Final Fantasy VII devs initially disliked One Winged Angel, series composer reveals why
Final Fantasy VII’s final boss theme, One Winged Angel, has become one of the Final Fantasy series’ most popular pieces of music, evoking memories of the climatic final battle against Sephiroth. A fan favorite, the dramatic piece has regularly been featured in game music concerts. However, Final Fantasy series composer Nobuo Uematsu revealed in a recent video interview on Newspicks that One Winged Angel was initially received poorly by his colleagues at Square.
Uematsu explains how One Winged Angel was difficult to compose, partly because he was up against his own creation. In the interview, he mentions the grandiose, organ-heavy last battle theme that he composed for the previous game, Final Fantasy VI. The epic piece, entitled Dancing Mad, is almost 20 minutes in length and split into distinct phrases that reflect each portion of the final battle against Kefka. While working on FFVII’s soundtrack, Uematsu was thinking “I have to create something even better (than Dancing Mad) for VII, but how should I approach it?”
The usual way to compose a piece of music would be to come up with an intro, A melody, B melody, a chorus and an ending, but this approach would not work for One Winged Angel. Uematsu revealed that he ended up composing FFVII’s final battle theme in an unorthodox way. He explains how every morning he would come to work, think about Sephiroth and freely write down the measures of music that came into his head, and that this pattern of working continued for 3 weeks. By this time, he had created many 2-to-4 measures for the final battle theme, which he then rearranged and combined into a full piece. He describes this jigsaw puzzle-like method as a tough but fun way of composing a theme.
Despite these efforts to compose One Winged Angel, it seems Uematsu’s team members didn’t like the piece when he first presented it to them. “My colleagues asked me to make it more heroic,” he recalls. However, he was thankfully able to convince them that the now iconic battle theme would be fine as-is.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, the second part in the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, is available now on PS5.
Verity Townsend
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One Winged Angel is memorable to me even when it’s played in many Square Enix games like Kingdom Hearts. It really sells the fact that Sephiroth is a fallen angel who has fallen from grace and deals with conflicting struggles of good and evil within him. I am glad Uematsu pushed for that because sometimes it is important to realize that it’s not always about the hero but also the villain as well who was once a hero, especially someone as complex as Sephiroth is.