Nobuo Uematsu: A legacy of Videogame Music

It’s the early 2000s, and an eight-year-old boy is watching his older brother playing a role-playing videogame called Final Fantasy VII, sometimes for hours. To him, the cuboidal pixel graphics were stunning, the characters were unique, and the music was unlike anything else he had ever heard. How could a soundtrack for a videogame have such an emotional impact, such attention to the story’s themes and characters’ personalities reflected in the music? This was the work of the legendary Japanese videogame composer, Nobuo Uematsu.

Born in 1959, his interest in music started when he first heard world-class performing groups like the Vienna Boys Choir and Philharmonic. Having received no formal musical training, he began teaching himself music by messing around with household instruments, like the guitar and piano, by the age of 9. In 1986, he picked up a side-job to compose music for small videogame projects at a burgeoning game company called Square. Soon after, a director at Square asked him to write music for a new project called Final Fantasy, the series that would define his career into the present day.

2026 marks Nobuo Uematsu’s 40-year career as a composer, and since I have a handful of tracks of his I share here at KCME, I wanted to share a little insight about what makes him such a great composer. Besides writing music for television shows, films, and playing in a rock band in his spare time, he is mostly known for his work on the popular Final Fantasy series of videogames, spanning numerous titles and spinoffs, and well over a thousand individual music tracks across the series.

One of the tracks that he says cannot be skipped at every Final Fantasy orchestral concert is “One-Winged Angel”, the fan-favorite theme for the antagonist of Final Fantasy VII. Wanting to create something different for this theme, he took inspiration from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. He began writing down short musical tidbits every day until he had about 20 or 30 measures. He then rearranged them into the final score, a powerful and foreboding theme with striking harmonic progressions and a John Williams-esque choir to boot (think “Duel of the Fates” from The Phantom Menace). He called this compositional approach a “puzzle scheme”. Although “One-Winged Angel” is one of the most popular themes in the series, he has never used this approach since.

I always enjoy sharing music by Nobuo Uematsu here on KCME, and I hope you enjoyed this slightly more in-depth look at one of my favorite videogame composers.