Nobuo Uematsu

Nobuo Uematsu (born 1959) is a Japanese composer best known for scoring the Final Fantasy series, a role he held from the franchise’s 1987 debut through many of its most beloved entries. Largely self-taught, he wrote enduring themes such as “One-Winged Angel” and “Aerith’s Theme,” and has been called the “Beethoven of video game music,” performing his work worldwide with orchestras.

The value of hardship

In an October 2025 interview, Uematsu stated plainly that he has never used generative AI and probably never will. His reasoning was not primarily legal or economic but personal and philosophical: the struggle of making something by hand is, to him, the very thing that makes the finished work rewarding. Removing that friction, he suggested, removes the meaning.

Coming from one of the medium’s foundational artists, the statement carries weight as a generational marker — a composer who helped establish game music as a serious art form declining to hand any of it to a machine. His view rhymes with that of younger peers like Joris de Man, who likewise locate the worth of music in the human effort behind it rather than the speed of its production.