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How Capcom Made Velkhana’s Sounds And Iceborne’s Music

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Capcom pulled back the curtain on how it builds a monster’s voice from scratch — and it starts with smashing things in a basement.

In an exclusive video feature published July 15, 2019, Game Informer’s Ben Hanson and Jeff Cork traveled to Capcom’s headquarters in Osaka to find out how Monster Hunter World: Iceborne actually sounds the way it does. They sat down with sound designer Wakana Kuroiwa, composer Akihiko Narita, and executive director Kaname Fujioka, who walked through the Foley work and scoring choices behind the expansion’s flagship Elder Dragon, Velkhana, and its icy new frontier.

• Kuroiwa demonstrated Capcom’s Foley process in a basement recording space, where the team crushes, breaks, and scrapes real materials to capture the crunch of ice, snow footfalls, and frozen armor rather than pulling from digital libraries.
• Velkhana’s roar and breath attacks were built by layering traditional animal vocalizations with custom-recorded high-frequency screeching and brittle ice effects to give the dragon an “elegant yet terrifying” presence.
• Composer Akihiko Narita said Iceborne’s score deliberately moves away from the base game’s “cool and mysterious” ambient tone, leaning on prominent piano to underline warmth and human resilience in the story.

Building Ice From Scratch

The base Monster Hunter: World soundscape was mostly about atmosphere — wind, distant creatures, the sense of being small in a wild place. Iceborne’s Hoarfrost Reach demanded something Kuroiwa’s team couldn’t just synthesize convincingly at a desk. So they went physical: real ice blocks cracked and scraped on mic, packed snow crushed underfoot, metal and cloth dragged across cold surfaces to mimic frozen armor plating. Kuroiwa showed Hanson and Cork the actual objects used to fake footsteps in snowdrifts and the splintering of ice shelves that show up whenever hunters trek through the new region.

That hands-on approach extends to the expansion’s new monster roster beyond Velkhana, including the shark-like Beotodus, which needed its own set of frozen-terrain movement sounds layered over its base creature vocalizations.

Engineering Velkhana’s Roar

Velkhana is Iceborne’s cover monster, and Capcom treated its voice like a signature. Instead of a single source recording, Kuroiwa’s team stacked traditional animal vocalizations underneath custom high-frequency screeches and brittle, splintering ice textures — the same kind of material recorded downstairs in the Foley space — to make the dragon sound simultaneously graceful and threatening. The goal, according to the team, wasn’t just menace; it was elegance layered over danger, matching Velkhana’s design as an icy, almost regal Elder Dragon rather than a straightforward brute.

The base game’s score leaned “cool and mysterious” — Iceborne needed to feel warm instead.

Narita’s Pivot Toward Piano

Composer Akihiko Narita laid out the philosophy shift for Iceborne’s soundtrack directly to Hanson and Cork. Where Monster Hunter: World‘s score sat back and let ambient orchestral tones carry the sense of untamed wilderness, Iceborne’s story — hunters banding together against brutal cold — called for something more emotionally direct. Narita said he pushed piano to the front of the large-scale symphonic arrangements specifically to convey that warmth and camaraderie, a deliberate contrast to the exploratory detachment of the base game’s music.

Fans of the franchise’s broader trailer and preview coverage can find more expansion breakdowns and gaming video features filed under InfoSearched’s Trending Games section, alongside other behind-the-scenes production pieces like the Star Wars Hotel construction status update that similarly goes past the marketing pitch to show the actual build process.

Significance for Wildlife Hunters

None of this is incidental polish. Iceborne is Capcom’s biggest paid expansion for a game that had already sold over 12 million copies worldwide by mid-2019, and the studio’s Foley-heavy, physically-recorded approach to Velkhana and the Hoarfrost Reach is the same philosophy that’s made Monster Hunter’s creature design feel tactile rather than generic. Kuroiwa’s basement full of ice chunks and scrap metal is a small, weird detail, but it’s the kind of thing that explains why a roar in this franchise never sounds like stock library audio.

Iceborne launched for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 6, 2019, with a PC release to follow, and Velkhana’s voice — screech, ice-crack, and all — was the sound Capcom built its whole marketing push around going into that window.