Nobuo Uematsu | Code Like It's 198x

Nobuo Uematsu never had music lessons. His older sister learned the piano; he did not, and he could not read the scores she played from. “So the only thing left was to make up my own and play with that,” he told his home prefecture of Kōchi, “and I started music in my own way.” That self-taught musician wrote the music for the first nine Final Fantasy games, almost all of it by himself, on sound chips that gave him five voices on the NES, eight on the Super NES and 24 on the PlayStation. By the 2000s orchestras were playing it in concert halls, and he was playing it as rock with a band of his own.

Fast facts

Born: 1959, in Kōchi Prefecture, Japan.
Joined: Square in 1986.
Best-known work: the music of Final Fantasy (1987) and its sequels to Final Fantasy IX; the main themes of later games, including Final Fantasy X.
After Square: left Square Enix in 2004 and set up his own company, Smile Please; worked with Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Mistwalker.
On stage: keyboards in The Black Mages, a rock band playing Final Fantasy music; co-founder of the Distant Worlds concerts.

Before Square

Uematsu grew up in Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku. When he was in about the fourth year of primary school, his sister half dragged him to a concert by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, and it was, he said, “the first time in my life that music brought me to tears”. He went on to study at Kanagawa University.

He wanted to make a living from music and took whatever work came. He told the Australian magazine Hyper in 2005 that he started with short pieces for commercials and music for low-budget adult films. “When I was in the porno business, I was told my music was too beautiful.” Then “I had a friend at Square who told me about a game they were making and asked if I wanted to help out. And it went from there.” He joined Square in 1986.

Scoring Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy came out on the Famicom in December 1987, and Uematsu wrote its music. The console’s sound hardware, the APU, offered two pulse channels, a triangle, a noise channel and a sample channel. In the first four games, Uematsu later said, you can hear “short sequences of music” looping.

The Super Famicom gave him eight channels of sampled sound, and with Final Fantasy V and VI he noticed the change in how the team wrote. “In V and VI, you’ll notice the people creating the music are becoming aware of film soundtracks,” he told Computer and Video Games in 1997. “At the time we all realised that we are going for something else than just a game.”

Final Fantasy VII moved to the PlayStation, and its three CDs could have held recorded music. Uematsu chose not to use them that way. The game’s music was still played by the console’s own sound chip, which could play 24 notes at once: he kept eight for sound effects and wrote with the other 16, enough to voice a two-handed piano chord and still have room for other instruments. “Some people say ‘Since you’re using CD-ROM, why don’t you do a studio recording, at least for the movies?’” he said. “I wouldn’t prefer making portions of the game gorgeous. I would rather concentrate on balancing out the quality of music throughout the game.” In the field music he tried something he called “my personal experimentation”: he dropped the rousing, set-off-on-your-journey tunes of earlier role-playing games for music that could “rise melodiously” or “make you feel insecure”. The director, Yoshinori Kitase, later told Retro Gamer that the team simply showed Uematsu the character designs and the scenario and let him “create the score comparatively freely”.

Reviewers outside Japan noticed. GamePro’s review of the Japanese release praised its “stirring soundtrack by composer Nobuo Uematsu”, and a reader wrote to Edge in 1998 that it was “the only 4 CD set soundtrack of a videogame I am ever likely to own”. Final Fantasy VIII (1999) went further: its main theme, “Liberi Fatali”, is written for orchestra and choir, and its soundtrack includes a recorded pop song, “Eyes on Me”, sung by Faye Wong.

Uematsu wrote almost everything for the first nine games. For Final Fantasy X (2001) he was one of three credited composers, with Junya Nakano and Masashi Hamauzu. He explained why to Hyper: after Final Fantasy IX, a new team started work on X while the previous game was still being made, “so there had to be more people to come in and help with the songs. It was impossible to do it all myself.” Asked which of his pieces he was proudest of, he named “the main theme from Final Fantasy X”. For Final Fantasy XII he wrote the main theme and chose to work on the film Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children instead; most of that game’s music was by Hitoshi Sakimoto.

Concerts and The Black Mages

Final Fantasy music had long been released on album in Japan, including a solo album by Uematsu. In the 2000s it moved into concert halls. On 10 May 2004 the Los Angeles Philharmonic played “Dear Friends – Music from Final Fantasy” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. Time magazine named him one of the “Innovators” in its “Time 100: The Next Wave – Music” feature.

