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2 Style 3 Career 4 Works 5 External Links |
Motoi Sakuraba was born on 5th of August in 1965, is married to Yuko Sakuraba, and has a daughter, Mio Sakuraba.
Motoi Sakuraba takes the pompous and melodic Japanese progressive rock of the 1980's and expand them with his own trademark complex rhythms, emotional flutes, abuse of male choir and heavy hall. The lighter side of his style in a crossover between symphonic progressive rock, cinematic orchestra and new age. Sakuraba is considered being one of the best progressive rock keyboard players with awesome performing style (as can be witnessed on the DVD release of his Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile live concert), introducing many jazz alike improvisations to his music style. In the last couple of years he made serious efforts expanding his style even further.
Sakuraba broke into the music scene as composer and keyboard player of the progressive rock band Deja Vu, which released an album, "Baroque in the Future", in 1988. The band later disbanded, and Sakuraba went on to release a solo progressive rock album, "Gikyoku Onsou", in 1990. During his work as video game composer he continued to produce heavily extended arrangements of his compositions.
Late 1989, Sakuraba began work as main composer for Wolf Team, a subsidiary of Telenet Japan. In 1994, former Wolf Team composer, director and composer Masaaki Uno, started working at Camelot Software Planning as coordinator and sound director, employing Sakuraba as composer for all Camelot games and developing games for Sony, Sega and Nintendo. In 1995, Wolf Team developed the break through game Tales of Phantasia for Namco, starting the third most successful video game series in Japan behind Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Wolf Team continued to develop games for Namco in the Tales series while keeping Sakuraba (and the other Wolf Team composer Shinji Tamura) as composer, until it morphed into the Namco Telenet joint subsidiary Namco Tales Studio in 2003. In 1995, former Wolf Team director and producer Jun Asanuma as well as Tales of Phantasia writer and programmer Yoshiharu Gotanda founded tri-Ace with financial backing of Enix, creating the Star Ocean series and, again, employing Sakuraba for all games. In 1999, long time Sakuraba sound designer and programmer Hiroya Hatsushiba, former member of Wolf Team and tri-Ace, founded tri-Crescendo while continuing to contribute sound work to tri-Ace games. In 2001, tri-Crescendo started working on Baten Kaitos together with Monolith and with financial backing of Namco, Hatsushiba as director and main programmer and Sakuraba, again, as composer. Sakuraba is regularly contracted for composing work in other media through his own TEAM Entertainment, a company founded in 1999 to promote and license the work of artists.
During July, 2003, Sakuraba held a live concert in Tokyo, Japan. He performed progressive rock interpretations of music from the PlayStation games Star Ocean: The Second Story and Valkyrie Profile.
Albums
For Wolf Team (subsidiary of Telenet):
Bio
Style
Career
Works
Games
For Telenet:
For Namco Tales Studio (subsidiary of Namco and Telenet):
For Camelot Software Planning:
For tri-Ace:
For tri-Crescendo:
Animes
Television Dramas
MoviesExternal Links