菊田裕樹 (Hiroki Kikuta) is a Japanese video game music composer, and was born … Read Full Bio ↴菊田裕樹 (Hiroki Kikuta) is a Japanese video game music composer, and was born on August 29th, 1962 in Aichi prefecture, Japan. He attended Kansai University and earned a degree in Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. After graduating, he worked as a manga illustrator and anime music composer.

He started his career as video game music composer in 1991, when he presented some demos of his work to Square , and was promptly hired to create the sound effects for Romancing Saga. Square then asked him to compose the soundtrack of Secret of Mana, which became a big hit. While at Square, he went on to compose the soundtrack to the next game in the Mana series, Seiken Densetsu 3, as well as Soukaigi, which was developed by Yuke's.

After finishing his work on Soukaigi in 1997, he left Square and subsequently founded his own game development company called Sacnoth while taking some of Square's staff with him. They went on to develop Koudelka, to which he acted as a Concept Designer, Game Planner, Scenario Writer, Producer and Composer. Due to friction within the company, the game did not turn out exactly as he wanted it to be, and became a commercial failure.

After development on Koudelka was completed in 1999, he resigned from his position as CEO and left the company. In 2001, he founded a new company focussing solely on music called Norstrilia Ltd., which is still active today. That same year he started working on a Taiwanese MMORPG called Chou Bukyou Taisen, for which he took the role of Concept Designer, Game Planner and Composer. However, development was discontinued after the closed beta test, and the game never saw a release.

He has since released several original albums, composed the soundtrack to the MMORPG Concerto Gate with Kenji Ito, and composed the soundtracks to several adult visual novels developed by Puzzlebox and Ciel.