Dear Square Enix, make Takeharu Ishimoto your prime composer

[Kenryoku_Maxis]

pastro243 said:

Kenryoku_Maxis said:

blaydcor said:
@g-value; how the hell can you possibly say Uematsu is overrated, especially only citing "some tracks" from 10 as proof. Have you played Final Fantasy 6? 9?

Uematsu is overrated.  I admit, he's a good composer and I listen to his stuff just like everyone else.  But he's theJohn Williams of gaming music.  Everyone known who he is because of the works he's tiedto, but not every song he's written is holy.  About half the stuff he writes is pure gold, while the other half is exactly as its meant to be, background filler music that you skip when listening to it outside of the game.

When listening to other artists works such as Koichi Sugiyama, Yasunori Mitsuda, Yoko Shimomura, Yoko Kanno, Jun Ishikawa, Kenji Yamamoto....you don't skip tracks when listening to these artists.  All their songs are good.

I agree with that, though I think Yoko shimomura suffers from the same at least in Kingdom Hearts OSTs.

Yoko Kanno was great in the Vision of Escaflowne, but VG music is different than anime or movie because in VG some tracks are just background fillers and not peices intended to add much to the game.

Of Kenji Yamamoto Ive only listened to the DB and DBZ OST, which I think have good songs but overall they arent anything spectacular.

Of the others I havent listened carefully any of their works, Ive recognized DQVIII music as awesome so thats a point to Sugiyama.

I think there is no composer that doesnt have meh songs, but I think the ones above and Uematsu are on the same league, other I would add is Kow Otani, he made Shadow of the Colossus and that is what I consider one of the best OST in videogames and e also made the music for Gundam Wing. I hope they have him for The last Guardian, but considering Ico music was made by Michiru Oshima(FMA OST) then I guess they will have no problem finding a good composer if he isnt there.

I was actually speaking of Kenji Yamamoto who did the music for Metroid and some other Nintendo games.  I believe they are two different people.

And Yoko Kannos music for video games is still just as good as her other works.  She adds a lot of flavor to those songs which would otherwise be 'filler'.  Much like the music in Turn A Gundam or Record of Lodoss War (which both sound similar and had long periods of dialogue with music as background).

And while I can't especially say no composer has a 'meh' song, I will say that I judge a good compser based on two things.  1) How much I like their music on a personal level and 2) How much of the music I enjoy listening to without skipping any tracks.  And of any composer, Koichi Sugiyama is the one (game) composer which I have listened to where every single song is good, and I never feel like skipping any songs.  Only other composer who's ever had this same effect for me was Joe Hisaishi, but he only does Anime and Live Action works.