On Sunday 21 June, eleven pieces of Square Enix music fill OVO Arena Wembley for one night, performed by the Novello Orchestra and Coro Spezzato under conductor Arnie Roth, with Yoko Shimomura, who wrote three of them, watching from the audience.
What follows is the setlist, reordered not by how it runs on the night but by how hard each one lands. For every track you will find three things: the game it belongs to, the story behind the score, and the moment it scores. It opens by getting your blood up. Somewhere around the seventh track, the floor gives way.
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The Music of Square Enix: Tracks to Expect
Apocalypsis Noctis, Final Fantasy XV (Yoko Shimomura)
The Game
Final Fantasy XV took almost ten years to make, beginning in 2006 as a spin-off called Versus XIII before becoming the mainline game that reached PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. At heart it is a road trip, four friends in one car crossing an open world built on a principle the team called fantasy based on reality, until duty turns the journey into tragedy.
The Score
Shimomura was its lead composer, her first numbered Final Fantasy. She has said that joining back when it was still Versus XIII let her write freely, without the weight of the series name. The result leans on her classical training to carry a more grounded, realistic world.
The Moment
Apocalypsis Noctis plays during the Astrals’ Revelations, the colossal trial against the Titan, its Latin choir chanting from the point of view of the gods testing whether Noctis is the king who can banish the dark. It is built for sheer scale.
Live at Wembley: the opening statement of intent, and the composer who wrote it is in the room.
Opening, Precipitous Combat, Final Fantasy Tactics (Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata)
The Game
Final Fantasy Tactics arrived on the original PlayStation in 1997 and remains the most quietly worshipped game on this bill. Director Yasumi Matsuno set it in Ivalice during a dynastic civil war, a story of two boyhood friends pulled apart by class, written in the shadow of Japan’s post-bubble lost decade, a world, as Matsuno put it, where many were robbed of hope.
The Score
The music was not by Uematsu but by Sakimoto and Iwata, the pair Matsuno brought from the Ogre Battle games. They built something deliberately orchestral and militaristic out of the PlayStation’s synthesiser. Sakimoto has since revealed the trick of it: “FFT is rock”, a hidden band structure of tuba and trombone acting as drums beneath the strings.
The Moment
The concert pairs the title Opening with Precipitous Combat, one of the game’s tensest battle themes, written to carry a sense of urgency and dread.
Live at Wembley: a full brass section finally gives both the weight the hardware could only hint at.
Octopath Traveler, Main Theme (Yasunori Nishiki)
The Game
The newest game here, and proof the lineage is alive. Octopath Traveler launched on Nintendo Switch in 2018 and introduced the HD-2D look, retro pixel sprites lit and layered with modern effects, wrapped around eight separate travellers whose tales run in parallel.
The Score
Nishiki has been candid that the main theme nearly broke him. A first version written in two weeks landed badly, a second in five days fared no better, and he admits he “honestly considered resigning from the project,” despite having already composed half the soundtrack. The fix was to fuse the two failed drafts into a third and lean on repetition so the melody would lodge in your head. He calls it “a prayer honoring the past RPG titles that made me who I am.”
The Moment
It plays on the character select screen, the face of the game, the sound of eight journeys about to begin.
Live at Wembley: with a live orchestra it opens up into something genuinely cinematic.
Corridors of Time, Chrono Trigger (Yasunori Mitsuda)
The Game
Chrono Trigger reached the Super Nintendo in 1995, the work of a so-called Dream Team: Final Fantasy’s Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama, telling a story of friends travelling through time to stop the end of the world.
The Score
The score exists because of a young engineer’s ultimatum. Mitsuda, unhappy with his pay, told Square he would leave unless he could compose, and Sakaguchi handed him the game, reportedly with the line that maybe his salary would go up. The work nearly cost him his health; he developed stomach ulcers, and Uematsu stepped in to finish ten tracks.
