Nobuo Uematsu Career Priorities Changing, According to Interview

Last year, prolific composer Nobuo Uematsu publicly announced that he would be taking a hiatus after some nagging health issues got in the way of his quality of life and his work. He has since made a small number of public appearances, and Japanese gaming outlet 4Gamer got a chance to interview him at an event earlier this month. During the interview he reminded us that nothing lasts forever, but he also said some interesting things about how he plans to tackle the remainder of his career.

Yesterday, 4gamer posted an interview with Uematsu Nobuo, which took place after a January 5th concert with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, one of Uematsu’s first appearances after his health-related hiatus.

He spoke about his life and career, and we’ll share a few tidbits: https://t.co/Mt9NkpqjOv

— グランブルーEN (@granblue_en) January 29, 2019

During the interview, which was translated by a Granblue Fantasy translation fan account on Twitter, Uematsu reckoned that he has “about 20 years left in him.” While that’s an easy statement to react to in so many ways, what’s more important is how he plans to adjust his work choices to fill those remaining years. While Uematsu has been quite busy in the recent past, contributing to all sorts of projects, we’re probably going to see a lot fewer cameo appearances from the legendary composer.

While he isn’t stepping away from games, he will be stepping away from projects that are, in his (translated) words, “make us a battle theme!” Based on the translation it seems like Uematsu felt like he was working for the fans more than himself, and was effectively going back to the well of familiarity to make people happy instead of pursuing passion projects. He says he’ll still be doing work in video games, but going after projects that he finds personally exciting, and writing the music “that he wants to write.”