Early life Born in Tokyo, Japan, on July 5, 1968, Ito became interested in music at the age of four. He 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. He was also interested in
Electone music, but was discouraged from learning it by a piano teacher. By the time he began composing at the age of ten, he had learned to play alto saxophone, clarinet, and piano, and was interested in becoming a singer/songwriter. When he was close to graduating from college, he decided to pursue a career in composing music; when he asked a professor for advice, the professor recommended becoming a video game music composer, given the recent success in Japan of
Dragon Quest III. During March 1990, after applying to several video game companies including
HAL Laboratory, Ito began working at
Square.
Career His first project was a co-effort that same year between himself and
Nobuo Uematsu for the
Game Boy title
Final Fantasy Legend II (
SaGa 2). It led the following year to the first album release of his music,
All Sounds of SaGa, which was a combination album of
The Final Fantasy Legend,
Final Fantasy Legend II, and
Final Fantasy Legend III; all of Ito's work on
Legend II appeared on the album. Shortly after in 1991, he composed his first solo work, the soundtrack for
Final Fantasy Adventure (
Seiken Densetsu), another Game Boy title. He 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. These soundtracks sparked Ito's first arranged albums; the first game was arranged in a French musical style by Masaaki Mizuguchi, while the other two were arranged by Ryou Fukui and Taro Iwashiro, respectively, into orchestral pieces. Ito was originally scheduled to continue on with the
Mana series and compose the soundtrack to
Seiken Densetsu 2 (
Secret of Mana), 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. 1995 marked the first time since he started composing that he worked on a title outside the
Mana or
SaGa series; he composed the music for
Koi wa Balance and was a member of an eight-person team for
Tobal No. 1. He 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''. He left Square in 2001 to become a freelance composer. He has said that this move was in order to give him the flexibility to work on more than just video game music. The first work that Ito composed after leaving Square was the soundtrack to
Culdcept II, which he regards as his best work. He attributes this feeling both to the fact that it was his first freelance piece and that he handled all aspects of the music production, from composition through arrangement and sound production. From there he returned to working with Square and the
Mana series with the remake of his second soundtrack,
Final Fantasy Adventure, into the soundtrack of
Sword of Mana. It was an act he would repeat two years later for Square, now Square Enix, with the remake of
Romancing SaGa,
Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song. He has since returned to the
Mana series twice, with the soundtracks to
Children of Mana and
Dawn of Mana. All of the video game soundtracks that he has composed since the third expansion pack for
Cross Gate in 2004 have been with the assistance of other composers except for 2007's
Hero Must Die, though during those years he has branched out from video games into composing and producing albums and singles for performers as well as composing music for plays and concerts. He has also released an album of piano pieces that he has composed; only two of the eight tracks are from his video game works. ==Legacy==