Regarding the musical monolith of the Final Fantasy franchise, this title screams for a much more fulfilling post involving an entire autobiography and musical analysis, but I thought instead I'd just show my points and hopefully inspire some people to check out some of his music - With or without the games they are attached to. Preferably, without.
That's not to say the games aren't worth it - the FF series is probably my favourite of all time. But sometimes, it's just a good thing to sit back and appreciate that secret little thing in the background that makes it all playable for 200 hours a pop, to begin with.
Why Nobuo Uematsu is so great
Nobuo's talent is a lot like The Beatles. The Beatles were not necessarily trained musicians, and it was irrelevant anyway. Their offering to the world was strikingly catchy and memorable tunes the catchiness levels of which have rarely been seen, and certainly not so frequently with release after release of timeless classics.
This doesn't, to me, make the Beatles music particularly amazing in and of themselves, but in context of a relentless pummeling of little melodies and motifs that somehow engrave themselves into a little patch of your brain for all eternity within the first few seconds, well, that's a superpower.
Nobuo also happens to have this superpower, but I would argue to an even greater degree.
When you think of prolific musicians, you might think of Tangerine Dream, a band which has some ridiculous amount of albums over 500 last I checked.
Or perhaps Mozart who wrote 600 works in his short, 35-year life. Or Telemann, notorious for having written over 3,000 classical pieces.
However, the more you learn about these ideas, the more you understand how. They typically followed a strict set of rules pretty much created by Bach (also quite prolific), and once you know these rules, you can whip out an entire piece overnight. Indeed there are many stories of such a thing happening.
Symphonies were shorter and simpler back then compared to the days of Beethoven and certainly the modern-day. Wagner, by contrast, spent the better part of 25 years creating a 4-opera cycle.
So, it's impressive, yes. It's no small feat. So let's consider Nobuo's music with all this in mind.
In my favorite game, Final Fantasy 9, there is a tracklist of 109 different tracks. In the next game, FFX, the playlist was about 4.5 hours long.
That's a Wagnerian Opera in duration, something that he kept up year after year, releasing his own albums, heavy metal covers with himself on the organ and so on (Again, not a post going into details).
What makes this the most inspiring to me is just how many contrasting ideas he kept churning out like an overproduction of saliva in your mouth.
Nobuo was largely influenced by Jazz, but the sheer range, the diversity of sound and style is phenomenal. In any given game, he will cover a complete range. I mean, the proof is in the pudding, having successful J-pop songs released and hitting high in the charts, orchestral concerts year after year playing his music, and heavy metal concerts doing the same thing.
How many musicians can claim such a trinity?
But that's not what started me writing this post in the first place. I started this when I was reminded of how each individual track is so, damn, flexible, that it can be re-interpreted and re-orchestrated almost infinitely.
This is likely because it was necessary for his job. With such huge games, the concept of a Leitmotif (a short musical idea representing a character, such as Darth Vader, or something else), was absolutely necessary. Nobuo's superpower was the ability to create Leitmotifs like you create dandruff.
Listening to a fraction of a second of any given track in a game, and I will immediately know the scene or section of the game, the character it represents and probably a lot more, simply because it was there running along in the background.
This unburdens the music in away. With such power of recognition a la The Beatles, you can now extract those leitmotifs and graft them elsewhere, and it still forms a recognizable track.
Tracks can also be completely updated from the cheap-ass, extremely limited MIDI of the '90s, to the modern-day full-blow orchestral force that we see in the newly released Re-make of Final Fantasy VII.
Let's have a little Listening Party to see what I mean.
Let's go with a supremely beautiful track (I'm not in the mood for the heavy metal tracks, though if you are, be my guest and enjoy this beast.
To be clear, if this brings you to tears, bear in mind that he can excrete this level of emotion on his daily trips to the toilet.
Take your pick from the list!
Flowers Blooming in the Church
Original
Piano Version (Try not to cry)
Remake Version
This song has some beauty you will rarely find in games, regardless of what form you put it in!
I hope you enjoyed the listening and learned something about the original composer's capacity to capture our imaginations and bring out our emotions. There's so much more to talk about, following the stylistic diversity aforementioned, orchestration talent and more, but I thought I'd take a different approach today.