Yoko Shimomura
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Yōko Shimomura (下村陽子 Shimomura Yōko, b. October 19, between 1960 and 1970) is a Japanese composer and musician best known for her soundtracks for various video games.
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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 Noriko Matsueda on the strategy/RPG Front Mission in 1995. In 1996, she composed and arranged (from Koji Kondo's Mario series music, as well as three tracks from Final Fantasy IV by Nobuo Uematsu), the music to Suare's very last Nintendo-produced game until 2003, Super Mario RPG
In 1998, she went solo once again for the soundtrack to the RPG Parasite Eve. One of her most major works was achieved in 1999 with Legend of Mana, a follow up to the beloved Seiken Densetsu series. The score to Legend of Mana showed a high range of breadth and depth to her music, and though the game met with polarized sentiments, the music can be regarded as classic.
Shimomura’s most notable 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.
In a very suprising matter in 2003 to both Square, Nintendo, and fans (if not the game industry), she composed Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga (a sequel to Super Mario RPG, and unoffically, Paper Mario) for Game Boy Advance. However she wasn't the only employee from Square Enix involved in the game.
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.
Video game soundtracks (incomplete)
- NEMO (1990)
- King of Dragons (1991)
- Street Fighter 2 (1992) (with Alpha 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)
- Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga (2003)
Other works
- Parasite Eve Remixes (1998)
Note for fans
Although very little of Shimomura's work has been remixed or arranged professionally, the PlayStation remake of Front Mission (known as Front Mission 1st) has higher quality and to some degree arranged versions of all the songs from the original. Unfortunately, the official release of the OST (along with the Front Mission 4 OST it was to be the bonus of) was canceled, and the only CD with Front Mission First music available is a 9-track promotional album. However, the full PSF set can be downloaded from several sites, most of which can be found from the external links section of the PlayStation Sound Format article.
External links
- Yōko Shimomura’s official Japanese website (http://www.midiplex.com/)
- Remixes of Shimomura's work (http://remix.overclocked.org/detailcomposer.php?compid=12)
- Yōko Shimomura (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0793738/) at the Internet Movie Database
- A website with midis of Shimomura's work among others (http://midishrine.com/index.php?bio=Yoko%20Shimomura)ja:下村陽子