I’ve lost a lot of the enthusiasm I had for the guy over the years. While sure, most FF OSTs are awesome, I feel he peaked pretty early on and then just... never recaptured that. The OSTs to V, VI, VII and IX are incredible almost in their entireties, with IX’s standing out for not only its variety, but also use of actual medieval techniques to make the setting really feel old-timey.



Buuuuuuut you can tell that soundtrack burnt him out completely because by FFX, he is by far the least inspired contributor to that game’s soundtrack. All of his tracks from that game sound like they just regurgitate old motifs from other games in a way that just doesn’t work together at all. The battle theme is the prime example of it - it isn’t structured cohesively at all, is slow to the point that it loses any sense of urgency, and combined with the very poor instrument samples it just makes for an incredibly painful musical experience that gets repeated as nauseam throughout the game. It feels like Uematsu whispering “kill me” into my ear every time it comes up.

I think really the biggest problem is that by that time he’s just outgrown his signature FF style and all of his contributions in that old style just feel wrong. Compare his soundtrack to the Last Story - who may have less general appeal because of less focus on strong melodies and more general atmosphere and a cinematic style - which works well and feels like Uematsu doing what he wants to again, to the incredibly bad songs he’s written for FF later like Kiss Me Goodbye or that Godawful theme for FFXV: Comrades, or what I consider his absolute worst work and made me disillusioned towards him in the first place: the FFXIV 1.0 soundtrack. Much like the FFX battle theme, it just regurgitates everything people supposedly want out of an FF soundtrack, whether it works together at all or not.


Oh yeah and the entire FFVIII soundtrack requires a thorough rearrangement and I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that so many people consider it not just good but the best.

So yes, imo, Uematsu can and has done a lot of wrong. Don’t get me wrong - he’s still a good composer who’s the reason why I got into video game music so hard, but I kind of feel his legacy is dragging him down a bit and I wish he could just write more new stuff without the pressure of having to recapture what made people love his old music.