Small Two of Pieces, the song that closes Xenogears, is the game's main theme with the words finally added. The same melody turns up early and unremarked — small, mechanical, playing out of a music box — and comes back at the very end as a soaring ballad sung in English by an Irish voice. Plenty of people who love the Xenogears soundtrack never clock that the ending and the music box are the same handful of notes.
Yasunori Mitsuda wrote that score across two years, recorded its most famous pieces in Dublin over two days, built the whole thing out of almost nothing, and put himself in an ambulance finishing it. It was the first soundtrack he made alone, and the last he made for Square — and he knew he was leaving the entire time.
The Last Thing He Made at Square
He wrote it knowing he'd leave. Xenogears was Mitsuda's first solo soundtrack — everything before it he'd shared with other composers, the lone exception being Radical Dreamers, which never even got an album release. It was also the last score he'd write for Square, the company that had given him his start. Both of those things were true the whole time he worked on it, and he knew it — a composer pouring everything into the last thing he'll make in a house he's already decided to leave.
The work itself was punishing. Composition ran across roughly two years, and the hardest part, by Mitsuda's own account, was keeping his motivation up — the most dramatic cues couldn't be tested until the very end, so he spent most of it writing into the dark. He kept long hours at the Tokyo studio and would fall asleep at his desk. A few melodies arrived while he was actually asleep; the tune for “Ties of Sea and Flames” came to him in a dream.
Then it nearly finished him. During the album's mastering — the last stretch, when the music is written and you're only shaping how it sounds — Mitsuda collapsed from exhaustion and was taken to hospital by ambulance. By that point the score had pulled in close to a hundred people. The director, Tetsuya Takahashi, had started the project unconvinced the music mattered much next to the graphics; by the end he was saying he couldn't have made the game he wanted without it. He wasn't showing off. He was spending down everything he had.
Two Days in Dublin
It sounds Irish on purpose. Mitsuda built the score on Celtic and traditional music, and he was specific about how: not dense, authentic folk, and not wallpaper either, but Celtic colour folded into songs you could actually hum. At the time this was a strange bet. Irish music was barely on the radar in Japan, and here was a science-fiction role-playing game about giant machines and dead gods leaning on tin whistles. His read was that a Celtic boom was coming. He turned out to be right — it arrived a year or two later on the back of Titanic and Riverdance, by which point his score was already done.
The team wanted a western singer, and Mitsuda couldn't find the voice he was hearing in his head — until he pulled an album called The Book of Kells off a shelf in a CD shop and played a track called “Chi-Rho.” The voice belonged to Joanne Hogg, who fronted the Celtic band Iona. He recruited her, and it became her first video-game recording; she sang the songs without ever playing the game.
The session credits put a date on it: the vocals were cut in Dublin across two days in November 1996. The players Mitsuda brought in came straight from the Celtic-revival world — Davy Spillane on low whistle, and, for the fully Celtic re-recording that followed, the fiddler Máire Breatnach. Both had played with Riverdance.
Masato Kato, the game's scenario writer, had written the original lyrics for both vocal songs; Hogg reshaped them so they sat more naturally on the melodies and rang more Celtic. Mitsuda used the same trip to record an all-Celtic version of the whole score with those musicians — the album that became Creid.
Not all of it was Irish. The choral piece “The Beginning and the End” was sung by a forty-one-voice ensemble, the Great Voices of Bulgaria, recorded live in Sofia. Takahashi wrote its lyrics in Japanese; they were translated into English and then into Bulgarian for the choir to sing. The rest of the score — the bulk of it — was programmed on the PlayStation's sound chip back in Tokyo. The live Celtic and Bulgarian recordings were the exceptions, spent on the handful of moments that had to carry the most weight.
The Xenogears Soundtrack, Built on Two Chords
The whole score runs on two chords. Mitsuda's Xenogears music is famously spare — it's been described as leaning on two chords across the entire collection. What keeps it from feeling thin is repetition with intent: he lets the main theme fade in and out of the area music, so the score keeps quietly circling back to one melody no matter where you are. He'd done the same thing on Chrono Trigger. Here it's the load-bearing structure.
He blurred the usual boundaries, too. In most games the cutscene music, the field music, and the battle music stay in their lanes. In Xenogears they bleed into each other — area themes resurface under story scenes, battle themes play in cutscenes, and some scripted fights run on what is really cutscene music. The result: the whole soundtrack reads like one continuous piece of writing, not a folder of separate cues.
If you want to hear how tightly it's wound, start with the music box — “Faraway Promise” — and hold that melody in your head. Then play the opening, the late battle music, and the ending back to back. You'll catch the same tune surfacing under all three. Once you've heard it, you can't un-hear it.
