Music, and how a game sounds, plays a crucial part in a video game’s identity. Don’t believe me? Try to imagine Persona 5 without its upbeat music or Metal Gear Solid 3 without its James Bond-esque “Snake Eater” theme. Composers play an important role in creating the way a video game sounds and we recently got an exciting opportunity to chat with one of the industry’s leading composers, Ludvig Forssell, the maestro behind the score for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and the Death Stranding games to talk about Death Stranding 2, working with Hideo Kojima and anime.

Ludvig Forssell (born in Sweden) is a BAFTA-nominated film and video game composer who first gained recognition composing the soundtrack to 2015’s Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain. Working closely with video game director and auteur Hideo Kojima, Forssell has built a reputable portfolio consisting of both Death Stranding games as well as anime projects like Belle.



Ahead of Death Stranding 2’s launch, we got to talk to Ludvig Forssell about his career, the process of composing Death Stranding 2, the relationship that he had built with Hideo Kojima over his career, and some of his favourite composers working in the anime industry.



When you first got the call from Kojima to compose a Metal Gear Solid game, were you familiar with the series at the time and did that impact the kind of music you created for The Phantom Pain?

Ludvig Forssell: I was very much familiar with the material. I think Metal Gear Solid 1 was the first game of its kind and one of the first games me and my friend played on the PlayStation, figuring out all those weird things about having to find the Codec number on the back of the box. So that was a really big, impactful part of growing up playing video games for me. I’d been aware and around the other games that came out over the years. I’d moved to Japan the year that Metal Gear Solid 4 came out, then I remember that being a huge thing with the PlayStation 3 coming out. But being a student at the time, I didn’t own any video games consoles but once I started working for Konami, obviously I was catching up on all of that.

A few sections within Konami moved around and I got moved over to Kojima Productions, so I was on the team and we’re gearing up to work on Ground Zeroes and then The Phantom Pain. As I was coming on as a team member, they had set the tone for what the game was gonna be. The audio director had his ideas of making this kind of non-harmonized, little-to-no melodic material type of percussion-based for the in-game soundtrack. But as things evolved, it ended up being more and more everything on me, and I ended up being the only member on the composer team that was originally like four people.

It was an iterative process, I’d say. It wasn’t like somebody called me up and I was just doing my thing, and then went in and did my thing. It was being part of a team that sort of figured out what we wanted to do for the game with the caveat of the audio director having to set some rules for us. But that evolved over the course of maybe five years, so it was a while before we actually knew what we were doing with the game.

Moving from Metal Gear Solid to Death Stranding, Death Stranding has a very unique quality to its soundtrack. There’s a lot of synth, a lot of electronics and non-traditional instruments. Was this always what you envisioned for the music of Death Stranding to sound like?

Ludvig Forssell: On the flip side of Metal Gear, that has its legacy – I came in as a young composer trying to abide by what everybody else was trying to get at with that, standing on the shoulders of giants of previous composers. Flip side to that, doing Death Stranding was starting something that didn’t have any prequels to it, and it’s such a weird, strange world that Hideo cooked up for that game. I had so much more freedom in the sense that we were making something new and come up with these ideas from scratch.

Thankfully, as I was part of the team in-house there, we had a lot of time starting from the very core, and I didn’t even have a studio when we started off. It took about six months before I actually had a space to work properly.

That flame was definitely fanned by the core concept for the soundtrack that Hideo had given me when I first joined on the team, which was this synthesized sound and he also mentioned wanting to use found sounds to do something weird with it. Thankfully, as I was part of the team in-house there, we had a lot of time starting from the very core, and I didn’t even have a studio when we started off. It took about six months before I actually had a space to work properly. But we had a lot of time to try and figure things out, throwing[censored] at the wall to see what sticks. That was basically how that sound came to be.



Some examples of soundtracks that were synth-based that Hideo had given me include the film It Follows, for example, which was one of the inspirations for how he wanted to interject sounds like that into the score for Death Stranding.

How involved was Hideo Kojima in the process of recording Death Stranding? Did he give you a lot of freedom to compose music or were there still guidelines you had to follow?

Ludvig Forssell: At that point, I had worked with Hideo for about five to six years. It definitely wasn’t the first time like I was meeting Hideo, but knowing what I can do, he had a good amount of trust in me and that also progressed during the years of making Death Stranding. So I did get a lot of freedom to do my own interpretations of what I thought each scene should sound like in terms of ups and downs. We’d go in sometimes, he’d listen to a demo, and he’d be like “no, that’s wrong” or “run with that.”

There’s never been too much back-seating in terms of how I approached the score. Hideo usually gives very broad ideas of sounds that he’s interested in, or it will be references like film scores and stuff like that. And then I internalize that and give my own output to how I think that works. He will come in, listen to something and if he doesn’t say anything, that usually means it’s good. But he does give me a lot of freedom, yes.



With the challenge of composing music for a sequel, you always have to carry over the themes and motifs while trying to make something still sound fresh and exciting. What was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome for Death Stranding 2’s score?

Ludvig Forssell: I think you already said it, you want to make it fresh but you also want to keep its core. I could list a bunch of ideas that I had that we implemented to expand on what was already the core. I think one of the more interesting sides to it, though, is conceptually for me making the first Death Stranding was such an off-shoot and a new path for me to work as a composer, having all that freedom with a blank slate of a new project. Personally, I don’t think I got to fulfil all the creative ideas that I had with that. They didn’t all come to fruition, so there was already gas left in the tank for me to jump on a sequel and go beyond where I ran into the wall with the first one, basically.

It’s sort of a different thing when you have something that already works but you need to add more facets to it.

