Track 6-26: Underworldly Entity

Galdera is the true secret boss of this game, complete with incredibly challenging boss fight, but this arrangement was not included in the original commission.

I believe I discussed this in an interview somewhere, but after I completed and delivered all the music for this game, I received a message that said, “It actually looks like the player will battle Galdera again, but since the music production phase is already over, we plan to reuse the music from OT1.”

This kind of thing happens a lot in game development: the process of creating what you initially designed inevitably requires adding new elements, and the timing tends to be right at the end of the schedule. You can’t predict this; you have to actually make the game, and the better you want it to be, the more uncertain elements will reveal themselves.

This Galdera battle music is a perfect example. I started out half-resigned to the idea that this was how things had to be, but when I considered the importance of Galdera to OCTOPATH TRAVELER and the fact that the battle would be so difficult that players would be using travelers they had spent a long time raising, I started to feel strongly that we couldn’t just reuse the existing music, and ended up asking producer [Masashi] Takahashi if he’d let me take one shot at creating a new track.

Given the lore about coming from another world, I wanted to create something that felt a little different from the original Galdera music, so I combined synth arpeggios, high-tempo loops, and Hollywood-style percussion, trying to express the idea of an outsider from another dimension right up front in the arrangement.

If you’re an in-house composer at a game company, this kind of last-minute intervention can be accommodated without too much difficulty, but for a freelance composer like me, changing course from the original plan can be an ordeal. However, after the first OCTOPATH TRAVELER, I had a close working relationship with the development team, and so I got to take my shot. I feel very fortunate that I was able to write in this piece and finish up with no regrets.

Of course, none of this changes the value of this track inside the game or anything, so this information is irrelevant to players, but I thought it might be an anecdote worth introducing since I have the chance here. I hope you enjoyed it.

Translation: Matt Treyvaud