Final Fantasy’s legendary composer doesn’t have the strength to keep going

Nobuo Uematsu is one of gaming’s legendary composers, recently working on the themes for Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and its Remake predecessor. While Uematsu isn’t going to leave the video game industry anytime soon, the composer said he won’t be making an entire game’s OST anymore.

Speaking with Zeit Online (via VGC), Uematsu said that he will still be making the main themes of Final Fantasy games going forward. However, when it comes to composing for full games, Uematsu said he just doesn’t have the physical or mental strength to do that anymore.

“As far as Final Fantasy is concerned, I’m still involved by writing the main themes for the games,” Uematsu explains. “But I don’t think I’ll compose music for a whole game again. You would have to give it full throttle for two or three years. And I don’t think I have the physical and mental strength to do it anymore.”

Considering everything Uematsu has done for the industry, we don’t blame him for only working on various aspects of a game’s soundtrack. We can’t imagine working on an entire game’s OST, as that requires coming up with themes for battles, towns, events, and menus, among other things.

Uematsu is mostly known for his work on the Final Fantasy series, though he has also worked on games like Blue Dragon and Super Smash Bros. for the Wii. The last time Uematsu composed a whole game’s soundtrack was Fantasian, an Apple-exclusive RPG that fans want on other systems.

Fans hoping to see more of Uematsu in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth should know that he’s only working on the game’s main theme. However, Uematsu did work on the original Final Fantasy VII, so fans can expect to hear several remixes based on his original music. This worked very well for Final Fantasy VII Remake, so we hope the same method works on Rebirth.

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Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is coming to PS5 on February 29 and has already received rave reviews. Gamers can also check out our review of the RPG, where we gave it a spectacular 9 out of 10.