The frontman for Year 200X, the band that played before The Earthbound Papas this year at MAGFest, dedicated their performance (or one of their songs, I forget) to Nobuo Uematsu, stating (paraphrasing), “This is for the man who helped compose the soundtrack to our childhoods.” Amen. Uematsu is a total gangster. I might dedicate a post to him later.
But now, I want to tell a quick story about my favorite game music composer — Yasunori Mitsuda — and share a few of my favorite songs he composed. (Non-video-game-nerds: You’ll still be cool even if you listen to the music (which is awesome, by the way))
Anyway, I found out last night that he’s on Facebook. And it’s not even a fan page or whatever. It’s Mitsuda’s actual Facebook account. So I friended him, and shortly after, he accepted. I wrote him a quick message wishing him happy birthday, and he wrote back. Granted, it was a short message and a short reply, but still, we’re talking about Yasunori-god-of-music-Mitsuda! It kind of made my night.
Mitsuda’s been actively making game music for nearly twenty years now, so he’s done quite a few games. In recent years he’s also put out some independent albums, which I really also like. But what first got me introduced and in love with his music were from games.
The first game he scored (and for which I initially developed a man-crush on him) was Chrono Trigger. Here’s the main theme.
The next two come from my favorite game, Xenogears.
And this next one is actually my favorite song of all time…
Here’s a live performance of the main theme from Chrono Cross.
And I’ll wrap this up with two tracks from Xenosaga Episode 1.
Acoustic guitars in this one are killer.
So, what’d you think???
Mitsuda’s also my favorite living composer — and thanks to your recommendation, we’re friends on facebook now, too. I was a bit disappointed that he didn’t do more on the Xenoblade soundtrack – I try to listen to everything new he does.
My personal favorite song is Time’s Scar (main theme from CC) and I just love the Chrono Cross soundtrack – its the most-played album in my collection by a long shot (have fallen asleep to Dreams on a Shore Bordering Another World many, many times). I even wrote a review of it years ago on amazon
It was hard to narrow it down to just five songs. There are, of course, lots of others. Actually, I don’t usually list June Mermaid among my favorites, but I just listened to it earlier tonight and I was like, “Man, that’s a really good song.” For me, the only song that definitely had to be on there was Creid. But yeah, lots and lots of great material.