French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that Saori Kobayashi, composer of Panzer Dragoon Saga, has just joined the association as an honorary member.
She considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us her support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Saori Kobayashi was born in Yokohama, Japan on July 31, 1963. She graduated from Musashino Academia Musicae and became a pianist, beginning her career as a musician. She entered the video game industry in 1994 when she joined SEGA, where she created the music and sound effects for various Game Gear and Saturn titles, including the sound effects for NiGHTS into Dreams. But the game that revealed her was Panzer Dragoon Saga on Saturn, for which she composed a memorable soundtrack in keeping with the dark and mysterious universe of the series. She left SEGA in 1998 to become a freelancer, although she continued to work for the company occasionally, which asked her to compose the music for Panzer Dragoon Orta on Xbox in 2002. The following year, she teamed up with Yumiko Takahashi, singer on Suikoden II and performer for Konami, to form the group AKANE, known for modernizing traditional Japanese music. AKANE released their first album, Kochae, in 2007 only in Japan. Then she put to music Crimson Dragon on Xbox One, released in November 2013, which reunited her with many of her colleagues from the Panzer Dragoon series, including its director Yukio Futatsugi. She then became one of the main members of the Brave Wave Productions label based in Japan and Kuwait, alongside other big names like Manami Matsumae and Yoko Shimomura. She collaborated with Brave Wave on the compilation In Flux, released in March 2014, and again in September for Journey, AKANE's second album and the first to leave the borders of Japan. With Brave Wave, she is working on several new projects including a future mobile game signed Wayforward Technologies and based on a famous license, as well as on her first solo album scheduled for fall 2015, TERRA MAGICA. Now a piano teacher for Roland in Tokyo, his activities go beyond video games, but Kobayashi ardently wishes to continue composing game music, in particular for studios and publishers outside Japan. She left it for the first time in her life in July 2015 to go to Japan Expo in Paris, and meet many European fans.
Sonic Triple Trouble (Game Gear, 1994)
NiGHTS into Dreams (Saturn, 1996)
Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn, 1998)
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (Vita, 2012)
Crimson Dragon (Xbox One, 2013)
And you, why not become a member of MO5.COM too?