Curated playlist
Video games scored by Nobuo Uematsu
- Final Fantasy Legend IIFinal Fantasy Legend II shipped in Japan on the 14th of December 1990, carrying a name that was, in its home country, entirely different: SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu. That gap between identities tells you something about the game's unusual…
- Final Fantasy VFinal Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities…
- Final Fantasy IIIFinal Fantasy III launched on the 27th of April, 1990, and within its first week sold 500,000 copies in Japan. By March 2003, that figure had reached 1.4 million, making it the highest-selling domestic release among the first three games…
- Final Fantasy VIIFinal Fantasy VII arrived in Japan on the 31st of January, 1997, and within three days had sold over two million copies. That pace was not an accident. It was the product of a project that had burned through multiple platforms, consumed…
- Final Fantasy IXFinal Fantasy IX arrived on the PlayStation in 2000 carrying a quiet act of rebellion. While its two immediate predecessors had chased a sleeker, more cinematic realism, this ninth entry turned deliberately backward, back to medieval…
- Final Fantasy VII RemakeFinal Fantasy VII Remake arrived on the 10th of April 2020, nearly a quarter century after the game it set out to reimagine. Square Enix had spent years insisting no remake was in development. The question that hung over the gaming world…
- The Last StoryThe Last Story arrived on the Nintendo Wii in January 2011, carrying the weight of a question its creator had spent years trying to answer: what was he doing wrong? Hironobu Sakaguchi, the man who invented Final Fantasy, had watched his…
- Final Fantasy IIFinal Fantasy II launched on the 17th of December 1988, almost exactly one year after the original game, and Square's small team of around ten people had already decided it would be nothing like its predecessor. The first game had saved…
- Final Fantasy XFinal Fantasy X shipped in Japan in 2001 and sold more than 2.14 million units on its first day alone, including 1.4 to 1.5 million pre-orders. A million copies moved within hours of release. Square had expected modest returns from a…
- Final Fantasy (video game)Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Final Fantasy XIFinal Fantasy XI launched in Japan on the 16th of May 2002, asking players to share a single online world with strangers who spoke different languages and lived on different continents. That was a radical proposition for a console game. At…
- Final Fantasy VIIIFinal Fantasy VIII sold 2.21 million copies on its first day of release in Japan, grossing the equivalent of $151 million in a single day. That figure made it the fastest-selling entry in the Final Fantasy series at the time of its launch…
- Final Fantasy XIV (2010 video game)Final Fantasy XIV launched on the 30th of September 2010, and within months Square Enix had suspended subscription fees, postponed its PlayStation 3 version indefinitely, fired its entire development leadership, and issued a public apology…
- Granblue FantasyGranblue Fantasy launched in Japan in March 2014 on Android, iOS, and web browsers, built by a studio called Cygames. What made it remarkable from the start was not its platform or its genre, but two names on the credits: composer Nobuo…
- The Final Fantasy LegendThe Final Fantasy Legend arrived on Game Boy in December 1989, carrying a name it had not been born with. In Japan it launched as Makai Toushi Sa·Ga, the first title in what would become the SaGa series. Square's president Masafumi…