Yoko Shimomura

Biography

Yoko Shimomura was born in Hyogo prefecture, Japan. Her parents enrolled her in piano lessons when she was five years old. She took quickly to the instrument, and she often pretended to be composing her own music by playing the piano randomly.

After high school, she enrolled as a piano major in Osaka Music University[?]. Upon graduation, Shimomura intended to become a piano instructor. She had been a video gamer for many years, though, so on a lark, she sent some samples of her work to various video game companies. Squaresoft invited her in for an audition and interview, and she was offered a job there. Her family and instructors were dismayed with her change in focus (video-game music was still not mainstream in Japan at the time), but Shimomura accepted the job at Square.

Shimomura's first project with Square was the score for the role-playing game (RPG) Live A Live[?] in 1994. After this, she was paired with more experienced composers for a time. For example, she teamed with Norika Matsueda[?] on the strategy/RPG Front Mission[?] in 1995. In 1998, she went solo once again for the soundtrack to the RPG Parasite Eve[?].

Shimomura’s most recent score is for Kingdom Hearts (2002), the joint Square/Disney venture that features Disney characters in an action/RPG environment. Shimomura rejected the project initially, skeptical that such a combination could ever work. However, she eventually relented, and her work for the game (which became a best-seller) is often cited as her finest to date.

She remains an avid gamer to this day, only now, she plays more often to get a feel for the games she is composing the soundtracks for than for her own pleasure.

Musical Style and Criticism

Critics often dismiss Shimomura’s work as "mediocre" at best and "annoying" at worst. Her music is on par for much video game work, these critics assert, but it lacks the uniqueness and flair of the music of some of her colleagues. Nevertheless, Shimomura is best known for her compositions for piano. She uses this instrument extensively in her work, and her piano pieces have been described as "majestic" and "extraordinary".

She also shows skill as an arranger of other musicians' works. Both in the soundtracks for Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996) and Kingdom Hearts (2002), she had to take established, well-known material and arrange it in new and interesting ways that fit into a totally new milieu. Her first solo work, for Parasite Eve (1998), was based on the work of anime composer Joe Hisashi[?], who scored the movie upon which the game was based.

Shimomura also has a knack for pushing the limits of game-music technology. She describes herself as "the type of person that tries until I can't go any more." This is also a significant criticism of her work as a video game composer, however, since on many occasions, she has had to abandon or significantly alter a piece in order to get it to reproduce acceptably over video-game hardware. Over all, however, Shimomura's music seems to be helped significantly by modern technology. Critics have generally received her more recent soundtracks better than her older work on the Super Famicom and PlayStation consoles, though some still find her work too light and repetitive.

Video Game Soundtracks (incomplete)

(Note: Various websites credit Yoko Shimomura as a composer on a handful of arcade games produced by Capcom in the early 1990s. Whether she actually was involved in these projects remains unconfirmed. In interviews, she makes no mention of this work, and it may be an error perpetuated on the internet. These games are listed below for completeness.)

• NEMO[?] (1990)
• King of Dragons[?] (1991)
• Street Fighter 2[?] (1992) (with Alfh Lyra[?])
• Street Fighter 2: Championship Edition[?] (1994) (with Alfh Lyra)
• Live A Live (1994)
• Front Mission (1995) (with Norika Matsueda)
• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars (1996) (with Nobuo Uematsu and Koji Kondo)
• Tobal No. 1[?] (1996) (with Masashi Hamauzu[?], Junya Nakano[?], Yasuhiro Kawami[?], Kenji Ito[?], Noriko Matsueda, Ryuji Sasai[?], and Yasunori Mitsuda)
• Parasite Eve (1998)
• Legend of Mana[?] (1999)
• Kingdom Hearts (2002)

Other Works

• Parasite Eve Remixes[?] (1998)

External links

• Remixes of Yoko Shimomura’s Work : http://remix.overclocked.org/detailcomposer.php?compid=12