Secret of Mana
During his seven years at Square, Kikuta composed the soundtracks to only three games: "Secret of Mana" and "Trials of Mana" for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and "Soukaigi" for the PlayStation. Kikuta says that he was given complete freedom to compose the soundtracks, in that he was given no direction at all as to how to compose the music; he began working on the music before the design of the game was finalized. This freedom was helped by the fact that Uematsu ran the music group as a separate division in the company from the game developers. Kikuta was originally chosen for "Secret of Mana" after Kenji Ito, who had composed the first game in the "Mana" series, "Final Fantasy Adventure", was forced to drop the project due to other demands, such as the soundtrack to "Romancing SaGa". Rather than create MIDI versions of his compositions, like most game composers of that time did, and hand these over to the sound engineering department, Kikuta made his own samples that matched the hardware capabilities of the Super Nintendo. This way he would know exactly how the pieces would sound on the system's hardware instead of having to deal with audio hardware differences between the original composition and the Super Nintendo. Kikuta spent nearly 24 hours a day in his office working on the soundtrack, alternating between composing and editing. "Secret of Mana" led to an arranged album, "Secret of Mana+", which is composed of a single 50-minute track made up of "experimental" sounds like waterfalls, bird calls, and cell phone sounds.