Armed Fantasia March 2024 Update
We are three months into 2024 and it’s my birthday month. There are a bunch of games releasing this year. With all that happening one game not to forget about in development is Armed Fantasia To The End Of The Wilderness. A new month means we get another update from Wild Bunch Productions and bee tribe Digital Studio. In this update, the team decided they wanted to start to focus on certain themes moving forward. The theme for this update is generally focused on sound work for the game and everything dealing with that. So let’s get into March’s update.
Like usual, the team had an opening message greeting the Armed Fantasia fans. They started by saying this:
It’s March. The weather is gradually getting warmer, but people’s hay fever is also getting more intense as well. We’re currently in a season where you kind of want to go outside but also kind of don’t. How are you all faring? Today’s report is coming to you courtesy of our chief director Ishii.
Armed Fantasia Project Update
Armed Fantasia’s chief director Ishii started the update by saying this:
Hello, Ishii here to bring you all this month’s report. As Sekiya described in last month’s update, we’ll be deciding on a theme. Then bringing you content focused around that each month going forward. This month’s theme is: sound effects! I’m not part of the team that creates the sound effects. But I’ll be talking about what goes into ordering them.
How Sound Effects Are Created
In regards to how the sound effects in Armed Fantasia To The End Of The Wilderness are created this is what Ishii said:
Usually, we start creating sound effects for games once the visual assets such as art and motions are well along in production. I think the overall process may differ a bit depending on the studio, but it generally goes like this: the person making the order describes their requests, then the composers create the sound effects while looking at the art and animations. After that, the sound effects are implemented, a check is done to see if they match with the overall image, and then fixes are made if necessary.
Describing the requests is a pretty difficult step. No matter how accurately you think you’ve described the sound effect in text, that alone will not be enough to get you the sound effect you’re imagining. Therefore, we also send over existing sounds for the composer to use as a reference, or translate the text into a common language that will help the person making the order and the composer share a unified vision.
More Sound Effect Creation
More was talked about regarding sound effects and Kaneko. This is what was said:
Kaneko is the one making the orders for sound effects for Armed Fantasia, and when we first asked him what sort of direction he’d prefer for the sounds this time around, he replied: “buppigan”. But the other person didn’t really understand, so he laughed while talking about how hard it was to explain what he meant. Indeed, it may only make sense to a certain generation.
On the other hand, if you manage to get your image across, the composer will usually be able to think up a sound effect that matches what you were imagining to a surprising degree. And even if the sound effects don’t end up matching what he imagined 100%. As long as it doesn’t sound unpleasant, Kaneko enjoys hearing the composer’s interpretation as a sort of chemical reaction that happens throughout the process. “It’s easy to find someone who agrees with what you think doesn’t taste good, but everyone has a different idea of what tastes good, and those sorts of opinions can end up broadening your horizons.
Sound Effect for this Gun ARM’s normal attack
We got a little preview of the sound effects for this gun ARM above. The team also showed the gun in the images below. When it comes to this weapon in Armed Fantasia the team said this:
The sound effect for this gun ARM normal attack has been completed. It may sound pretty different from the normal sort of “bang!” sound you’d expect a gun to make, but the gun ARMs that appear in Armed Fantasia don’t fire out magic. Instead, the Lacrima Drives that serve as the engines for each ARM cover actual bullets with converted ether energy. Then fire them out using gunpowder and a firing mechanism that’s no different from an actual gun. As you can hear, the sound effect combines the mechanical noise of brandishing the gun along with the energy-laced bullet being fired.
Menu-related Sound Effects
Next up in regards to Armed Fantasia sound effects, we have the menu sounds. This is what was shared about that:
Aside from the battle-related sound effects like the one we just showed you, sound effects for cutscenes and menu screens are also being worked on. There are a lot of scenes in which the sound effects serve very important roles. You can especially see each composer’s unique characteristics shine when it comes to cursor noises and confirm/cancel noises where there aren’t any actual tools or actions being shown on the screen.
And so, a lot of hard work is going into the sound effects for the menu screens in Armed Fantasia, with the goal of creating sounds that make the menus feel good to use. Of course, as we just explained, sharing a unified vision of what “feels good to use” means is a pretty difficult step.
Kaneko-san and Environmental Sounds
Another important area of sound in games is environmental sounds. So we get a little bit of information about that and Kaneko’s focus regarding this. So this is what they said in regards to that in Armed Fantasia:
Changing topics a bit, the environmental sounds such as wind blowing and rivers running are also treated as sound effects. Kaneko is very particular about music-related direction, and this includes environmental sounds and other sound effects as well. So there are a lot of things he does on purpose in order to make the story more dramatic. For example, with a previous game he worked on where you ride dragons, there was a scene where a new character appears at the end of a dungeon.
And so, instead of randomly connecting the dungeon music to the event scene music (which had a completely different melody) where the new character would appear, he had the dungeon music fade out, then created a pause where environmental sounds of wind blowing through the mountain could be heard. This gave the event scene music and the appearance of the new character much more impact. In return making the scene much more exciting. As you can see, environmental sounds can end up being much more useful than simply adding sounds to the environment, so they’re worth putting care into.
The Team Concludes
The Armed Fantasia team wraps up this sound-focused update and says this:
Sound effects production always ends up falling into the lower half of production, and is prone to various schedule conflicts. Thanks to the composers fighting bravely within the limited timeframes they’re given, the world of the game can end up becoming two or three times more appealing than it would have otherwise been. At a previous job I once heard that there used to be some really harsh schedules. The director would spend a week lodging together with the composer in order to create all the sounds. Of course, this is something that happened decades ago, so the statute of limitations has run out.
Sound effects end up being more memorable than you may imagine. I’m sure there are some sound effects in anime and TV shows where just hearing them will make you think “Ah, I know where that’s from!” We’re working hard to create memorable sound effects like those for Armed Fantasia as well.
That concludes this month’s update. See you next month!
Wrap-Up
I always enjoy seeing any type of images and videos the teams behind these games want to share. I’ve backed multiple Kickstarter projects at this point, 3 to be exact. So I appreciate seeing how to money we’ve invested as backers is being used. It’s kind of like seeing what we as fans helped bring to life in a way. The Armed Fantasia team does an excellent job sharing these updates with us. Stay tuned for more updates regarding Armed Fantasia To The End Of The Wilderness.
