Nobuo Uematsu is a legend. The composer behind the full soundtracks of the first nine mainline titles in the Final Fantasy franchise, plus plentiful contributions to the series ever since, he’s also worked on everything from Blue Dragon and Fantasy Life to Fairy Tail the Movie: The Phoenix Priestess and Phantasmagoria. He’s as talented as he is prolific, and he’s won so many awards that I don’t even know where to begin.
All of this to say, Uematsu-san knows his stuff. And over the past few years, he’s had some interesting opinions on the state of modern game music. Put together, his interviews paint the picture of a man who believes that many modern gaming composers are held back from greatness by producers with overly strict – and even naive – development approaches.
In John Williams, Directors Overly Trust
I’ve been thanking Automaton a ton lately, and for good reason. They’ve been covering splendid stuff. Most recently, they caught an interview with Japanese publication Real Sound in which Nobuo Uematsu spoke at wonderful length about his career and the video games music industry at large.
Automaton also referenced a NewsPicks video interview with Uematsu, from about a year and a half ago, which is where I pulled his critique that gaming music has gotten “boring”!
During his time with Real Sound, Uematsu had some choice words on the state of things. Real Sound’s interviewer dove into the Final Fantasy legend’s related thoughts, asking if he would describe the situation as “stagnation”:
Q: “On the other hand, it seems like you feel a sense of stagnation in the current state of game music. Looking at your interviews over the past few years, I get the feeling that you have a sense of crisis about your creative process?”
A: “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the industry is stagnant, but I do think that directors and producers have too much power in the music department. Even now, game composers aren’t in a position to express their opinions very much, and no matter how much knowledge and skill they have, it’s difficult to convey that.”
Uematsu, then, isn’t committing to a word as loaded as stagnation. But he firmly believes that composers are being bottlenecked in their creative capabilities by higher-ups in the game-making process who think they know better than to allow that creativity to flourish.
“There are very few producers who are well-versed in global entertainment and various musical genres,” Uematsu continued, “so it’s enough to just play cinematic music in the style of John Williams. I want to do something about this situation, but the bigger the content gets, the more difficult it becomes. Personally, I’d like to see more young, energetic indie composers emerge.”
To be clear, I’m sure Uematsu isn’t dissing John Williams or anything. On the off-chance it comes across that way with my excerpt, a full read of Real Sound’s interview should paint a more accurate picture. But I think I get what he’s saying. “Go do a Williams” is the unspoken order of the day, rather than letting composers branch out to their heart’s content.
Thinking back on Nobuo Uematsu’s incredibly ambitious soundtrack diversity – often shifting from genre to genre within individual scores with remarkable results – I try to compare that to many modern soundtracks, and I’m drawing a bit of a blank. Sure, similarly eclectic works exist. And I reckon plenty of modern OSTs are great in their own right; they’re just not nearly as willfully all-over-the-place. If Uematsu’s right about composers wishing they could do more each time, and bring more of themselves into their works, then that’s a real bummer.
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