The drumming in the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters was done by a child genius

pcgamer.com:

At some point I reached an age where people more successful and talented than me started being younger than me too. It was all well and good when I was 20 years old and almost everyone younger than me was basically a child, but now the lead actors of phenomenally successful TV shows(opens in new tab) don't even remember the credit crunch. And now I have to come to terms with the fact that Yoyoka, the drummer on those hardcore Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster tracks, was around 11 years old when she performed them.

Yoyoka, whose full name is Yoyoka Soma, is a drumming prodigy from Ishikari, Japan, who you might already know from four years ago, when she went viral for crushing a performance of Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times(opens in new tab). When she was, oh no, 8 years old

It appears that performance (among many others you can find on her YouTube channel) caught the attention of the devs at Square Enix, because the company brought her on during the game's development to contribute to 18 tracks across the remasters of Final Fantasy 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

Yoyoka posted about her involvement(opens in new tab) in the FF remasters a while ago, but it only came to my attention after an enterprising Resetera user(opens in new tab) dug up her video showcasing the tracks she contributed to. It's a little bit surprising that Square Enix didn't make more noise about hiring a memetic child prodigy to pep up its soundtracks for the remasters. I suppose that's a testament to her talent: she was enlisted for her abilities, rather than to gild a marketing campaign.

The remasters of the first six Final Fantasy games have, for the most part, gone down pretty well, even if they do make a few of the same stumbles(opens in new tab) that