In September 2021, Shoji Meguro walked out of Atlus's Tokyo headquarters for the last time as an employee. He had been there for twenty-five years. He was fifty years old. On his way out, he did not make a speech. He simply told colleagues he would still work with them on select projects, as a freelancer. Then he left.
Meguro was born in Tokyo on June 4, 1971. His parents ran a small factory and he grew up around machinery. His mother encouraged him to learn the Electone organ when he was four or five. Later he picked up the trombone. As a child he did not listen to popular music. He listened to classical. Later, as a teenager, he discovered jazz — T-Square, Herb Alpert, Casiopea. He liked the structure of it, the way instruments talked to each other without words.
In 1995 he sent a demo tape to Atlus. He passed two interviews and was hired in April 1996. His first assignment was a game called Revelations: Persona for the PlayStation. He composed sixteen tracks for it. One of them was called 'Aria of the Soul.' It was his first professional work. The game released in 1996. That theme became one of the most enduring pieces in the series, reappearing in every Persona game that followed. Meguro was twenty-five.
Over the next decade, he worked on soundtracks for Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, Persona 3, Persona 4. For Persona 3 he used a pop-based vocal style. The soundtrack sold over one hundred thousand copies. For Persona 4 he mixed rock and jazz. For Persona 5, released in 2016, he became sound director and leaned into acid jazz, layering hard-rock elements when the story turned serious. Western RPG soundtracks were orchestral. Japanese RPG soundtracks leaned synthesized. Meguro's work sat in neither camp cleanly. It sounded closer to a mixtape than a score.
But while working at Atlus, Meguro had been building something else. For five years he had spent his spare time creating role-playing games — small projects, personal experiments, things he made for himself. In 2021 one of those projects caught the attention of Kodansha Game Creators Lab, a program to support independent game developers. Kodansha did not select him for their standard 'Round 1' recruitment. But they awarded him a special prize and, after negotiation, opened a special position for him outside the usual program structure.
That recognition forced a decision. He had been at Atlus for a quarter-century. He had composed the soundtracks that defined a generation of games. His name was known. He had stability. But the thing he had been building in his spare time — the games he made when no one was watching, the projects he worked on because he wanted to, not because he was assigned to — those were still unfinished. If he stayed, they might always remain unfinished.
So in September 2021, Meguro resigned. He told the press that he maintained a close relationship with Atlus and would continue to work with them on music for select projects. But his focus had shifted. On November 6, 2021, at the Indie Live Expo Winter event, he announced his first production as an independent developer — a game built under the Kodansha partnership, made with his own hands.
The decision was not dramatic. There was no conflict, no grand statement. He simply chose to write the next chapter himself. Twenty-five years earlier, a young composer had sent in a demo tape and been hired to write sixteen songs for a game he had never heard of. Now, at fifty, he was starting again — this time writing not just the music, but the entire story.