Masaharu Iwata (#295)

[Jormungand]

Iwata is the music director for this new smartphone title. He is joined by Azusa Chiba, Yoshimi Kudo, and Kazuki Higashihara. Kaneko worked on SFX.

More music.

[Jormungand]

Iwata's "Fog of Phantom" (WOF version) has made its way into Final Fantasy XIV's latest patch.

[dissident93]

Curiously, his worklist is no longer listed on Basiscape's website (and the URL is dead), possibly meaning he left? Yet checking the company's overall worklist, it appears he was still working with them as late as 2016, so either he is officially a freelancer who still works closely with them, or he left sometime this year.

[Datschge]

Interesting development. The last snapshot on archive.org is from March this year and shows that between 2011 and the smartphone game in 2016 he didn't work on anything?

[CHz]

Good eyes! Mai Hamano is gone too. I guess they were dropped on May 7 or November 16.

[dissident93]

Originally Posted by Datschge

Interesting development. The last snapshot on archive.org is from March this year and shows that between 2011 and the smartphone game in 2016 he didn't work on anything?

Checking their entire worklist, Iwata seems to be credited for music in Grand Kingdom (a 2015 game), among other games, so I think his profile was just incomplete for some reason between 2011 and now. Iwata is also credited for music in SLOTギルティクラウン, which has a given release date of June 2017, meaning that if Iwata did in fact leave the company, then it most likely happened in the last few months, so maybe the November 16 date CHz mentioned was it? Perhaps somebody should ask him on Twitter for confirmation?

[Datschge]

I would have guessed Iwata was actually freelancing since 2011, but for the smartphone game ("Blue's Memories"?) he returned for heading the Basiscape team for one project... Yeah, somebody should ask him. ^^

[Giga_Force]

I wish he was able to release the soundtracks to Evolution: The World of Sacred Device and Evolution 2: Far Off Promise; both are incredibly underrated!

[fusoxide]

Mitsuhiro Kaneda told me that he works for mobile MMORPG dev Asobimo nowadays (whether as an employee or contractor I'm not sure), so it seems he hasn't retired from the game music industry. This is one of his tracks for Toram Online.