Japanese Game Musicians Talk About Western Soundtracks

This week's issue of Famitsu magazine contains a roundtable discussion held between nine Japanese game-music composers, sponsored by local game-music production firm Noisycloak, Participants included Keisuke Ito (the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series), Nobuyoshi Sano (Tekken and Ridge Racer, Takenobu Mitsuyoshi (Shenmue, Sega Rally, Takayuki Nakamura (Lumines, Virtua Fighter), Hidenori Shoji (Yakuza), Shinji Hosoe (an old Namco stalwart), and Masato Kouda (Monster Hunter).
The roundtable discussed a wide variety of topics, answering questions posed to them by Noisycroak website readers. Most interesting among them: What do you think about the music in Western games? Their responses:

Sano: You see a lot of first-person shooters put huge budgets into the music, hiring full-on orchestras and so on.
Ito: I get a lot of orders lately [from clients] to give them "Hollywood movie-style" music, too.
Sano: They basically make games like they make movies and they use vast sums of money on it, so if you're asking me what I think about it, I'd respond that I'm jealous!

Mitsuyoshi: Do all of you think much about Western game music when you work? I don't, really, to be honest.
Nakamura: Listening to Western game soundtracks from a Japanese perspective, a lot of it sounds very close to what I hear in movies and so forth.
Mitsuyoshi: A lot of it does a gorgeous job at creating atmosphere, but what you never see is really unforgettable melodies -- like you see in Kouda's Monster Hunter, for example.
Sano: That's what makes Monster Hunter so great. There's real warmth to the music, where I think the Hollywood orchestral sound has this image of being pretty dry in my mind.

Shoji: I watch a lot of horror movies, but whenever Hollywood remakes a Japanese horror film, the results always seem really dry to me. Maybe it's kind of like that.
Nakamura: They're great technological achievements and they're made with big budgets, but that isn't what it takes to produce good music.

Sakamoto: What about sound effects?
Hosoe: In the US they'll borrow a tank just to record sound off of it. We just can't do that here.
Sano: Capcom puts a lot of work into that sort of thing.
Kouda: We sometimes go to Hollywood in order to record. With Devil May Cry, we put mikes several hundred meters apart from each other in order to record the sound a bullet makes after it's been shot.

Sano: That's Capcom's latent strength for you. It's making me wish another [economic] bubble would come along!
Mitsuyoshi: With money as tight as it is, there's a lot we'd all want to do that's just not possible. If another bubble occurs, Japan's going to get seriously busy.
Sano: We know how to throw around money a lot better than the younger generation, too. If it happens, then we'll start worrying a little more about the Western marketplace!