Morio Kishimoto on Sonic Colors Original Soundtrack:
The development team members of Wii version’s Sonic Colors were a combined team focusing on the development teams of Wii game Sonic and the Black Knight and PS3 / Xbox 360 game Sonic Unleashed. Because of that, the strong members, who had developed many Sonic titles, were gathering. However, as for me, I first participated in Sonic’s development in the Wii game Sonic and the Secret Rings and went through Sonic and the Black Knight successively, and it turned out that I was entrusted as the director for the first time and yet for the mainstream Sonic title in this game. From the fact that I had developed the two games (they were, so to speak, the spin-offs) so far side-by-side with the mainstream, they were the titles in which I would seem to tackle the things impossible in the mainstream actively and carry out the differentiation as a product, and that appeared to be a good rival with the mainstream. In other words, the direction with the things I had made so far changes in 180 degrees, so I went through the hardship in the beginning of the development. (I was often pointed out that the ideas were not mainstreamlike….) Therefore I thought, I would be relieved if I left it to the strong staff around for the mainstreamlike Sonic!, and in addition to that, I considered making the action game strongly. The new actions, new mechanism, and the like you can expect only in this game are certainly the concerned parts for the purpose of wanting to convey the fact that we think a great deal of various things of an action game using the whole game. For example, the tendency in which the stage starts immediately without inserting an event scene that explains the story in the beginning of the game when started from the title screen, as well as the one that reaches the point that Sonic is controllable in the screen that clears up the score after clearing the stage, and others. (For that matter, have you noticed that Sonic is also controllable in the title screen?)
Such way of thinking was also together in the music aspect and I think that I had talked about it repeatedly in order to share the fact of wanting to approach the Sonicness to the action game in the prerequisite. I hardly remember making orders other than those, but I asked for only the need to have hummable melodies. Through the hummable melodies, I looked forward to such interaction of game and music in which the playing memories would seem to be recalled and the melodies from the screen would appear to come to mind. Moreover, I also wanted to impress the playing feeling of an action game through the music in the game flow. When selecting a stage from the map screen, the BGM of the stage will start along with the screen that displays the stage name. Here is the loading screen that is reading the data of stage map and the like internally, but it is not the waiting time for the sake of loading with the BGM starting to play at the moment of having selected a stage from the map screen but the stage name display from the stage selection, and it is for wanting the players to experience the tempo of the action game in which the playing will begin without the series of flows towards the stage pausing. However, the optimization of the program’s loading time was necessary here, so it turned out that I requested both the game staff and sound staff for the unreasonableness. By the way, I love every piece, but the one being the strongest to my heart’s content personally is the BGM of Sweet Mountain. It is the piece of the time when playing the BGM for the first time in this game. I felt that it is an energetic, enjoyable, and cool piece typical of this game beyond the compatibility with the stage. It seemed to me that it was the moment of having accelerated continuously towards the direction where this game is trying to face.
In conclusion, the one that I had aimed at combining the momentary and universal fun by enhancing the enjoyment of an action game while affirming the fun of Sonic series is Sonic Colors. I hope that Sonic fans, of course, as well as action games’ fans who have not yet played Sonic could enjoy it.
I want to continue the development aiming at “The latest game is the best Sonic,” even from now on.