Into the Thick of It (Secret of Mana)

In 1993, Hiroki Kikuta was given a problem most game composers would have called a gift. He was assigned to compose the music for Secret of Mana, a role-playing game from Square, and he was told he could have almost two years to finish it. Most game soundtracks of that era were composed in months, sometimes weeks. Kikuta spent nearly twenty-four hours a day in his office, alternating between composition and sound editing. He was not writing MIDI files like other composers. He was creating his own samples from scratch, tuning them to match the exact capabilities of the SNES SPC700 sound chip so that what he heard in his studio would be what players heard at home. This was not efficiency. This was obsession.

Into the Thick of It plays when you first enter the forest in Secret of Mana. The piece opens with a bright, repeating melody — plucked strings, a flute-like lead, and a bass that pulses without hurry. There is no tension. There is no darkness. The forest is not hostile. It is alive, and it is waiting. Kikuta has said in interviews that he wanted the music to evoke a sense of exploration without imposing a specific emotion. The melody does not tell you to feel wonder or fear. It tells you to walk forward and see what is there. The distinction is subtle but absolute. A composer who imposes emotion is trying to control the player. A composer who withholds emotion is inviting the player to feel their own.

The SNES SPC700 sound chip had eight channels, and Square made an unusual decision: they gave all eight to the music, interrupting it only when a sound effect needed to play. This meant Kikuta could layer textures that were impossible on the NES or Sega Genesis. Into the Thick of It uses five or six channels at once — strings, a lead voice, a counter-melody, bass, and subtle percussion. The result is not polyphony. It is space. Each instrument enters, plays its part, and leaves room for the others. Kikuta did not fill every channel. He left silence in the arrangement. The music breathes.

Kikuta was inspired by progressive rock and film scores, not by other game music. He has said he listened to Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, and the soundtracks of science fiction films while composing. He did not want Secret of Mana to sound like a video game. He wanted it to sound like a place you could remember. Thirty years later, people who played Secret of Mana as children can hum Into the Thick of It without effort. They do not remember it as background music. They remember it as the sound of the forest itself. The question is not why Kikuta made music that stays in memory. The question is why so few others have tried to make music that does not tell you what to feel.