January wasn't meant to move this slow for me. I'm in that odd situation where I have a new pile of shame from an Xmas haul that I can't find myself getting motivated to play, despite the fact that for the first time in a while I have a surplus of great games to get through. Maybe it's being spoiled for choice, or maybe it's just winter malaise, but I've spent the majority of my video game time these past two weeks just watching LPs and playing Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call in short bursts.
Curtain Call is the enhanced edition of Square-Enix and Indieszero's 2012 rhythm game Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which recontextualizes the entire Final Fantasy multiverse as a stage filled with adorable marionette facsimiles of the venerable series' enormous cast of PCs and enemies. The focus is entirely on the music from those games, and Curtain Call expands the already impressive discography of the first game to include a lot of Final Fantasy spin-offs and the franchise's few appearances in other media. However, it's not purely built for fan service: the game itself is accessible to all with its easy to grasp and tricky to master rhythm gameplay, though the difficulty curve kind of rises precipitously when you get to the hardest difficulty setting, Ultimate, and the game simply becomes some kind of absurd Jedi training program. Hell, it would make finding robots disguised as humans easier than any Turing or Voight-Kampff test ever could.
Anyhoo, I've gotten pretty deep into the game and I'm close to the cap for Rhythmia, the game's cumulative score-slash-currency that unlocks new features every milestone. (Most of these features are nonsense, like new noises for hitting notes and new features for your StreetPass card (wooo.), but there's been some good stuff too. I sort of want to see what happens when I max it out.) As such, I've been thoroughly reintroduced to the Final Fantasy series through its music, and I'm thinking of just going through the series and discussing its games from a purely musical perspective. Some soundtracks stick out more than others, and for various reasons, let's just say.
(I also want a jab at some of its DLC, especially the Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana tracks, but £.89 per song seems a little inconvenient. Who wants to charge their Visa 89 pence? I kinda wish there was a pick and mix option, but I shudder to imagine the amount of additional eShop infrastructure tweaking that would require. Maybe I'll just put ten quid's worth of credit on the eShop and be done with it.)
Final Fantasy - "I, Garland, Will Rock You All (Down)"
The core Final Fantasies are left largely untouched in Curtain Call, with a smattering of previously DLC-only songs thrown in for color. What's unusual, to perhaps anyone who is hopelessly naive, is how many core series songs are still available as DLC even for Curtain Call. Anyway, the first Final Fantasy does what it can with the NES's sound tech, though it's certainly not bad. Catchy, even. Capcom pulled off wonders with that thing, after all, and Square's lead composer Nobuo Uematsu was no slouch back then either. What's a little jarring is that some of the tracks are clearly from the GBA and PSP remakes, as they sound way more modern than the rest. The Halloween-esque final boss theme, for instance, was added to versions of FFI created long after the original NES release: in the NES version, poor old Chaos had to settle with the standard battle theme.
Final Fantasy II - "I Hurt Myself Today"
So my purpose here today is to sidestep the reputation certain Final Fantasy games have in order to focus on their music. FFII's soundtrack isn't all that notable (but the less charitable might say that it's still the best thing in that game) and it has the fewest number of tracks for any core Final Fantasy as a result. Tracks like the Rebel Army's main theme are still catchy enough, which is fortunate because you have to go back and forth from their base about a hundred times. FFII's lead designer, Akitoshi Kawazu, would go on to create his own vaguely derivative Final Fantasy-inspired spin-off, the SaGa series, which would become renowned for their soundtracks. Though, again, it's probably more the case that people were reaching for something nice to say. There's quite a number of SaGa tracks as DLC but... ehh.
Final Fantasy III - "A Hard Day's Onion Knight"
I enjoy the music of Final Fantasy III quite a bit, especially the final boss music and some of the field stages. It's the biggest of the NES trio, so there was quite a number of tunes to choose from. Even though it's just NES bleeps and bloops, tracks like The Boundless Ocean can be pretty darn moving.
Final Fantasy IV - "Loonarian Tunes"
Now we're getting to the good stuff. Final Fantasy IV is absolutely jammed with memorable tracks, from the ominously imperial Red Wings theme at the start of the game to the equally ominous final encounter with Zemus, now a giant R-Type boss calling itself Zeromus. The technological theme of Within the Giant, the rousing Battle with the Four Fiends, and the portentous Tower of Zot are all great too. It's probably some degree of nostalgic fanservice guiding my words here, and Theatrhythm wouldn't be nearly as fun without that, but FFIV's music is so totally the shit that it isn't even spoony.