The Moment
Corridors of Time plays through the floating Kingdom of Zeal, the doomed sky utopia of 12,000 BC, all hypnotic, lilting rhythm and a melody fans have spent thirty years calling weightless.
Live at Wembley: the first time the room goes quiet rather than loud.
Hikari, Simple and Clean, Kingdom Hearts (Utada Hikaru)
The Game
Kingdom Hearts should not have worked. Tetsuya Nomura’s idea of folding fifty years of Disney into one original story, following a boy named Sora and his friends Riku and Kairi across worlds with a key-shaped sword, was reportedly viewed inside Disney as close to an abomination. It became one of the most beloved series of its generation, beginning on PlayStation 2 in 2002.
The Score
The series composer is Yoko Shimomura, who starts from the place and the feeling and writes with the melodic, piano-led hand of someone raised on Chopin and Rachmaninoff. The theme song was different. Utada Hikaru had already recorded it when Nomura approached her, certain from the start she was “the only artist I envisioned singing the theme song,” and the upbeat version that opens the game is a remix by the British producer PLANTIb.
The Moment
It scores the bittersweet parting of friends, framed as hopeful rather than sorrowful, and for a certain age of player it is simply the sound of being fourteen.
Live at Wembley: the melody rising from a full orchestra ambushes grown adults, which is rather the point of the evening.
Zanarkand, Final Fantasy X (Nobuo Uematsu)
The Game
Final Fantasy X landed on PlayStation 2 in 2001, the first in the main series with full voice acting, following the blitzball player Tidus, lost in a strange world, the summoner Yuna, and a pilgrimage toward sacrifice.
The Score
To Zanarkand almost never belonged to this game. Uematsu first wrote it as a flute piece for a French player’s recital, decided it was too sad for the occasion, and set it aside. As he tells it, “I was falling behind all the while the producers were hounding me. So since that flute piece was unused, I just kind of meekly handed it to them. They listened to it and said, Yes, this is brilliant.”
The Moment
A single piano opens the game over the ruined city at sunset, as Tidus begins, “Listen to my story.” Fans routinely name it the most beautiful thing Uematsu ever wrote.
Live at Wembley: one grand piano under the lights, and the room will not need the story explained.
Kainé, Salvation, NieR Replicant (Keiichi Okabe)
The Game
NieR was the last game made by the studio Cavia, released in 2010 under director Yoko Taro, a melancholic post-apocalyptic tale of a man searching for a cure for his dying sister. A 2021 remaster re-recorded much of it with live instruments.
The Score
Keiichi Okabe and his studio MONACA, with the singer Emi Evans, built the score around an invented tongue fans call the chaos language. The reason is deliberate. As Yoko Taro put it, “having lyrics which you can recognize and understand might distract you from the gameplay. We wanted something that could truly serve as background music.” Evans based Kainé’s theme on a version of Gaelic, finding in its sounds “an air of beautiful attitude” to match a character who is unrefined yet gorgeous.
The Moment
On the album the track is simply Kainé; Salvation is the soaring arrangement used for the game’s true ending and in concert. It is, in Evans’s words, “the song which seems to make fans cry the most.”
Live at Wembley: gorgeous and quietly devastating, sung in a language no one speaks and everyone understands.
One-Winged Angel, Final Fantasy VII (Nobuo Uematsu)
The Game
The big one. Final Fantasy VII shipped on three discs on the PlayStation in 1997, broke Japanese role-playing games into the Western mainstream, and gave gaming its most famous villain in Sephiroth.
The Score
One-Winged Angel was the first Final Fantasy track to feature vocals, a real choir of eight singers layered over the sampled orchestra, with Latin text drawn from the medieval Carmina Burana. Uematsu built it by a method he has never used again. “I wrote down two to four measures of music that popped into my head every day until I got about 20 to 30 different measures,” he explained. “Then I took those different pieces and rearranged them to fit together well.” He wanted to fuse Stravinsky with the destructive force of rock.
