Due to the game not being developed by Square, its influences were very different, encouraging Kikuta to experiment with the score. Similar to his work on the Super Famicom Mana games, Kikuta wanted to push the hardware capacities of the PlayStation's sound card when creating his score. The music budget was ¥30 million. Kikuta composed the music with "different complex styles"; his cited examples were the fusion of in-house music with live orchestra, and combining fusion and folk music. His main inspiration when composing were East European bands such as Värttinä. The track "Quake" used Buddhist chant-inspired lyrics written in Malayan and Thai. The singers performed the lyrics phonetically to create an exotic impression. Recording the music took around a month. Kikuta was able to reserve multiple studios for recording because of the high budget, with his aim being to transform the live performances through computers when transferring them into the game. Conversely, this high studio usage and its toll on the overall budget severely restricted the number of tracks he could create. Due to his unconventional scoring style, which involved difficult cord transitions, there were some conflicts with the performers. Once he explained his idea, they understood and were able to perform their parts. Kikuta has said that he had different challenges for each of his compositions between Secret of Mana and Soukaigi; with Soukaigi, it was the challenge of recording live with Japanese stage musicians. A remembered incident during recording that impressed Kikuta was when guitar soloist Tomohito Aoki arrived in the studio with a severe hangover, but managed to perform his part for the track "Fire Wire" without mistakes after a drink of water. Around 80% of the soundtrack was recorded live. The ending theme "Lovely Strains" was performed by Kotomi Kyono, with lyrics by Yuki Kitayama. An official soundtrack album was released on June 11, 1998. It was published by DigiCube and distributed by the music division of Sony under the catalog number SSCX-10017. The album was around 50 minutes long, and included seventeen tracks. Tracks from the game were later released on the Square Vocal Collection (2001), Square Enix Battle Tracks Vol.2 Square 1996～1998 (2010), and Final Fantasy Tribute ~Thanks~ (2012) arrange albums. Dave Valentine of Video Game Music Online gave the album a rating of four out of five stars; Valentine was almost entirely positive about each track and the extensive use of live