Yasunori Mitsuda was born on January 21, 1972 in Tokuyama, Japan. He learned how the play the piano during his years in elementary school, but didn't practice seriously or often enough. During high school, he was inspired to take on music.  He was inspired by music from movies like "Blade Runner" and works from people like Henry Mancini. He one day hoped to compose music for movies. After leaving his home, he set out to study music. He enrolled in a junior college of music where he worked hard and received lots of criticism. Desperate for work, one of his instructors handed him an ad to work as game music composer for Square.

He was interviewed by Square's sound team, two of which were Nobuo Uematsu and Kenji Ito. He was then hired as a "composer," but was working as a sound engineer. After working as a sound engineer for a while, he was fed up because he truly wanted to compose music. So after talking to Hironobuo Sakaguchi (at that time, the vice president of Square), he was to compose music for Chrono Trigger (March 1995). He worked with other composers on CT's soundtrack, including Nobuo Uematsu. After that, he went on to compose solo works for games like Xenogears and Chrono Cross and earned his place in the world of video game music.