Naoshi Mizuta

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Naoshi Mizuta (水田直志 Mizuta Naoshi, born January 24, 1972, in Kochi, Japan) is a Japanese video game music composer. He is a casual video game player. He is known for his work on Rockman & Forte, Street Fighter Alpha, Parasite Eve 2 and Final Fantasy XI (with Nobuo Uematsu and Kumi Tanioka). He attended Chiba University, majoring in Law & Economics. His interest in music began to grow when he was in either second or third grade. His musical influence was Ryuichi Sakamoto. He was formerly a composer for Capcom, but he is now a composer for Square Enix. He began his career scoring the Street Fighter series. He was involved in scoring Street Fighter Alpha in 1996 with Isao Abe, Syun Nishigaki, Setsuo Yamamoto, and Yuko Kadota. When he was composing music for Capcom, he answered a Squaresoft recruitment advertisement in 1998, and he subsequently signed on. His first assignment for Squaresoft was to score Parasite Eve 2. The original Parasite Eve game was scored by Yoko Shimomura, and Mizuta incorporated some of the original game's tracks into Parasite Eve 2. He scored most of the Final Fantasy XI soundtrack. For the MMORPG's expansion pack soundtracks, Square Enix decided to license Mizuta to go solo, thus deciding not to enlist the services of Uematsu and Tanioka to assist him in scoring the expansion packs. Tanioka left to pursue other musical projects, while Uematsu left Square Enix to freelance. Mizuta is also a member of the band The Star Onions, which also includes Tanioka, Hidenori Iwasaki, and Tsuyoshi Sekito. As a member of The Star Onions, he plays the bass, or lower-pitched notes. Mizuta is now the sole composer for the extensions of Final Fantasy XI.