Kenji Ito, known by the nickname Itoken, is a Japanese video game composer and musician.
23 Facts About Kenji Ito
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Kenji Ito is best known for his work on the Mana and SaGa series, though he has worked on over 30 video games throughout his career as well as composed or arranged music for over 15 other albums, concerts, and plays.
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Kenji Ito learned to play several instruments at a young age, and joined Square directly out of college as a composer in 1990 at the advice of a professor.
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Kenji Ito worked there for over a decade, composing many of his best-known scores.
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Since leaving Square, Ito has composed soundtracks to over a dozen games, and has branched out into composition and production of music for plays and albums for other performers.
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Kenji Ito's work has been performed in a concert dedicated to his pieces as well as general video game music events, and he has played the piano in additional concerts.
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Kenji Ito began to learn to play the piano, becoming interested in it after hearing piano music coming from a classroom he passed by daily with his mother.
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Kenji Ito was interested in Electone music, but was discouraged from learning it by a piano teacher.
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Kenji Ito's first project was a co-effort that same year between himself and Nobuo Uematsu for the Game Boy title Final Fantasy Legend II.
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Kenji Ito then returned to the SaGa series for the next few years, composing the soundtracks to the Super Famicom's Romancing SaGa, Romancing SaGa 2, and Romancing SaGa 3.
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Kenji Ito was scheduled to continue on with the Mana series and compose the soundtrack to Seiken Densetsu 2, but was forced to hand the project off to Hiroki Kikuta as his first score due to the demand on his time for scoring Romancing SaGa.
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Kenji Ito returned to the SaGa series in 1997 with SaGa Frontier, and finished out the decade with Chocobo Racing and Chocobo's Dungeon 2; for Chocobo Racing he only arranged previous works from the Chocobo and Final Fantasy series, and contributed only a few tracks to Chocobo's Dungeon 2.
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Kenji Ito left Square in 2001 to become a freelance composer.
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Kenji Ito has said that this move was in order to give him the flexibility to work on more than just video game music.
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The first work that Kenji Ito composed after leaving Square was the soundtrack to Culdcept II, which he regards as his best work.
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Kenji Ito has since returned to the Mana series twice, with the soundtracks to Children of Mana and Dawn of Mana.
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Kenji Ito has released an album of piano pieces that he has composed; only two of the eight tracks are from his video game works.
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Kenji Ito performed piano live during September 22,2006 Press Start 2006 -Symphony of Games- live concert, at which several of his pieces were performed by an orchestra.
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Music composed by Kenji Ito has been performed at the Extra -Hyper Game Music Event 2007 and Christmas Live 2008 "gentleecho -prelude-" concerts.
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Music composed by Kenji Ito was performed at a concert devoted to his music on February 21,2009 titled "gentle echo meeting" at the Uchisaiwaicho Hall in Chiyoda, Tokyo.
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Additionally, KMP Music Publishing has published a book of the piano music included in the Sword of Mana soundtrack album, which Kenji Ito arranged from his original compositions.
22.
DOREMI Music Publishing published music from the original soundtracks of some of the SaGa games that Kenji Ito composed as piano sheet music book; music from Romancing SaGa 3, Romancing SaGa Minstrel Song, and SaGa Frontier were written by Asako Niwa for piano solos of beginning to intermediate difficulty.
23.
Kenji Ito's music is mainly inspired by images from the game rather than outside influences; however, he never played the games themselves.