Michiko Naruke

Written in 2005

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Back in 1997, a new RPG was developed on Sony's PlayStation console. Since it was the first one of its series, it had some drawbacks many new RPGs created by new teams have. The graphics, 2D on the overworld and rather simple 3D in the battles were rather mediocre, the battle system innovative but not that curageous. Don't get me wrong, the game I described is not a bad game at all - on the contrary, many people liked Wild Arms, and the project turned out to be a rather successful series. Of course, a successful game needs more than just good music, but the soundtrack composed by Ms. Naruke, especially the famous intro theme was quite a kickoff for her career.

Ms. Naruke, just like many other musicians of that time started doing music at Telenet Japan. Telenet is one of the oldest japanese videogame publishers and gave birth to many great teams which still produce world famous games nowadays. Not only did teams like Wolfteam, tri-Ace or Namco Tales Studio spawn from Telenet Japan, famous people like Motoi Sakuraba also started their career as game composers there. Even though her first soundtracks were already released in the very early 90's, she got famous after joining at Media.Vision with her score for the Wild Arms games.

On some projects (like the @MIDI project), she used an alias called "Hassy". Not much is known of her personal biography, only her discography is thoroughly documented. If you can understand japanese and want to contact Ms. Naruke, you can try on her official website.

By the way, the image on the top left is not meant to make fun of her - this is the only available image in the internet, from the FM Sound Module Maniax album.

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