FINAL FANTASY^® XIV Online x Gaming Speaker HTB01

Gaming Speaker SC-HTB01

Masayoshi Soken: I was very happy. I’ve been involved in several projects for products recommended for FINAL FANTASY^® XIV before, but games are a form of entertainment to be enjoyed in a personalized space, so there tends to be many headphone-related projects. Especially FINAL FANTASY^® XIV is a game that you play alone with other players online and not side-by-side while looking at the screen, so it’s normal to think it’s better suited to wearing headphones and immersing yourself in the game’s world. But as people who work with music, we want players to experience the real thrill of the sounds through a speaker. When the discussion about developing a gaming speaker was brought to us, I thought, “Finally a sound project!”, and I was really happy about that.

Kinuya: To differentiate between each mode, we were very particular about adjusting the sounds up to the very last minute. For example, FPS are games where players use the information they hear. They can only win if they can accurately pick up the sounds coming from the enemy’s footsteps or presence. In other words, they are games where players get information from sounds. So we continually adjusted the FPS Mode until we could develop the proper sound outputs.

Soken: Having players experience the sensation of being surrounded by sounds. With games these days, the 3D positions of the sounds are designed in real time, so the sounds get closer when a character approaches the target, and the sounds follow the characters when they move from right to left. As creators, we pay attention to the placement of the sounds, but actually there is very little hardware that can faithfully produce the details of these sounds. This gaming speaker lets users feel the sensation of being surrounded by sounds with a single speaker, and it provides a sound experience achieved with surround sound, so we hope gamers will try using it.

Kinuya: I’ve actually tried playing games using this gaming speaker, and it really does let you enter the game. You can truly experience a sense of immersion.

Soken: I mainly work on the music, and Kinuya mainly works on the sound effects(SE), but we both handle sounds, so we carry out production and adjustment work while communicating with each other closely. Like when creating sounds for a battle with a boss that manipulates the wind, Kinuya will create the sound effects of a tornado when a tornado appears during the battle, but the sound of a tornado isn’t powerful unless low-pitched sounds are generated. If the music that I’m ordered to create is a heavy rock ‘n’ roll sound, the bass sounds and the tornado sounds clash (laughs). That’s why we create sounds while understanding each other’s intent, such as “I’ll be using this range for this part of the background music, so how should we proceed?” or “This range is needed for the SE.” When creating a production for an upset victory, we want to play the SE to the max, so we often choose to stop the background music.

Kinuya: In previous FINAL FANTASY^® games, particularly in the boss battles, this exchange was very challenging when developing the background music during a battle with the primals, which are known as summoned beasts in the game.
Soken: Because we express this with the SE, we sometimes talk about developing a simpler arrangement for the songs, or rearranging the songs depending on the situation.

Soken: I used to make SE, so I know very well what Kinuya wants to do. I understand that a certain scene may not be powerful enough if we don’t use SE, and SE are very important in a game, so we don’t fight each other over them. I create the music, but I’m more of the type who wants to push the SE to the forefront, so we often lower the music’s volume.

Kinuya: When I receive the music data from Soken, it’s common for him to tell me, “I left space for low-pitched sounds for the SE.” It’s very helpful.

Soken: After working together for such a long period of time, we understand each other well. I know that “if it was Kinuya, he would probably be more aggressive with these kinds of sounds.”

Soken: I want to listen to lots of live recordings. The HTB01 not only has Game Mode, but also Music Mode, and I wanted to try it out today to see how live recordings on Blu-ray sound ... (Here we will play a live recording on Blu-ray).

Kinuya: Amazing! The sound output of the live recording is really nice.

Soken: It’s a really beautiful sound. I just asked Panasonic earlier, but apparently the sampling rate of the input source is monitored by the device, and with a high-resolution input, it purely plays the high-resolution sounds as they are. So, in order to reproduce the acoustic space that users experienced in the standing area of a venue, the sounds that were adjusted through hard work are directly reproduced and it has a very realistic feel to it.

Soken: I’ve been a “heavy user” of Karaage-kun since a long time ago, and a representative from Lawson happened to overhear this. At first, I was asked if “I wanted to collaborate with them”, and since I thought that it wouldn't make sense in collaborating with me personally, I proposed a “collaboration with FINAL FANTASY^® XIV”, which resulted in the development of the “charred garlic oil flavor” (Limit Break Flavor).

Soken: After having deep discussions with Lawson about the appeal of Karaage-kun, such as the scent that passes through your nose when you take a bite of the chicken and how it tastes delicious even when it is cold, the person in charge of development told me that, “I was the first person he had met who talked about it in this way” (laughs). I was supposed to have just one tasting event, but they ended up letting me do it four times. Initially, it was scheduled to be released around the fall, but the timing deviated. As a result, we decided to release it in the winter, but the people at Lawson asked me to “hold another tasting event because the flavor that I liked may change with the changing of the seasons”, and suggested that we conduct another tasting event. They were really serious about it (laughs). Personally, I think that we were able to pull off a really great collaboration.

Kinuya: It was very well received by people within the company. They all said it was delicious.

Soken: That’s good to hear. However, I realized during this collaboration that the flavor may change slightly between the trial product and the mass-produced product. And I also felt that there were slight individual differences in the taste among the different Karaage-kun flavors, and that the taste was slightly different depending on the store...