Square Enix sound designer and composer Masayoshi Soken has composed music for baseball games and epic battles alike. Now, he's added an entrance theme for an internationally famous wrestler to his repertoire. AEW star Kenny Omega returned to the ring earlier in January 2025 for Wrestle Dynasty accompanied by a new composition from Soken, written just for the occasion. Soken spoke with GLHF about creating the track and why it was a remarkable project for him personally and professionally.
Soken began composing for video games in 1998 with Konami, first for the horror game Evil Night and then for two baseball games that were never released internationally. He joined Final Fantasy studio Square Enix in the early 2000s and worked on a variety of projects -- the dark fantasy Drakengard series, military tactics game Front Mission 5, and even Nintendo's Super Mario basketball spinoff Mario Hoops 3-on-3. Then, in 2010, he started working with Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu on Final Fantasy XIV's soundtrack, a project that has remained his primary focus ever since.
Final Fantasy XIV is an online role-playing game that's always live, with hundreds of thousands of players from around the world logged in at a given moment. Soken composed hundreds of tracks for the game -- themes for towns and exploration, battles and characters -- and received a Golden Reel nomination for his work on the soundtrack for 2019's Shadowbringers expansion.
His career is a storied one, but for all the variety in his past work, this marks the first time Soken composed professionally for a live sporting event. As a wrestling fan for almost his entire life, it was a task he eagerly embraced.
"Who wouldn't feel that excitement burning deep within their hearts, hearing that our Kenny Omega was going to return in the new year?!" Soken says. "I put that [burning excitement] directly into my music. It would make me so happy if I could take part in sharing Kenny's life as a wrestler as well as his future with his fans alongside this music."
Soken says his love for wrestling began when he was a grade school student in Japan. Matches would air on TV just as he sat down to have dinner. Watching them every week became a ritual, and his appreciation for the work that goes into every wrestler's identity grew the more he watched.
"There's a story behind each wrestler, regardless of whether they win or lose, and there is a story before and after their matches," Soken says. "In the ring, you see a magnificent battle, but in order for them to make it spectacular, they work incredibly hard behind the scenes, unseen by us. The more I research on those different backgrounds, [the more] I am amazed at professional wrestlers. And at the same time, just taking a look at one of their matches ringside with that knowledge in mind, the appeal is explosive, and something I cannot describe in words just bursts out."
Composing a wrestler's entrance theme presented Soken with a different context from composing for video games, one with a few limiting factors removed. Soken says that while writing video game scores, he has to keep in mind what's happening at that point in the game from several perspectives. That includes timing his score to the on-screen action or drama, depending on the circumstances, and considering how it relates to the themes, story, and characters as they've developed to that point. File size is also an influence and a limiter. Final Fantasy XIV is over a decade old, with five expansions, and Square Enix aims to keep the space it requires on a player's PC or console as reasonable as they can.
For this piece, though, Soken says he had just two main guiding ideas -- big and exciting.
"Kenny was going to appear on a big stage like the iconic Tokyo Dome stadium, making a grand entrance, then striding around to the audience's cheers before jumping into the ring," Soken says. "I was imagining all that to create a song that was fit for that moment."
The track begins with a booming choral segment similar to those Soken wrote in Final Fantasy XIV's Shadowbringers expansion and Final Fantasy XVI's main themes. Reference to phoenixes rising from the flames of adversity to reach new heights are as much a nod to Final Fantasy XVI, in which manifestations of the series' classic Phoenix and Ifrit icons play a prominent role, as they are to Omega's return to AEW. He halted his career after December 2023 and underwent surgery for diverticulitis in May 2024. January's Wrestle Dynasty match marked his first professional appearance in over a year.
Soken wanted to chant "O! ME! GA!" along with the song in its latter half.
"I'm sure any wrestling fan would understand, but it's such an exciting experience to chant the wrestler's name with their theme," he says. "As a wrestling fan, I wanted to incorporate that element somehow, and so I asked permission from Kenny to put that in."
The word "Omega" also has strong ties to Final Fantasy XIV and the series more broadly. It's the name developer Square Enix gives to an optional, powerful enemy in several of the series' games, including Final Fantasy XVI, and it plays an important role in two of Final Fantasy XIV's expansions, 2015's Heavensward and 2017's Stormblood. Soken incorporated elements of the Omega battle score throughout Kenny Omega's new theme.
Soken says he was delighted to learn that Kenny Omega agreed, as he's a particular fan of Final Fantasy. Omega even incorporated Final Fantasy VII into his routine in 2023, prior to taking a hiatus, and entered dressed as antagonist Sephiroth to Nobuo Uematsu's track "One-Winged Angel." Uematsu also spoke during Omega's entrance, though his short speech doesn't appear in Soken's official track.
Following his Wrestle Dynasty re-debut, Omega is appearing regularly in AEW matches again. Meanwhile, Soken continues his work on Final Fantasy XIV and its most recent expansion, Dawntrail.