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Square-Enix details how they chose the songs for Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory
Square-Enix has shared a new dev blog for Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory, and it gives some insight into the game's soundtrack. There are literally hundreds of tunes in the Kingdom Hearts series, but all of those can't be crammed into the game. How do you go about selecting the right tracks? See the approach Square-Enix took in the snippet below.
When you’re making a rhythm action game, track selection is one of the first things you have to consider - but deciding which tracks to include in Melody of Memory was a particularly tricky challenge. After all, there’s a genuinely massive amount of music in the KINGDOM HEARTS series - we’re talking 600 tracks, perhaps 700 if you include the latest releases.
Right at the start of development, we made a list of all the different music across all the various games. Then, we collected all kinds of information that we could use to identify the songs that had left a particularly strong impression on players.
For example, we looked at which tracks had been included on the set list of the recent KINGDOM HEARTS Orchestra -World of Tres- tour, and which were voted most popular by fans. We collected all kinds of data, and by studying it, we were able to work out many of the songs we knew would really excite people.
The element of the game that really brought the selection into focus though was the World Tour. The core theme of that mode is for players to relive the KINGDOM HEARTS series (so far) through music, so we made sure to include as many tracks from important and memorable scenes as we could.
These considerations allowed us to whittle the options down to a shorter list, but when it came to the final selection, other factors came into play - some technical and some emotional.