He also played the music himself. The Black Mages were a rock band of Square staff, with Uematsu and Kenichiro Fukui on keyboards, Michio Okamiya and Tsuyoshi Sekito on guitars, Keiji Kawamori on bass and Arata Hanyuda on drums. When Hyper saw them at Club Citta in Kawasaki in January 2005, just after the release of their second album, The Skies Above, the crowd was on its feet from the first number, the band’s version of Final Fantasy III’s “The Rocking Grounds”. Uematsu, Hyper reported, “looked positively ecstatic”.

After Square

A few days after that Hyper interview in late 2004, Uematsu announced that he was leaving Square Enix to run his own studio, Smile Please. He said he had left on good terms and would keep writing game music, make CDs and play concerts with The Black Mages. He became one of the freelancers working with his old colleague Hironobu Sakaguchi at Mistwalker, and wrote the scores for its Xbox 360 role-playing games Blue Dragon (2006) and Lost Odyssey (2007). Edge noted an Iron Maiden-style rock song over Blue Dragon’s boss battles.

In 2007 Uematsu and the conductor Arnie Roth co-founded Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy, an orchestral concert series first performed in Stockholm that year. The organisers count more than 250 performances since, in halls including the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Tokyo International Forum.

In September 2018 Uematsu announced that he was stopping work for the rest of the year. Fatigue, he wrote, had made it “mentally and physically difficult” to continue, and he could not say when he would return. He went on to write the music for Mistwalker’s Fantasian (2021), which Sakaguchi approached as possibly his last large project.

Sources

Kōchi Prefecture, tourism ambassador interview no. 10, Nobuo Uematsu (web, published March 2025): born 1959 in Kōchi Prefecture; no piano lessons, unlike his sister, and making up his own music; the Vienna Boys’ Choir concert in about his fourth year of primary school; Kanagawa University; joining Square in 1986. https://www.pref.kochi.lg.jp/doc/interview10/
Hyper issue 136, February 2005, pp. 39–41: interview (commercials and film music before Square; the friend at Square; MIDI scores “restricted to 24 sounds”; sharing the work from Final Fantasy X; Final Fantasy XII and Advent Children; the Final Fantasy X main theme; his departure from Square Enix and Smile Please; Time’s “Innovators”).
Hyper issue 139, May 2005, p. 80: The Black Mages at Club Citta, Kawasaki, January 2005; the line-up; The Skies Above.
Computer and Video Games issue 191, October 1997, p. 59: interview with Uematsu (eight channels on the Super NES, 24 on the PlayStation with 16 for music; the internal sound source instead of studio recordings; film soundtracks from V and VI; the field music).
100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die (Retro Gamer), p. 118: Yoshinori Kitase on working with Uematsu.
GamePro issue 104, May 1997, p. 35: Final Fantasy VII review.
Edge issue 63, October 1998, p. 102: reader’s letter on the four-CD soundtrack.
Edge issue 92, Christmas 2000, p. 61: Faye Wong’s “Eyes on Me” in Final Fantasy VIII.
Hyper issue 107, September 2002, p. 35: “Liberi Fatali”, the main theme of Final Fantasy VIII.
IGN Unplugged issue 9, December 2001, p. 13: Final Fantasy X’s three composers.
Hyper issue 134, December 2004, p. 25: Final Fantasy XII’s main theme by Uematsu and most of its music by Hitoshi Sakimoto.
Total Control issue 5, January 2000, p. 113: soundtrack albums in Japan and Uematsu’s solo album.
Edge issue 136, May 2004, p. 20, and Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 178, May 2004, p. 85: “Dear Friends” at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, 10 May 2004.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 187, January 2005, p. 46: Uematsu leaves Square Enix to start his own studio.
Edge issue 160, March 2006, p. 48: Uematsu as a freelancer with Mistwalker. Edge issue 179, September 2007, p. 79: Blue Dragon’s score. Edge issue 182, December 2007, p. 43: Lost Odyssey.
Distant Worlds, “About the concert” (web): co-founded by Uematsu and Arnie Roth in 2007; premiere in Stockholm; more than 250 performances. https://www.ffdistantworlds.com/about
“Final Fantasy Composer Nobuo Uematsu Goes on Hiatus for the Rest of 2018 Due to Illness”, Anime News Network, 19 September 2018, and “Nobuo Uematsu Illness Concerns Lead to Hiatus Through 2018”, PlayStation LifeStyle, 20 September 2018 (web, secondary). https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2018-09-19/final-fantasy-composer-nobuo-uematsu-goes-on-hiatus-for-the-rest-of-2018-due-to-illness/.137033 https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2018/09/20/nobuo-uematsu-illness/
Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and Fantasian: dates as set out in the Hironobu Sakaguchi entry.