Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy

Tears of Time

God dammit, I thought to myself. I'm actually about to start crying.

I was sitting in the Heinz Music Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A friend of mine from college was beside me, glancing over as my hand covered my mouth. My eyes were locked onto the projection screen, the colorful dance of 16-bit kaleidoscoped images of childhood right before me, while the symphony below sung a most precious song of my life. Of my entire childhood.

Yes, I'd heard the overture from the Final Fantasy games repeatedly in my life. Yes, I've replayed many of these games recently. The nostalgia has tugged at my mind and my heart before. It was nothing new.

Our entourage come from a late lunch at Primanti Brothers in the nearby Market Square of the city, fueling my motor of a mouth with the likes of Crown Royal and Maker's Mark as we discussed video games, anime, and film cinematography with friends old and new. "Jolly fat man" is the best description for a drunken me, and it was that jovial attitude that stepped into the Heinz Music Hall for an evening of familiar MIDI tracks metamorphosed into soothing symphonies. Perhaps the alcohol screwing with my brain chemistry knocked a lever from "Grinning Idiot" to "Sobbing Sap" in the process?

The answer came to me later, as they played the opera from Final Fantasy VI. It wasn't just the nostalgia – this music taking me back to my childhood, to the living room of a house that has belonged to someone else for... well, half my life, now. It was a much deeper realization, one that I had forgotten somewhere along the way.

Without Final Fantasy, I would not be here, writing this article for the front page of Gamers With Jobs.


Photograph from thumbnail of YouTube user James Callow

To be specific, without Final Fantasy IV I would not be here. I've reminisced and been nostalgic before, and I've often described how much of an impact the opening flight of the Red Wings of Baron had on me as a child. It was also that game, however, that introduced us in America to the new overture – to the strings and woodwinds calling out a song of memory, too sweet to be bitter, too sorrowful to be delightful. I didn't just remember the game. I remembered early mornings where I had awoken before anyone else in my family, turning the system on and just listening. Listening to this song that conveyed emotions I wasn't old enough to understand, emotions I could not have possibly felt yet. Emotions that I longed for, the love and loss and pain and awe that it conveyed in all of its limited bloopity-bleep capability. It was my sole connection to the stories and experiences that had yet to occur in my life.

I've always known that it was Final Fantasy IV that taught me games could be more than games. That they could possess human drama and emotion. That they could tell epics, like that told in my brother's Lord of the Rings VHS recorded off of television.

While the game had been censored, it still contained content that surpassed the realities most children's entertainment at the time was willing to address: romance, the drama and pain of the love-triangle, betrayal at the hands of your closest friend, the cost of taking a life, and even what it meant to sacrifice yourself for the safety of your friends. Melodramatic? Poorly written? Oh, completely! No differently than how poorly the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was written, at least. Yet the crucial difference was in subject matter, and the Ninja Turtles never dared to approach something as serious as Edward's loss of his beloved fiancee or his ensuing struggle to stand strong on his own.

By the time I was nine years old and entering fourth grade I had been growing bored of most of the cartoons intended for me. Sure, I was loving Animaniacs and Rocko's Modern Life, but most other shows were simply white noise as I sketched videogame characters in my notebooks. I was reading books meant for adults. I was discovering the on-going, serialized plots of anime such as Ronin Warriors, though I wasn't aware at the time it originated from Japan. I was falling in love with Squaresoft, who had followed up Final Fantasy IV with Secret of Mana. Every screenshot from Final Fantasy VI that was printed in Nintendo Power was a promise. I'd open the pages every day like a locket, a cherished photograph that acted as vow to one day be in my home, loaded into my Super Nintendo, and playable on my screen.

Everyone else in my class was still freaking out about the latest Mortal Kombat release. They all insisted that the SEGA Genesis was better than the Super Nintendo because of the blood and gore. I didn't care about these things. I just wanted to see what story awaited me in Final Fantasy VI.

I nearly burst into tears again in the Heinz Music Hall when the woman on stage began to sing the opera piece. For the first time they had chosen to do the entire thing, from start to finish. The narrator read the lines as precisely as I had recalled. Hero Draco's on-stage avatar sang longingly for Maria. Maria lamented the absence of her true love Draco.

I, however, was no longer in my seat of the auditorium. I was in my living room sitting beside my older brother, the two of us grinning ear to ear. "They made an opera!" we exclaimed over and over. "They put an opera into a video game!"

It was more than nostalgia. It was the recollection of why such a thing was momentous. Yes, the MIDI tracks sound horrible by modern standards. Perhaps they even did at the time. The two-dimensional sprites were still tiny, deformed shapes that vaguely resembled human beings. All the dialogue had to be scrawled onto the screen, and unlike the subtitles to a film, the text was still pixelated.


