Glad to see it. The soundtrack for XV is incredible.
Uematsu greatly deserves any honor he gets.
As for the XV soundtrack, I recently spent 50 hours playing the game and there’s not one song I can actively remember the theme for. Looking back at all of Nobuo’s works and I recall so many of his themes across games.
I think Uematsu is the absolute GOAT, but XV had a great soundtrack. Not on Uematsu level of memorable, but still very good.
The leitmotif work with Valse di Fantastica/Sunset Waltz/Dewdrops at Dawn always was my favourite, but Ardyn has a nice theme too. Loved when the second version of his theme came in towards the end of the game.
Nevermind that Shimonura deserves it for other major works, like Kingdom Hearts or, amazingly enough, Mario RPG (those who say you can’t remember her songs, fucking Mushroom Forest lives rent free in my head since the 90s). XV isn’t even her best work!
Fun fact, she worked on Street Fighter 2 way back when. From an interview I read, she wrote Blanca’s theme inspired by a day watching and listening to a plastic bag stuck in a subway system (the beat does sound like a train on rails, iirc). I’d dig up the article, but it’s probably been close to a decade since reading it.
