Staff Members :: Totz

Title Reviewer, Biographer, Assistant News Reporter Email Address totzman [at] squareenixmusic.com Real Name Eduardo Joined Site May 2003 Favourite Game Music Artists Masashi Hamauzu Yôko Shimomura Yoshitaka Hirota Junya Nakano Koichi Sugiyama Michiko Naruke

Date of Birth February 13, 1986 Place of Residence Rio de Janiero, Brazil Occupation Student Favourite Musical Styles Impressionism General Interests Lost Writing Composing Reading String Quartets Pretending To Know French

Biography

I've been playing games for a long, long time now. I probably began playing around age five, when my grandparents bought me an Atari. Needless to say, I was hooked. Well, as hooked as an impressionable five year-old can be to Frogger, anyway. Years go by, and so do video games. After the Atari, came the NES, and I'm sure everyone can guess what game I used to play the most, right? Yep, it was nothing other than Super Mario Bros. Obviously, I could care less about who wrote the music and who created the game. A couple of years later, I got a Super Nintendo.

And then comes 1996, the fateful year: I play a little masterpiece by the name of Super Mario RPG. Since I was a dumb 10-year-old, my English wasn't good. To be honest, I didn't speak a word of English, so I could barely enjoy the plot. However, that motivated me, and I began taking English lessons shortly thereafter. Still, I had no idea who this Square company was, but I knew one thing: the Mushroom Kingdom track was fantastic. A year later, a friend of mine purchased Final Fantasy VII. He was telling me about lots of cool stuff about the game, so I got curious and when I finally bought my own PlayStation, I was able to play it. I fell in love with the game, and this prompted me to begin looking for other Square Enix titles, now with a decent English vocabulary.

Strangely enough, music was never really a huge part of my life back then. I began taking piano lessons around 2002, because I thought it would be great to be able to play an instrument. So, even though I was quite an inexperienced player, I began searching for Square sheets on the net, which, in turn, led me to Square Enix Music Archive. But it wasn't until after the great crash that I joined the forums. Truth be told, if I had never joined the forums, I wouldn't be composing as much as I am now, and surely I wouldn't know half as much as I know now about things. Not only about music, but things in general. It's amazing what you can learn simply by posting in a forum. And for that, I am thankful to everyone who has helped me get where I am now. Not only that, but because I've begun a deeper analysis on video game music, my interest in music grew, and a lot. And that, coupled with the fact that one of my idols is a video game musician, has made me want to get a major in Composition. Will I even be able to go to Music College? I don't know, but hopefully.

Right now, I'm studying to become a translator/writer, so I can pursue my first passion, which is to write for games (and who knows, maybe even for Lost, that awesome TV show). The VG market down here isn't all that developed yet, so by knowing another language, my chances in landing jobs in other countries increase. I have also developed a (rather masochistic) taste for rendering MIDIs into MP3s, using a few different softwares. So, don't be alarmed if someday you see me credited as a synth operator. Yeah, I have crazy dreams. What is not crazy, though, is enjoying this site and our reviews, so I hope you do just that.

Reviews Written

Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII Original Soundtrack
Dirge of Cerberus Final Fantasy VII: Redemption - Gackt
Final Fantasy VII Reunion Tracks
Final Fantasy XII: Kiss Me Good-Bye - Angela Aki
Front Mission 3 Original Soundtrack
Kingdom Hearts Original Soundtrack
Musashiden II BLADEMASTER Original Soundtrack
Ogre, All Sounds of
Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song-: Minuet - Masayoshi Yamazaki
Romancing SaGa -Minstrel Song- Original Soundtrack
Shadow Hearts II Original Soundtrack
Shadow Hearts Arrange Tracks, Near Death Experience,
Tales of Symphonia Original Soundtrack
Valkyrie Profile Arrange Album