The Moment
It is the theme for the final battle against Sephiroth, and every fan in the building knows the swell, knows the instant the choir lands.
Live at Wembley: with Coro Spezzato at full volume, the one track likely to draw a roar before it has finished.
Vector to the Heavens, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (Yoko Shimomura)
The Game
Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days came out on the Nintendo DS in 2009 and is the saddest chapter in the series. It follows Roxas and a fourteenth member of the villains’ ranks, a girl named Xion who can also wield the Keyblade. Xion is a replica built from Sora’s leaking memories, and for Sora to wake, she must rejoin him and cease to exist.
The Score
This is Shimomura at her most quietly cruel. Vector to the Heavens weaves in Kairi’s melody and the series theme Dearly Beloved, because Xion looks like Kairi and is made from Sora. Even the title carries the grief: vector comes from the mathematical term, because Xion’s designation was No. i, the imaginary unit, a number that is not quite real.
The Moment
It is Xion’s final boss theme, the music of a girl fighting to be remembered as she is erased.
Live at Wembley: to hear it performed while its composer watches is almost too much.
Weight of the World, NieR:Automata (Keiichi Okabe)
The Game
NieR:Automata, made by PlatinumGames and Square Enix in 2017, is a story of androids fighting a war for a humanity that is already extinct. It hides its true ending behind a final act unlike any other in games.
The Score
Weight of the World is the game’s main theme, recorded in English by J’Nique Nicole, in Japanese by Marina Kawano and in the chaos language by Emi Evans. The choir that swells beneath it is the development team itself, singing the player on.
The Moment
It plays over Ending E, where the credits become a battle and the game asks you to delete your own save file, every hour you have put in, to help a stranger you will never meet survive theirs. Yoko Taro has explained the design grew from a problem, that the first players to reach the ending would have no saved data to lean on, so without the sacrifice there would be no way through.
Live at Wembley: the one most likely to leave the room in tears.
Dearly Beloved, Kingdom Hearts III (Yoko Shimomura)
The Game
Kingdom Hearts III closed the long Xehanort saga on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019, but Dearly Beloved belongs to the whole series, the quiet piano theme that has opened every title for over twenty years.
The Score
Shimomura has described where it came from with disarming simplicity: “I was playing the beginning of the game, set in the Destiny Islands, and I was struck by a lot of imagery about the sea. Dearly Beloved just came to my mind one day, while I was thinking about that, picturing the sea and the waves.” It was meant to be a one-off. Instead it became a homecoming, re-recorded for every game, and she has said she would never want to change it.
The Moment
It is the first thing you hear on the title screen of every Kingdom Hearts, the melody waiting for you each time you return.
Live at Wembley: the perfect close, heard live at last, with the woman who wrote it in the audience. You will leave humming it.
That is the night, in the order it finds your soft spots. Eleven scores, forty years of games, one orchestra and one choir, and the composer of three of these pieces sitting among you.
Back and side seats are £35, up to 50% off the standard price, and the discount is applied automatically through the Japan Nakama link. There is no code to enter and there is only one night. With two weeks to go, the best seats are going first.
Book your seats with up to 50% off.
One night, eleven moments
Put together, these eleven pieces are the argument for why Square Enix music has outlived the consoles it was written for. A road-trip battle theme, a doomed sky kingdom, a girl fighting to be remembered, an ending that asks you to give up your save file for a stranger: this is music written to carry a story, and it holds up with nothing on screen at all. If you want to go deeper on the people who made it, our profiles of the composers behind the Square Enix sound trace how Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Yasunori Mitsuda and Keiichi Okabe each shaped what you will hear on the night.
And the night itself is almost here. The Music of Square Enix plays OVO Arena Wembley on Sunday 21 June, with the Novello Orchestra and Coro Spezzato under Arnie Roth, and Yoko Shimomura in the audience. Back and side seats are £35, up to 50% off, with the discount applied automatically through the Japan Nakama link. One night, eleven moments, and only so many seats left.
