Overview
Ryu Umemoto (18 February 1974 – 17 August 2011) was a Japanese video game music composer, born in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. He is known for composing soundtracks to various visual novel and shoot 'em up games since the 1990s, for several companies including FamilySoft, C's Ware, ELF Corporation, D4 Enterprise, and Cave.
He is considered to be one of the greatest FM-synth chiptune composers, and has often been compared to Yuzo Koshiro. His soundtracks for adventure games such as EVE Burst Error and Yu-No: Kono Yo no Hate de Koi o Utau Shoujo largely defined the dominant style of music still used in the visual novel genre, as can be heard in Key works such as Kanon, Air and Clannad. Despite his influence in Japan, he remained largely unknown abroad. It was only in recent years he began gaining international attention through his work for Cave's bullet hell shooters such as Espgaluda II and Akai Katana.
Umemoto died on August 17, 2011, at the age of 37 years old, after months of illness, before he could complete his last project, the soundtrack for Instant Brain. Several other soundtracks he worked on before passing away will be released posthumously by Cave. A few months after his death in 2011, his former colleague Hiroyuki Kanno, the scenario writer for EVE Burst Error and Yu-No, also passed away.
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