Underappreciated Composers Appreciation Thread

Originally Posted by CelticWhisper

Examples would be the case of OSTs like recent Final Fantasies or some of the Persona games, wherein multiple composers worked on the soundtrack but credit generally only goes to one (Masashi Hamauzu springs to mind in the case of FF).

I was going to mention myself how no one but Shoji Meguro seems to get any recognition for SMT and SMT spinoff stuff. Especially overlooked is Kenichi Tsuchiya, whose tracks I like more than Meguro's in Nocturne. Picking up Rebus and Persona 2 only to see that he contributed to those excellent scores confirmed that for a guy whose style I enjoy, he seems to be a bit unknown.

And yeah, I have to constantly remind people that FFX had two other composers besides Uematsu. It's usually to say that Hamauzu outdoes the other two, but still.

Originally Posted by CelticWhisper

Worse still are cases like Shadow Hearts, whose OST was composed primarily by Yoshitaka Hirota, but somehow is too commonly credited in whole to Yasunori Mitsuda despite his only having written a handful of tracks for it.

Heh. Everybody loves Mitsuda, right? Why mention anyone else?

As for Iwadare, I usually like him, but I only love him in the original Grandia. That's why he isn't one of my top tier composers. He's probably underappreciated compared to some other popular composers, but who isn't next to Uematsu and Mitsuda? I'm not sure about Koshiro being overly popular though. The only ones who would hold him so highly are those familiar with his work in the chiptune days. Some people today might only know of him through Shenmue.

Hiroshi Tamawari is probably underappreciated. I really like his stuff in the Vandal Hearts series and yet some people seem to dismiss it as being wannabe Sakimoto stuff. I actually nominated a song of his in the battle theme contest a few years back but it didn't get far. His battle themes in Vandal Hearts II are awesome.

I'm not sure that Tenpei Sato gets much love since his music is a bit lighthearted. For me Phantom Brave has one of the best PS2 soundtracks there is. Unfortunately, the Disgaea monster seems to overshadow everything, though even then you rarely hear about the music.

Noriko Matsueda (and Takahito Eguchi, since they often work together) has done some good stuff and yet she gets hate for replacing Uematsu in FFX-2. I like the music in The Bouncer quite a bit and you also have stuff like Front Mission 2 and Racing Lagoon.

Jam it back in, in the dark.