did the soundtracks to both Xenosaga AND Noir? Is there a more talented person on this planet?
Fuck me!
Yes. Whoever did Last Exile, Witch Hunter Robin, and Read or Die/ROD TV.
Just to be clear, she wrote the movie music for XS2, and she was the sole composer for XS3.
Damnit! WHR really does have great music. But Kajiura also apparently did hacksign, which is better… by only a little bit.
SG! Who was that guy who did the SF2 music? He’s damn good too. Feldschlacht III is the best battle theme I’ve ever heard.
Masashi Hamauzu. He’s the lead composer of Square-Enix since Uematsu left the company. Here’s a few of his bigger works:
SaGa Frontier 2
Unlimited SaGa
Final Fantasy 10, with Nobuo Uematsu and Junya Nakano
Dirge of Cerebrus: Final Fantasy 7, with Ryo Yamazaki
And, coming soon, Final Fantasy 13.
Did he do the music in the older FF13 trailer? Because that song is absolutely made of win.
Probably. There’s the slightest chance that Uematsu wrote it - Uematsu is writing the main theme for FF13. Personally, I wish if they brought Uematsu to write the main theme of the game, that he would write more than just that. It seems silly to have the main theme of the game not written by the main composer 
I love YK. The way she mixes rock/classical/etc with trance… it’s just mesmorizing. Her fiction CD was a blind purchase for me and quick became one of my favorite albums in recent years.
Yeah, the rock trance classical thing is what I like most. Godsibb and Salva Nos are unbelievable
I thought SF2 was Street Fighter 2. You can’t taint my childhood!
Pretty fun music, too.
Uematsu also wrote only the main theme for FFTA.
Yeah, I know…I kind of wish he would write more in those games.
Every music thread always turns into an Uematsu thread. He’s obviously GOD, let’s talk about people who aren’t 
I didn’t really mean for it to be that way, I just think it’s dumb that he gets hired to write ONE SONG and that’s it.
Personally, my favorite composers for VG Music are Noriyuki Iwadare (Lunar, Grandia), Kenji Ito (Many SaGa games, many Mana games), and Hitoshi Sakimoto (FFTactics, Ogre Battle, Vagrant Story).
Legend of Mana has some of the best music ever.
Agreed, LoM has great stuff, though my favorite albums remain Chrono Cross, Xenogears, and Wild ARMs 3.
Sakimoto’s stuff is good but not very fun to listen to as a standalone… maybe as background music while you’re doing work, I guess.
Uematsu has some good stuff but I don’t see him as being superior to Yasunori Mitsuda or Michiro Naruke. He’s more hit-or-miss.
I find that Sakimoto is great to listen to without the context of the video game. However, I’m willing to admit that this might be because I’m a music geek, so I notice and appreciate some of the musical ideas he uses.
As for Uematsu, I think he’s always got it. He’s a very smart composer, and really writes excellent music within the context of the games he plays. I’m not saying that anyone in this discussion is saying this, but I’m baffled when I hear people say things like Uematsu has lost his touch. If anything, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey show that he can write music a lot like his older stuff, and likely makes a choice not to do so for other games he writes in - likely due to contextual reasons.
Yoko Shimomura is not one of my favorite composers; I think she’s alright. But, I will admit that Legend of Mana is like…her magnum opus. It’s seriously one of the most brilliant Video Game soundtracks…like, ever.
I enjoy Mitsuda a lot, but I haven’t heard him write anything lately, or maybe I just haven’t heard anything he’s worked on. As for Michiko Naruke, it’s hard for me to say, because the only works I’ve heard of hers is Wild Arms 2. For what it’s worth, though, I thought it was really good, if not totally-super-cheesy-anime music. But, hey, it was really appropriate for Wild Arms 2, so I can’t say that was a bad move on her part.
Naruke also wrote WA3, which is leagues better than WA2. You should really give it a try if you haven’t. Not every track is amazing, but considering there’s over a hundred tracks, there are a heck of a lot of winners.
Yoko Shimomura wrote the KH games as well, didn’t she? KH2 has some really solid tunes, pretty much all the boss themes and some of the more “thematic” ones.
I haven’t heard anything from Uematsu since FF9, so I can’t comment on his later stuff, but I will say that the only soundtracks I thought were consistently good were FF6 and 7 (and perhaps FF1 and 3 if you hear them redone on actual instruments). FF2, 4, 8, and 9 had a couple of good tracks interspersed with a lot of filler.
I thought FF8 was Uematsu’s best work because of how the songs were integrated. Think about the Salt Flats or Deling City, those tracks were absolutely perfect for where they were. They’re not meant to blow your mind, but they make excellent bgm.
Mitsuda’s compositions rely a little less on context to make them shine, but you also have tracks like Gale from CC, which might be the most obnoxious song in any game, ever. Especially since you have to hear it over and over again.
I think Mitsuda has really good musical style, but Uematsu has a much better understanding of the medium he’s working in. I’ve never played a game composed by Uematsu where I felt like I was listening to a song that shouldn’t be there. I wouldn’t call either of them hit-or-miss, but of the two, I think Mitsuda is more likely to write a really shitty song.
And Cid… have you not heard FFX’s soundtrack?
Mitsuda has a history of mediocre-to-bad battle themes, though he usually does better in the boss battles. Compare Gale to Between Life and Death in CC, or Steel Giant to Knight of Fire in Xenogears. Not that I dislike Steel Giant, it’s just a boring theme.
However, though I also feel he’s more likely than Uematsu to make one or two really shitty songs, he usually has a much higher ratio of awesome tracks. Off the top of my head, Chrono Cross and Xenogears have a slew of aweosme songs, while Uematsu’s FF’s usually have, like Cid said, several great tracks with plenty of filler in between. FFIX sorta cheats since it seems like he picked the best songs he had and remixed them at least once or twice each: We Are Thieves!/Theme of the Tantalus (This one’s just redundant), Freya’s Theme/A Face Forgotten, The Place I’ll Return to Someday/Oeilvert/Ipsen’s Heritage, Immoral Memory/Dark Messenger, etc.
And he missed the chance to make the single remix that I think would have been completely justified: The Place I’ll Return to Someday remixed for Bran Bal’s theme.