Like a wrestler entering the octagon, Sephiroth’s menacingly iconic “One-Winged Angel” theme song plays almost any time he appears in a Final Fantasy 7 scene. Just mentioning the title likely conjures the track’s first few rhythmic thumps considering just how legendary this tune is. However, it wasn’t an easy number to put together, as composer Nobuo Uematsu said writing the theme was “tough.”
Uematsu sat down with the Japanese YouTube channel NewsPicks on February 19 to chat about Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the latest entry in the PlayStation-exclusive remake trilogy of Square Enix’s most recognizable Final Fantasy game. I” According to a translation by Aitai Kuji CEO Audrey “aitaikimochi” Lamsam, Uematsu said he had a difficult time putting the villain’s motif together because, in the same way that Sephiroth lives in Cloud’s head rent-free, he just couldn’t stop thinking about him.
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“’One Winged Angel’ was a song that I struggled with actually,” Uematsu said via Lamsam’s March 12 Twitter translation. “Every morning, I would go to work and think about Sephiroth and write something, about three or four musical phrases. And then I’d call it a day. And then I’d repeat it the next day: go to the office in the morning, think about Sephiroth the entire time, and write some more music.”
This apparently went on for about two to three weeks, Uematsu said, which is a good and bad thing. It was good because all this obsessing over Sephiroth gave him more material to work with, but all that abundance became unwieldy, and he had to “figure out how to piece” everything together into one cohesive track. In the end, Uematsu found the writing process “really tough” but “very fun.” And that’s great for everyone, because Sephiroth is a “really tough” but “very fun” boss encounter, whether that’s in OG FF7, the Kingdom Hearts games, or FF7 Remake. It’s like a shared struggle between us who fight Sephiroth and Uematsu fighting to make Sephiroth’s theme. He gets it. We are one.
Uematsu recently told the German publication Zeit Online that he doesn’t think he has the “physical and mental strength” to score games anymore. Though he isn’t done working on individual songs, he doesn’t intend to create full-game soundtracks anymore. It’s a bummer, but considering his unspecified health issues, he’s gotta take care of himself first.
