Manami Matsumae

Note: This biography was written exclusively for Square Enix Music Online by Chris and is under copyright.

Manami Matsumae (née Gotoh) is a former composer of Capcom. She is accredited as composing the iconic soundtracks to Mega Man and Mega Man 2 with Yoshihiro Sakaguchi, firm favourites with game fans and doujin musicians thanks to their catchy upbeat melodies. Other Arcade works at the company include 1943 Kai, Area 88, Tenchi o Kurau II, Strider Hiryu, Magic Sword, U.N. Squadron, and F1 Dream. Since 1990, she has been a freelancer and worked on numerous instalments onthe Derby Stallion series. She is married to Kimitaka Matsumae, a prominent former Hudson Soft composer.

In 2007, she was surprisingly the composer of best-seller Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors after Koichi Sugiyama had scored all other games in the series. Her involvement does not reflect that she is the intended successor of Sugiyama, who only contributed reprises to the title, but rather her affiliations with its developers. Matsumae emulated Sugiyama's classically-oriented style for the score but focused more on timbre and mood rather than musicality. As a result, the score was functional but often criticised on a stand-alone level.

List of Relevant Game Projects

List of Covered Albums