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Nobuo Uematsu Splitting With Square Enix
FreyarHunter writes "According to Gamespot, Nobuo Uematsu and Square will be separating. Nobuo was the person responsible for the mostly awe-inspiring music for the Final Fantasy games.
The report indicates that he will be moving to a company called "Smile Please". While this was first thought to be a rumor it was later announced on Uematsu 's fansite that it is true.
He states that it isn't "quitting", but more of a graduation. There are hints in this article saying he will still do work for Square, but at his own pace. The good news is that he still plans to write more music for video games, perform more concerts, and produce the second Black Mages Album."
Hope this isn't offtopic, but it is on my mind (since I'm listening to it at work). This website: http://www.ocremix.org/ posts remixes of classic titles. I especially like the Chronotrigger remixes, but it has A LOT of Final Fantasy remixes as well. Most of them are a big salute to Nubuo Uematsu's original mixes. Hope the people who care enough to read this article enjoy the remixes as much as I do.
Info.
Check WinMX or a similar P2P service for samples.
Couldn't find any samples but:
Info
purchase @ Amazon
purchase @ Yesasia
Hope this helps
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
There are several albums that 'regroup' the various music, although most of them are arranged or orchestrated.
'20020220 music from FINAL FANTASY' is a two-disc recording of the February 2002 concert performed by the Tokyo Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. It's got music from all the FF games from the first to the tenth, although the later ones (especially like FF8) get more play time than the earlier ones.
'Final Fantasy 1987-1994' is a collection of songs taken from various arrange albums (like Celtic Moon and Dear Friends) during that period.
There are also 'N Generation' and 'S Generation', which are North-American collections of FF songs broken into two periods (the 'N Generation' being the Nintendo period and the 'S Generation' being the Sony one). I think some of the songs on these are arranged, but i'm not sure.
'FINAL FANTASY SONG BOOK mahoroba' is a vocal album with songs from different Final Fantasy games being sung by Manami Kiyota.
If Vocal Collections count, there are two or three of those, and, while they're entirely arranged and have added lyrics, they're probably my favourite albums out of all the ones i've mentioned so far. They're pretty rad.
And then the only other ones i know of are the 'POTION' albums (there's two of them), which i think are just compilations of arranged versions of the most relaxing songs from Final Fantasy.
Fix: http://www.altpop.com/stc/reviews/ffbm.htm
Final Fantasy: The Hollywood Symphony Orchestra and Chorus Perform The Music of Nobuo Uematsu
There's also a bunch of other soundtracks for the individual games at Amazon, though they're mostly imports.
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These aren't the droids you're looking for.
Uematsu has basically decided to go freelance.
Many ex-Square composers are now freelance.
Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Xenogears, Xenosaga, etc.)
Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy Tactics, Breath of Fire V, Gradius V, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, etc.)
Yoko Shiminoura (Legend of Mana, Parasite Eve, Kingom Hearts, etc.)
Kenji Ito (Romancing Saga, Saga Frontier, etc.)
A word of warning: the album mentioned above sucks. Big time. I wish I had read these reviews before wasting my money... (and yes, it is the same album - "Perform the Music of Nobuo Uematsu" is "A Musical Tribute" repackaged and with one extra and sucky track).
You'd be much better with "The N Generation" and "The S Generation" albums - compilations of songs from several arranged japanese albums. They were domestic releases, so finding them at decent prices through eBay is not too hard. Heck, I've seen new copies of them in my local SamGoodie: look for them in the soundtrack section.
If that doesn't work, then your best shot is going to Animenation.com or some other import store and look for the compilation albums. lav-chan's suggestions are pretty good (I'd go with 20020220).
I'm surprised no one's given a link to his (English) homepage yet. He's popular enough that Square-Enix's homepage contains it as one of nine navigational links on the top of their page! (His Japanese site is, not surprisingly, far more up to date.)
His site includes an English webpage for the Black Mages with more information, including two official samples (requires Flash).
If you're interested in purchasing the disc, I would highly suggest using Froogle. You can get it for quite a bit cheaper than the $20 people have been linking to.
Now for my brief review:
If you aren't into Final Fantasy and Nobuo Uematsu's music, the disc is nothing special. It sounds like "80's synth" music. Most of the music has no meaning unless you can tie it in with the game when it played, so if you haven't played the games that go along with the music it's nothing special. If you are into Final Fantasy music, though, this disc is excellent.
If you have the complete Final Fantasy soundtrack for every Final Fantasy from I to XI (guilty, excluding X-2), then you should go get this disc. It's worth the money, and you'll enjoy every track. (Except, possibly, Dancing Mad. It's long and practically straight from the game.)
If not - then it's probably not worth it.
(Also, there are previews for the second disc on his Japanese site. Thankfully the site is half-English. :) Note that they're webpage doesn't return proper MIME types for the Windows Media files if you're using Firefox.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.