Seikens

Soundtracks - Yoko Shimomura

Name: Yoko Shimomura – 下村 陽子 Yoko Shimomura
Date of Birth: 19/Oct/1967, Hyogo prefecture
Occupation: Composition, Arrangement
Best known for: Parasite Eve, Legend of Mana, Kingdom Hearts
Influences: An unknown list of “lots of people”
Website: Midiplex (Official Japanese Website)
SD Credits: LoM (Composer), DoM (Composer), HoM (Composer)

 

Starting piano lessons at an early age, Shimomura took to the instrument quickly and graduated years later with a piano major from Osaka Music University. An avid gamer for years, she had intended to become a piano instructor, but on a whim sent samplers to several gaming companies and was rapidly hired by Capcom to work on the music for games such as Street Fighter II and the Mega Man series.

She transferred to Square in 1993 and was given her first project of Live a Live in 1994, after which she joined forces with other composers to bring several different scores to life, including Square’s last pre-2003 Nintendo title, Super Mario RPG.

Going solo, but still working for Square, she created the scores for Parasite Eve, and the follow-up to the Seiken Densetsu series, Legend of Mana, considered a classic among videogame soundtracks in-spite the mixed reception of the game as a whole.

She left Square to freelance and was commissioned the score for the sequel to Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga. She then took on the task of creating the score for the Kingdom Hearts series, a job which she was apprehensive on taking up due to the pressure of arranging Disney music.

Her latest contribution to the Seiken Densetsu series has been the soundtrack for the second Nintendo DS title, Heroes of Mana, which combines her style with that of the tracks from Seiken Densetsu 3.