Photograph taken by Jonathan Chiu

All the limitations be damned. Squaresoft did what they could, and they put an opera into a video game.

It's more than just a love for video games, or of playing them. Anyone can enjoy playing video games. Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI taught me something else, though. They taught me that video games can be more, and while I've always known this, always said it, I had somehow forgotten just how significant it was for me. I suddenly understood why I felt so betrayed during my rebellious teenage years, so angered at Square for aesthetic and gameplay changes that seemed to abandon what I thought I loved about the franchise. Why I see the monster designs for Final Fantasy XV, so familiar to the Super Nintendo era and yet so much more gorgeous, and yearn to welcome it once again with open arms.

Perhaps it is silly to say that the Final Fantasy games are a part of who I am, that they are a part of my own identity. For a few hours, though, sitting in that music hall in Pittsburgh, it didn't feel silly. It didn't even feel like a celebration. It was an old VHS, dust brushed away and carried carefully down from the attic.

It was a video of an event as simple and annual as a birthday – a video filled with family that have passed on, siblings that have grown into adults, and children that have begun to find their way as they enter college – a memory of where you came from, who and what shaped you, and a memento to keep you going forward.

Melodramatic? Oh, certainly. But it just wouldn't be Final Fantasy without a little overwrought melodrama, would it?

Comments

I have never played a Final Fantasy game with a number in the title.

This piece makes me want to. Well done!

I sympathize with you completely. I've had to stop listening to Video Games Live or similar performances while at work, as it really destroys my productivity.

For my part, I never played FF IV (I started at 7... sorry), so my 'gotcha' game soundtracks are Chrono Cross and Kingdom Hearts.

I regret not going now!

Great article. I have seen several of the Final Fantasy concerts--they are fantastic! Conductor Arnie really gets into it.

Ugh, can't believe I skipped out on the opportunity to go when it was here. Time to start a nostalgic replay of FFVI as a consolation prize. Fantastic piece.

I was fortunate enough to be taken to a Distant World's concert this year by my wife for my birthday and Uematsu was in attendance. Seeing him up on stage playing his keyboard with the orchestra was amazing, but I'm pretty sure I had tears in my eyes and a giant smile on my face nonstop through the concert. What a great experience.

Oh, and the midi music in FF IV and VI did and still sounds great.

Warriorpoet897 wrote:

Oh, and the midi music in FF IV and VI did and still sounds great.

That's what I keep telling Clock and Minarchist but they's just cray cray.

+1

JRPGs, and their music, make me feel nostalgic in a way that no other genre does. The original midi version of Terra's theme has a wistful beauty that none of the remastered versions have quite captured:

Yeah, I love that piece of music. It's beautiful. That being said, a full orchestral version of that would sound amazing.

I actually really love the Random Encounter version of Terra's theme, which has a sort of "echo" to it with the electric guitars that suit the Esper on the snowy mountains of Narshe setting well.

Entertainment System also has a great medley that opens with Terra's theme.

Rallick wrote:

Yeah, I love that piece of music. It's beautiful. That being said, a full orchestral version of that would sound amazing.

Rallick, have you heard the orchestral version from Distant Worlds II? Might be what you're after.

Yep, that's awesome. Thanks!

Thanks for sharing Chris. I too grew up on Final Fantasy and Squaresoft (as I'm sure you know from the JRPG and FF threads). I was definitely excited to see you finally got a chance to see this series when you first posted about it months ago, and I'm happy you had such a memorable time. I've been really lucky to have attended a few of them now (San Fran in 2005 and the last couple of times they've hit Boston). Each time has been an absolute blast and it's always cool to see the music come to life with a live orchestra. Also, so many StreetPasses!

It's also really cool to see institutions starting to recognize video game music as something worth celebrating, much like we celebrate composers such as John Williams, Alan Silvestri, or Hans Zimmer for their movie scores. Berklee did a show a couple years back that was half music from film and half from games and it was phenomenal:

If you can get to the Zelda concert series (Symphony of the Goddess), I highly recommend that one as well.

All the limitations be damned. Squaresoft did what they could, and they put an opera into a video game.

And they did it twice!

(Although I'm sure anyone who's an opera afficionado would chuckle and think it's cute that we hold VI's opera scene in such high regard)

And in closing... Here's the Boston show a couple years ago bringing down the house with Dancing Mad on the huge pipe organ at Symphony Hall which I'm sure you'll appreciate

shoptroll wrote:

And in closing... Here's the Boston show a couple years ago bring down the house with Dancing Mad on the huge pipe organ at Symphony Hall

That was fan-f*ckin'-tastic. Thanks for posting it.

ccesarano wrote:

That was fan-f*ckin'-tastic. Thanks for posting it.

I knew you'd appreciate it

I'm loving this thread.