Final Fantasy IX, the 9th mainline entry in Square’s legendary JRPG series, was released for the PlayStation in July, 2000, and celebrated its 25th anniversary last year. To commemorate the big milestone, Famitsu sat down with series composer Nobuo Uematsu to discuss some of his memories working on the title, and asked him about his personal highlights of the soundtrack. In the interview, Uematsu notes that while FF9 is much more popular among overseas fans of the series compared to Japanese fans, many of his personal favorite tracks are precisely from that game.
“Whenever I travel abroad, I get the impression that there are many FF9 fans over there. Compared to Japanese people, I feel like overseas people bring up FF9 as their favorite title more often,” says Uematsu. And while he’s not quite certain whether the game’s return to a classic medieval fantasy setting is what hit the sweet spot of Western fans, Uematsu notes that FF9 in particular has a lot of songs he’s fond of – which could be one of the reasons for its popularity.
Interestingly, the Final Fantasy composer says he usually isn’t satisfied with any of the songs he makes. “From the moment a song is complete, I don’t want to listen to it. It’s just too embarrassing. Bud during debugging I do end up having to listen to them until I start hating them,” he jokingly adds. However, he admits that, when it comes to most of his favorite FF9 songs, he likes the melodies or the chord progressions. “I usually end up noticing flaws like The tone quality sounds so dull here or Why didn’t I arrange this part with more care – the stuff only I pick up on, but I’m like, Eh, I guess the melody is not that bad (laughs).”
Uematsu brings up Roses of May, the piano theme of General Beatrix, as his personal favorite among the ones he composed for FF9. He also mentions The Final Battle, the last boss theme in the game, as the other one he particularly likes. “I wanted to have the voices of the dead in that one, so I told our synth programmer Keiji Kawamori to Go to hell and record it for me. He was like, Okay, and the next day he brought me an amazing track.”
Apparently, the “back-to-the-basics” approach of FF9 was quite refreshing for the composer who had been making tracks for the more sci-fi oriented series entries that came before it. “I was really happy to find out that I’ll be able to go back to something more medieval-ish with FF9. After all, I am a medieval otaku (laughs).” According to Uematsu, when thinking about the stylistic direction for the FF9 soundtrack, he decided to take a trip to Europe to look for inspiration. “I thought it would be best for me to get a grasp of what medieval Europe was like. So, my wife and I went on a tour of old European castles. But there were so many university students around us and we were the only old people there – so it was a bit exhausting,” he jokes.
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