Masayoshi Soken

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Masayoshi Soken composed the music for an entire expansion of Final Fantasy XIV from a hospital bed. For most of 2020, while his colleagues were working on Shadowbringers and planning the next chapter of one of gaming's most beloved online worlds, Soken was quietly undergoing chemotherapy. Almost no one on the development team knew. He did not announce it until May 2021, during the Final Fantasy XIV Digital Fan Festival, when he told the audience the cancer was in remission.

  How does a composer born in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico end up as the sound director of two of the biggest entries in the Final Fantasy franchise? Why did his path run through chemistry labs, Konami arcade games, and a robot-filled pencil commercial before landing at Square Enix? And what is it about his musical instincts that led him to form a rock band with a game translator and eventually collaborate with one of rock's most politically charged guitarists? The answers reach back further than most fans realize.

• 2. An Unlikely Background

  ›

  Soken was born on the 10th of January, 1975, in La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, and the family later moved to Tokyo. His father was a professional trumpet player and his mother taught piano, so music was present from early childhood. Yet when he enrolled at the Tokyo University of Science, his major was chemistry, not music or audio engineering.

  The pivot came when he chose sound design over a science career. His first industry job was at Konami, where he worked as a sound editor and designer, and his earliest credited work was on the arcade rail shooting game Evil Night. That grounding in practical sound work, rather than pure composition, would shape how he thought about music in games for the rest of his career.

• 3. Early Square Enix Years

  ›

  Soken joined Square in 1998, and for the first several years his work centered on sound effects rather than composing melodies. He assisted Kenji Ito on sports titles including Gekikuukan Pro Baseball: The End of the Century 1999, learning the mechanics of game audio from a collaborator rather than as a lead.

  His debut as a sole composer came with Nichibeikan Pro Baseball: Final League, a Japan-exclusive sports game. A second sports title, World Fantasista, followed with synthesizer programmer Takeharu Ishimoto. The break into larger projects came in 2006 when he made his debut as a lead composer on Mario Hoops 3-on-3. That same year, he joined Kenji Ito and Tsuyoshi Sekito on the soundtrack to Dawn of Mana, with Academy Award-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto contributing the main theme. Soken not only composed but performed the electric guitar for his own arrangements of tracks from earlier Mana games.

  Beyond games, he contributed to Square Enix advertising, scoring a commercial in which he was beaten up by two robots, and creating the fanfare for Square Enix Music TV, a monthly feature covering new album releases and composer interviews. For the iTunes-exclusive Square Enix Music Official Bootleg series, he contributed the piece "Dog Street" to the first volume in 2006 and "Languid Afternoon" to the third volume in 2007, releasing the latter under the alias "Sorbonne Soken". In 2008, he scored Nanashi no Game under yet another pseudonym, "Luis Noma".

• 4. Taking the Helm of Final Fantasy XIV

  ›

  A development team reshuffling in 2010 placed Soken as sound director for Final Fantasy XIV. The game's initial launch had been troubled, and the rebuilding effort known as A Realm Reborn gave him the chance to become its primary composer.

  Soken credits his years of work as a sound designer, sound editor, and voice editor for helping him manage the pressure of that remake. His primary composing tools are piano and keyboard, though he favors guitar in live settings. When arranging music originally written by Nobuo Uematsu, he applies particular care to maintain the player's experience, which he names as the central concern guiding all his compositional decisions.

  The Uematsu connection became more complicated in 2018. Uematsu's illness that year prevented him from contributing the main theme to the Shadowbringers expansion, as he had done for every previous one. Soken took on that composition, making Shadowbringers the first Final Fantasy XIV expansion written without Uematsu's direct involvement.

• 5. The Primals and Live Performance

  ›

  Soken did not keep music strictly inside the studio. He formed a rock band called The Primals with members of the Final Fantasy XIV sound team and translator Michael-Christopher Koji Fox, to perform at franchise events including Fan Festival. The group went on to release multiple albums, beginning with Final Fantasy XIV: From Astral to Umbral.

  His taste in rock runs toward the confrontational: his favorite bands are Rage Against the Machine and Pennywise. In 2025, that admiration led to an actual collaboration. Frequent Final Fantasy XIV collaborator Jason Charles Miller told Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello about Soken's long-standing admiration for the band. Morello responded by writing and performing a track called "Everything Burns" with the band Beartooth, and the song was woven into the Arcadion Heavyweight raid series in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail.

• 6. Cancer, Silence, and Resilience

  ›

  Through most of 2020, Soken was receiving chemotherapy, and he kept the fact hidden from nearly everyone on the Final Fantasy XIV development team. He continued doing portions of his work from the hospital, maintaining enough of a presence that colleagues did not realize what he was going through.

  When he finally disclosed the diagnosis at the May 2021 Final Fantasy XIV Digital Fan Festival, he also told the audience that the cancer was in remission. The timing meant that the music players had been experiencing in 2020 and early 2021 had been composed under circumstances the audience could not have imagined. His decision to continue working and to shield the team from the news shaped the texture of those releases in a way that only became visible in retrospect.

• 7. Final Fantasy XVI and Recognition

  ›

  In September 2020, Square Enix announced that Final Fantasy XVI was in development for PlayStation 5. Soken's role as lead composer was not confirmed publicly until June 2022, when further details about the project were released.

  For his work on Final Fantasy XVI, Soken and his team were nominated for the Game Award for Best Score and Music in 2023, and they won. The win marked a formal acknowledgment from the industry of work that had been building across more than two decades, from sound effects on arcade rail shooters to one of the most anticipated scores in franchise history. His collaboration with Tom Morello on "Everything Burns" for Dawntrail came the following year, 2025, adding another chapter to a career that continues to expand outward.