Meguro composed the music for Persona 5 Royal, a score built on jazz, funk and vocal tracks in English performed over game systems. Its most distinctive achievement is functional: menu music, battle themes and social scenes all belong to the same musical world, so the interface itself feels composed rather than assembled.
He worked as an in house composer at a Japanese studio for decades, scoring its demon summoning series through several generations of hardware. He plays guitar and writes rock and jazz idioms directly rather than through orchestral arrangement, and his scores are built for repetition, since a player will hear a battle theme hundreds of times.
Recurring subjects: rebellion scored with attitude, vocal tracks used as thematic statement rather than as background, and functional music given the same care as cinematic cues. He writes hooks that survive constant repetition, and he arranges the same theme across many idioms within one game.
His scores are among the most recognised in Japanese role playing games and are performed at concerts worldwide. The music is a substantial part of why the series found an audience far outside Japan, and its willingness to use vocal pop and jazz where the genre expected orchestral scoring has been widely imitated since.
For listeners who want game music that works as an album. Suited to anyone who played the school year role playing games, and to those interested in jazz and funk idioms in interactive scoring.
