Remember that time in the 90s when Michael Jordan retired and then un-retired from ruining the lives of his fellow NBA players’ lives? Well, it seems we’ve just had a sort of video game composer analogue of that, with legendary Final Fantasy songsmith Nobuo Uematsu now having said that he’s not planning on retiring from making game music following his work on Fantasian Neo Dimension.
If you’re wondering why he’s had to clarify that, well, a clip posted to the official Fantasian Twitter account yesterday saw the composer say “This is my final project as a composer of video game music. I hope you’ll pick it up and play it! Thanks for your support!”. However, it seems this is one of those messages that’s gotten a bit mixed up in translation from Japanese to English.
“Wait, wait, wait! Everybody calm down,” Uematsu’s since tweeted from his own account, “There seems to be some misunderstanding, but I’m not retiring from video game music work!
“I’m going to cut back a bit on my video game music work because I want to have more time to make the music I want to make. It would be difficult for me to take on the entire soundtrack of a video game because the time commitment for composing would be too long, but I would like to continue to work on jobs such as one theme song.”
So, there you go, not a full retirement, but a scaling back so he can focus on his own stuff while still cranking out the occasional individiual video game tune, rather than full soundtracks. It’s not quite a press release simply stating ‘I’m back’, but to be fair, telling everyone to hold the phone and chill is a wonderful way to kick off a message that you’re never going to have left.
The good news is it obviously sounds like we’ll be able to enjoy more Uematsu bangers in our games for a while yet, until whichever day he potentially decides it’s time to properly hang up his instruments on the gaming front.
