Composer Nobuo Uematsu has shared his thoughts on music in modern video games, stating that the current landscape has become less interesting as scores aim to emulate Hollywood movies.
While there’s been much discussion around games emulating films in storytelling and design over the years, less attention has been paid to the evolution of video game music.
It’s a topic which is of particular interest to Nobuo Uematsu, who is best known as the sole composer of the first nine Final Fantasy games and for contributing tracks to many subsequent entries.
In a new interview, Uematsu has said he believes the technical limitations of the SNES and original PlayStation consoles led to more creatively interesting soundtracks. For the PlayStation, while it was possible to stream music due to the CD-ROM format, the loading times and limited memory meant that he continued to use compressed sound samples.
According to Uematsu, the most significant change occurred in the PlayStation 2 era, from Final Fantasy 10 onwards, where game music entered ‘a period where we could pretty much do everything’. The advances in technology also made it ‘easier for me to express different genres of music (like rock and jazz) within game music’.
Uematsu believes modern game music has become less interesting as a result, and suggests that the problem might be that directors and producers are ‘satisfied with movie soundtrack-like music in games, adding: ‘I think people need to have more freedom when creating [game music].’
In a video interview with NewsPicks (translated by Automaton), Uematsu said if game developers keep using Hollywood movie-style scores, the genre of ‘game music cannot develop further’.
‘Game music will become more interesting if composers consider ‘what is something only I can do?’ and use their own knowledge and experience to be truly creative,’ he added.
Interestingly, that’s something we also discussed with Irish composer Eímear Noone, when we interviewed her a few years ago, as she discussed how most current game composers are influenced by, and told to mimic, movie soundtracks.
Elsewhere in the same interview with Uematsu, he stated that the Final Fantasy 10 theme song titled ‘To Zanarkland wasn’t originally intended to be used in the game.
As translated by Audrey on Twitter, the composer explained how the song was originally for a flute recital, but he submitted the track for Final Fantasy 10 as he was being ‘hounded’ by producers for falling behind on a deadline.
‘To Zanarkland was actually not meant to be the theme for Final Fantasy 10,’ he said. ‘There was a flute player from France who originally asked me to write a song for them to play during a recital. When I wrote the piece, I thought perhaps this sounded a bit too sad for a recital. So I set it aside for the time being.
‘Sometime after, when I was making the score for Final Fantasy 10, I was falling behind all the while the producers were hounding me. So since that flute piece was unused, I just kinda meekly handed it to them. They listened to it and said, ‘Yes! This is brilliant!”
Last month, Uematsu said he doesn’t think he will ever compose music for an entire game again because he lacks the ‘physical or mental strength’. However, it appears that this doesn't mean he has lost interest in game music.
