Who wrote Star Ocean's music? Motoi Sakuraba

One keyboardist stands on both sides of the Wolf Team split, and he has scored nearly everything either side made.

Motoi Sakuraba (born August 5, 1965, in Akita) came to games from progressive rock: at Meiji University he formed the band that became Deja Vu, whose 1988 album Baroque in the Future he composed entire. He joined Wolf Team in late 1989, and when that studio broke apart in 1995 he went freelance, the decision that made him the connective tissue of two franchises. He has composed every main Star Ocean game, and nearly every tri-Ace title besides.

His sound is unmistakable and entirely self-taught: dense keyboard arpeggios, baroque counter-melodies, odd meters and battle themes that behave like prog-rock instrumentals at full sprint. The full arc of his Tales work is documented on the Tales shelf; this page covers the Star Ocean side of the same career.

THE STAR OCEAN SCORES

1996 to the rearrangements

1996, on a giant cartridge

His first Star Ocean score had to live inside the 48-megabit cartridge alongside the graphics and the voiced intro, sharing the same composer’s toolkit he had built for Tales of Phantasia with Shinji Tamura the year before.

The Second Story and Blue Sphere

The Second Story’s score made his reputation with the series’ audience. For the Game Boy Color’s Blue Sphere he composed on a PC-9801, squeezing the same style into a handheld’s sound hardware.

The 2003 concert

On July 19, 2003, Sakuraba headlined a live concert at Zepp Tokyo devoted to his music from The Second Story, Blue Sphere, Till the End of Time and Valkyrie Profile, performing the game scores as progressive rock with a full band, the clearest statement of how he hears them himself.

Second Story R, 2023

For the remake he re-composed the entire Second Story score with full-band and string recordings. The game lets players switch between his new arrangements and the 1998 originals, making the remake an inadvertent career retrospective.

THE WIDER SHELF

The other franchises on his desk

Tales, with Tamura

Sakuraba and Shinji Tamura were Wolf Team’s house composers, and Sakuraba has gone on to score the great majority of the Tales series, sixteen mothership titles and counting, in parallel with Star Ocean for three decades.

Camelot and Golden Sun

Through his old Wolf Team colleague Masaaki Uno, who became Camelot’s sound director, Sakuraba also scored Camelot’s Mario Golf and Mario Tennis games and the Golden Sun trilogy.

Dark Souls and beyond

The same keyboardist behind Star Ocean’s bright space opera wrote the Dark Souls series’ funereal boss music, a range that also covers Valkyrie Profile, Baten Kaitos and Kid Icarus: Uprising.

Sakuraba on the Tales Shelf The Second Story R

Who wrote Star Ocean's music? Motoi Sakuraba

THE STAR OCEAN SCORES

THE WIDER SHELF

THE FIRST WORD