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When it comes to the world of video games some of the biggest and most influential names all come from the male gender. You got your Nolan Bushnells, Yu Suzukis, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nobuo Uematsu, Yuzo Koshiro, Warren Spector, the list goes on and on and seems nearly endless. So, I wanted to start putting the spotlight on video game music, something that most of us love and can quite easily make or break an interactive experience.
To start this series off I wanted to avoid the overdone artists, it does not take much time to find any information on Nobuo Uematsu or Koji Kondo for example, and what better way to start than with the rare female composer who has worked on many popular titles but still exists largely in the shadows?
Without further ado, the Compendium opens and begins reading an entry on Yoko Shimomura.
Yoko Shimomura graduated from Osaka College of Music in 1988 and quite quickly found herself working at Capcom during its Golden Years in the arcade. It would take her a year before she ended up working on music for an arcade game though. That game? Final Fight. She only did one song and was uncredited for the work however.
She went back to the Famicom World where she created the soundtrack for Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, and it turns out that she has quite the affinity for Disney! The next game that she did most of the songs on that the Western World saw was the NES game Code Name: Viper.
She would soon find herself back in the arcade realm where she composed the music for the beat'em up The King of Dragons and finally moving onto a little unheard of game called Street Fighter II. You have probably never heard any song in this strange, quirky, and stereotype ridden fighting game, but least of all this one.
Go home and be a family man!
For the rest of her years at Capcom she was mostly just a member of a large composing team for such games as Mega Man 5 and Breath of Fire before she left Capcom in 1994 and began working at a totally non-influential fringe developer Squaresoft.
When she first started at Square all of her work (like the entire company) was limited to the Super Famicom with the games Live A Live, Front Mission, and a game that no gamer could possibly dislike, least of all its music, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.
That's right, in less than 10 years Yoko Shimomura found her music gracing arcade fighting tournaments worldwide and also the most beloved Mario games not made by Nintendo. Quite a resume is building up so far.
She would continue working at Squaresoft through the rest of the 1990s. Her list of games continue to build and her credentials grow higher and higher with games like Parasite Eve, which shows a more suspensful part of her writing range. She ended the decade composing the mixed PS1 release of the Mana series Legend of Mana.
And that foreshadowing I blatantly threw in your face back at the beginning of this text comes back to finally pay off! Yoko returned to the world of Disney to compose the soundtrack for Kingdom Hearts, every game in the series.
After the release of Kingdom Hearts she broke away from Squaresoft to work as a freelancer and was hardly alone at this time since the mighty RPG giant merged with Enix and bled talent for a few years. But, Square-Enix kept her on the staff for the Kingdom Hearts series where she enjoys success to this day.
Kingdom Hearts is not the only series that has been built up by her music. She returned to the Mushroom Kingdom to work on one of the spiritual successors to Super Mario RPG, the Mario & Luigi series. She has done the music on all of them so far, but no word that I can find if she returned to work on the upcoming Dream Team.
She also returned to the Mana series with Heroes of Mana, but we all forgot about that game.
In recent years she has worked to build musical scores for another new series, composing the music for the Wii classic Xenoblade Chronicles alongside her fellow Square alum Yasunori Mitsuda and returned to the world of Aya Brea in The 3rd Birthday alongside one piece of the talent that Square did not bleed, Tsuyoshi Sekito.
Gamers will also be treated to her music in her first foray in the Final Fantasy series with the soundtrack for Versus XIII whenever that decides to come out, until then we will probably play some more games that she had her hand in, hopefully a few more of us will be able to find out if Yoko Shimomura put her stamp on it.
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