There are very important tracks on the soundtrack [to Death Stranding 2] that I wrote in-between projects before the sequel was even started, because I had some ideas that I wanted to put down on paper. When I didn’t have a specific project that I was working on, I wrote some of that, which ended up being part of very pivotal parts of the game. What you definitely want to do is keep the core and expand upon that, and that can be challenging in a completely different way than starting a completely different new thing where all of a sudden, you have to learn new skills or certain types of music styles that they want for the project. It’s sort of a different thing when you have something that already works but you need to add more facets to it.



But I think we did well with adding simple things, like adding guitars on top of everything, adding the human elements of all of these vocal ensembles, avant-garde things that we recorded for the second one. What was once a bit more of an ambiance core for the first one, this is way more crowd-pleasing in a way, so it’s sort of conceptually and musically evolved from the first game.

Is there anything drastically different that we’ll hear on Death Stranding 2’s score that we didn’t hear on the first game’s soundtrack?

Ludvig Forssell: I think it comes down to the approach of musicality to a lot of the pivotal boss fights, where I wanted to steer away from just scoring the action and the darkness of it or the stressfulness of it. I wanted to tell more of a story with the score, and make those moments more emotional rather than just dark and dreary. It posed quite a challenge on the engineer who was mixing the game because they had mix differently around sound effects, dialogue and music to put that storytelling within the music forefront.

I wanted to lean into how music can tell a story, and I think this is gonna make for a much more listenable soundtrack in a way. As a composer, I just wanted to make stuff that to me, felt as valuable as music itself.

For Death Stranding 2, with the process of recording and composing the soundtrack, when does that process start? Did it start before the game actually began or once Kojima showed you all the cutscenes or concept art and gave you context?

Ludvig Forssell: This is also the reason that we work well together. The process itself is very much akin to what it was when I was in-house with Kojima Productions, so it’s a very iterative process starting fairly early on. We started back in 2022 when we had the first announcement trailer done, so I composed the arrangement for “BB’s Theme” which Troy Baker’s character, Higgs, sings for that trailer. I guess it is Troy Baker rather than Higgs for that version. We did that as sort of a one-off before I delved deeper into actually working on the project itself at the beginning of 2023.



It was pretty early in production, and they were still out shooting performance capture so I also went along for a few trips to help out with that. That’s also a very good input for me as a composer to be there on the stage with the actors and see the performances done way before they actually get implemented and become as pretty as they are now. At that point, if I were to see what it looks like in-game, it will be stick characters, basically. So it’s fantastic to have that visual input at a very early stage. I’d start writing very conceptually at that point because there’s not much that can be implemented, so I’m writing suites of music for certain characters or things that I know will be a part of cutscenes.

I wanted to lean into how music can tell a story, and I think this is gonna make for a much more listenable soundtrack in a way.

So a lot of music was basically written with just the concepts and knowing what the first one was so I kind of knew what was gonna happen in the sequel. That becomes a process of getting more from the game as I’m writing and things come into place. Iteratively, maybe changing a few things that didn’t work that were done initially.

Outside of video games, you also composed the music for an anime movie called Belle. How different is it scoring for a feature-length movie versus a video game?

Ludvig Forssell: There’s nothing that’s gonna take as much time as making a video game unless you’re making a film about somebody growing up which that actually happened and it took them 20 years to make it (Editor’s note: referring to the 2014 movie Boyhood). When it comes to different media like films or anime or anime films, they’re all different in their approach to music and how it’s written. In anime these days, you’ll get an Excel list of tracks and it’s like “this is supposed to be this mood”, five tracks like that and you’re just ticking things off of a list.

I personally enjoy the freedom that I get where the only guidance I get is a couple of words and I can just write a song about those words.

And working for feature films, it’s basically set in stone and every cut is very much set before you even start. That said, they all have their ups and downs. I personally enjoy the freedom that I get where the only guidance I get is a couple of words and I can just write a song about those words. Whereas you’re looking at a perfectly-framed picture of actors moving in a film, you have to follow these different rules. You’re always scoring perfectly to picture which is a way of saying “it will be perfect for that”, but you’re denying the freedoms you could otherwise have in musicality.



Writing for Belle specifically was a process somewhere in-between all of these where I’d write off of storyboards, and sometimes we’d have picture to some extent. But it also being a feature anime film meant that it was closer to working on a live-action film in that [the music] wouldn’t be reused down the line. When it comes to comparing it to video games, it doesn’t really compare at all because it’s not interactive. Writing for interactive media is fundamentally different in how I write, especially, because I’m thinking about every way the music can possibly change interactively with how the players are moving.

On a more personal note, I take it you’re fan of Japanese pop culture and anime. Can you talk about some of your favourite anime scores?

Ludvig Forssell: That’s a hard question because I think when it comes to music, there’s a lot of slop in anime, if I’m being honest. The anime industry needs a few things to change. We’re seeing some changes to shows that are getting more international acclaim now, because a lot of these composers are working off of budgets where there’s no way they’re gonna be able to record live and they have to finish three hours of music in a month. Unfortunately, it means a lot of composers are starved for chances to write good music.

Evan Call’s music for Frieren is one of the outstanding ones of the last couple of years. I feel bad that I’m gonna mention again another foreigner, but my good friend Kevin Penkin’s score for Made in Abyss is one of my favourites. I’ve always been a fan of [Hiroyuki] Sawano’s stuff. I heard an interview where he talked about his Solo Leveling score and wanted to make that more towards a Western audience because the original material was also very famous in the West and was made outside of Japan.

I think when it comes to music, there’s a lot of slop in anime, if I’m being honest. The anime industry needs a few things to change.

There’s a lot out there that I hope we’ll see more experimentation going forward within the medium. I definitely hope to see more challenges towards new stuff.

You can follow Ludvig Forssell on Instagram, X and his official website.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is available right now on PS5. Read our full review here.