was compressed to make this piece. A disc's worth of ambition, squeezed into two megabytes. A man, folded into a single office for the better part of a year, surfacing twice a month. And out of all that crushing pressure came a sound that feels not smaller but enormous — a piece that opens onto the whole sky. That is the quiet riddle at the center of 'Fear of the Heavens.' We tend to assume that taking things away makes what remains poorer. Kikuta's first piece of game music, written under every kind of constraint at once, suggests the opposite: that when a disc, a budget, and a life all get compressed down to almost nothing, what is left is not less. It is essence. The question worth carrying out of the room is whether the vastness we hear was added by the composer — or simply uncovered, once everything else had been pressed away.