"What would Uematsu do?": Final Fantasy 14 composer Masayoshi Soken on following series legend

Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki Yoshida is the predominant and popular figurehead for the MMORPG, but there are plenty of other developers on the game beloved by its community. One of those is composer Masayoshi Soken.

While Nobuo Uematsu composed the remarkable scores for the early games in the series, Soken has taken up the mantle as the composer for Final Fantasy 14 and also Final Fantasy 16.

His musical style is an eclectic mix of genres, from delicate piano and vocal pieces to heavy metal rock songs. That led to not only the regular piano concerts at the Fan Fest events, but the development team’s in-house rock band The Primals (named after the game’s summonable monsters), with Soken on electric guitar alongside localisation director Michael-Christopher Koji Fox fronting on vocals.

Indeed, these performances were highlights at the Fan Fest events I attended in 2023. Much of that was due to Soken himself: after particularly emotional renditions from pianist Keiko and singer Amanda Achen, Soken arrived on stage with his Otamatone instrument to undermine his own compositions to much laughter. In person, too, he’s a humble and fun-loving interviewee.

Notably, Soken was secretly battling cancer during development of the Shadowbringers expansion. He revealed this at the digital Fan Fest in 2021 – seeing his joy on-stage ever since has only endeared him to the community further.

Ahead of a concert this weekend celebrating the music of Final Fantasy 14 and 16, I had the chance to speak with the composer.

You started your career doing a lot of sound design work. How do you think that affected your approach to composition?

I think that experience is definitely reflected in everything that I do. In terms of sound design, if you are putting the game experience first, then as a core thought you would have to think about that coming before the composition. I think it is very important. Something that I wouldn’t want is for people to see game composers as artists [as opposed to developers]. The reason for that is because making music for games, I need to think of the music as just one part of the entire game experience. If we think about just the sound, you have the sound effects, and you have the voice lines, as well as the environment sounds, and then you have the music. So all of the elements need to come together naturally, combined, and then that becomes the sound of the game. If I hadn’t learned sound design beforehand, then I wouldn’t have had as complete of an understanding of this. In the realm of game composers, I guess that title is quite a flashy thing, so people see it as something similar to an artist. But I think anyone who wants to go into game composition should learn sound design first.

You previously also worked on the Mario Hoops 3-on-3 score with [Mario and Zelda composer] Koji Kondo, what was it like to work with him?

Using the environment of the Nintendo DS was incredibly difficult because there was a limitation of what could be played. For example, on the game selection screen for Hoops, I think, there’s a song that plays, but back then we didn’t have the specs or the capacity in terms of storage or memory to allow this. In terms of the DS, people might have been like, ‘it’s not possible on the DS’, but I think it was a great learning experience for me that made me learn how to do the impossible. Back then there were a lot of limitations in terms of the hardware compared to contemporary hardware, so I think that experience of having few tools to do something, and developing the ideas needed to go through that process, has allowed me to have the experience needed to create lots of ideas now.

Since composing the soundtracks to Final Fantasy 14 and 16, how does it feel to be the composer for two mainline Final Fantasy games and to be following in Nobuo Uematsu’s footsteps? Do you feel a lot of pressure to live up to his work?