You can hear the economy most plainly at the two ends of the game. The opening was a problem to score: the movie was animated before Mitsuda wrote a note, and when he finally scored it he found his composition drifting out of sync with the finished footage by about a minute and a half, and had to rebuild it to fit. What came out is the one cue that packs every influence in the whole score into a single piece — Celtic, choral, and electronic, all at once.
The other end is starker. There are two late battle themes, “Awakening” and “The One Who Bares Fangs at God,” and the second is the most divisive thing on the album — it hands almost everything over to synthetic choral texture and refuses to give you a clean melody to hold. Some listeners find it hollow. I don't: a final confrontation with something built to be a god shouldn't resolve into a tune you can whistle, and the refusal to give you one is the whole idea. That's also where Mitsuda's stated aim shows through — he wanted music that felt religious, but from an unfamiliar angle, and the battle music at the end is that idea pushed to its edge.
Small Two of Pieces
Everything comes back to one melody. The track called “Faraway Promise” — you'll also see it as “A Distant Promise” — is the melody the whole score is built around, and Mitsuda rendered it, the way he almost always renders his main themes, as a music box: small, wound-up, fragile. “Small Two of Pieces” is that exact melody given a voice, a band, and a key change. The ending ballad and the music box aren't related tunes. They're the same tune.
Once you know to listen for it, the melody is everywhere: in the opening “Dark Daybreak,” in the hushed “In a Dark Slumber,” in “Wings.” The music box is the seed, and the rest of the score keeps growing back toward it. “Small Two of Pieces” is where it finally opens all the way — and it was a hard piece to write. The demo alone, Mitsuda has said, took him an awfully long time to get right.
It also has one of the strangest deadlines in game music behind it. Mitsuda could feel the comparison coming before anyone had heard a note: a big Celtic-tinged ballad, sung wide-open by a soaring female voice, was about to become the most famous sound on the planet, because Titanic was about to open. He pushed to finish the recording before the film reached Japan, and the comparison landed anyway: people heard “Small Two of Pieces” and thought of “My Heart Will Go On,” exactly as he'd predicted. On the album it's an unapologetic power ballad: near-operatic dynamics, Hogg wide open at the top of her range, and a guitar solo that keeps burning underneath the third verse. It was the first ending theme with sung lyrics ever to appear in a game Square made, and it closes the record straight out of the Bulgarian choir — “The Beginning and the End” into “Small Two of Pieces,” back to back.
That melody outlived the game by a wide margin. Mitsuda has kept coming back to it: the all-Celtic Creid the same year, an orchestral album called Myth in 2011, and a full remaster for the game's twentieth anniversary in 2018, with Hogg singing “Small Two of Pieces” again and the Irish choir Anúna behind her. The best way back into it is simple: start with the music box on the original two-CD set, and follow the tune through the whole score until it reaches the end and finally opens its mouth. It's been one song the entire time.
Common Questions
Who sings “Small Two of Pieces”?
Joanne Hogg, the lead singer of the Celtic band Iona, sings it in English. Mitsuda found her by chance — he pulled Iona's album The Book of Kells off a shelf in a CD shop, heard her voice on a track called “Chi-Rho,” and recruited her. It was her first video-game recording, and she sang the song without ever playing Xenogears.
Is “Small Two of Pieces” the main theme of Xenogears?
Yes. It's the vocal arrangement of “Faraway Promise” (also localised as “A Distant Promise”), the main-theme melody Mitsuda wrote as a music box. The same tune runs through several tracks, including the opening “Dark Daybreak.” The ending ballad is the game's main theme with lyrics — the same handful of notes, fully opened up.
Where was the Xenogears soundtrack recorded?
In three places. The two vocal songs were recorded in Dublin across two days in November 1996. The choral piece “The Beginning and the End” was recorded live in Sofia, Bulgaria, with a forty-one-voice choir. The rest of the score — the bulk of it — was programmed on the PlayStation's sound hardware in Tokyo.
Why does the Xenogears soundtrack sound Celtic?
Because Mitsuda built it that way on purpose. He wanted Celtic colour inside easy-to-listen-to songs, bet that a Celtic boom was coming to Japan, and brought in Irish musicians — singer Joanne Hogg and low-whistle player Davy Spillane among them — to record in Dublin. The bet paid off: the boom arrived on the back of Titanic and Riverdance, right as the game came out.
Was Xenogears really Mitsuda's last soundtrack for Square?
Yes. It was his first solo score and his last for Square, the company where he'd started as a sound engineer. He already knew he was leaving while he wrote it, and afterward he went independent and founded his own studio, Procyon. He's since called Xenogears one of the projects he feels closest to.