Final Fantasy V - "The Clash on the Big Bridge"
FFV's music, too, is remarkable in a lot of ways. While I tend to forget what half its silly plot was about (aliens, meteors and werewolves, I think), there's some tracks that take me right back to the parts of the game I actually do remember. The way Exdeath's final boss theme initially sounds like Ghostbusters, for instance, or the bittersweet reunion that accompanies Home, Sweet Home. Gilgamesh's not-so-final showdown with Clash on the Big Bridge too, of course, since I brought it up. It also has one of the best Chocobo themes with Mambo de Chocobo.
Final Fantasy VI - "He Suplexed the Midnight Train, Goin' Anywhere"
Final Fantasy VI is a damn masterpiece, as I'm sure we're all aware, and its eclectic soundtrack reflects that to an extent. Almost every character, and there's over a dozen, has their own leitmotif that reflects their personality - Celes's is sad and compassionate, Terra's is enigmatic and lonely, Sabin/Edgar's is brash and regal. Kefka's final boss theme, Dancing Mad, is one of the longest tracks in the entire game (though it's not a patch on the "full" version, which is seventeen minutes long. It's like Final Fantasy's version of Stairway to Heaven.) I'm a little shocked they managed to cut it down to ten tracks, but I guess they needed to hold something back for DLC.
Final Fantasy VII - "Materia Girl"
It shouldn't come to any surprise to anyone that Final Fantasy VII, despite having a stellar soundtrack that really took advantage of the series's leap to CDs, is a little over-represented here. While many of the big tracks are here (except the opening Bombing Mission theme, which is DLC), many of them end up getting remixed in some manner with the two other Final Fantasy VII-related entries on this list. Still, all ten of FFVII's are bangers, and 100% is not a bad ratio to hit. Certainly can't go wrong with the standard battle theme (I love the metallic echo-y parts), standard boss theme, J-E-N-O-V-A, Aerith's theme, Gold Saucer, Cosmo Canyon (possibly my favorite FF7 track) or Judgment Day. Even the main theme still gives me goosebumps. Ol' Sephy's One-Winged Angel dirge is here too, of course, and not for the last time.
Final Fantasy VIII - "Total Ellipsis of the Heart"
The best Final Fantasy soundtrack. As much as I love the music for a lot of these other games, Final Fantasy VIII is the easy winner for me. Maybe it stands out more because the rest of the game ain't so hot, but I love almost every track from this game (except maybe Eyes on Me). Don't be Afraid and Force Your Way are amazing battle themes, The Man With the Machine Gun reminds me how awesome Laguna's little asides were, Maybe I'm a Lion might well be the most badass boss theme in the entire franchise. The Extreme's fantastic too, as sinister as Maybe I'm a Lion is relentless. Blue Fields and Fisherman's Horizon are a gentle tonic for the game's crazier moments, while Find Your Way and The Castle feel like something out of a horror game. I just wish there was more Final Fantasy VIII music in this game, consarnit. (Well, it has five DLC tracks if I really wanted to bite the bullet and call my own bluff. Not that I could call out anything while biting a bullet. Mixed metaphors, my friends; wanna avoid those if you can.)
Final Fantasy IX - "Ozma Osbourne"
I like Final Fantasy IX's music a lot too, of course. I feel like they deliberately kept things simple after the nutty Kojima-esque excesses of VIII, and the music's a similar story. As I have a bit more of an emotional connection to FFIX, because it actually had characters I cared about, some of its tracks stick out for me more for their nostalgic value. Songs like Something to Protect, A Place to Call Home and Not Alone are more powerful for their added context. Others are just fun and a little goofy, like Festival of the Hunt and Dark City Treno.
Final Fantasy X - "Blitzball Bop"
Final Fantasy X might be my third favorite soundtrack of the series, after VIII and MQ. It feels like Uematsu (and his eventual successor, Masashi Hamauzu) drew from a lot of different genres while putting it together. If you were to just take the five boss themes included in Curtain Call: Fight with Seymour's your classic frantic Final Fantasy boss tune that sticks a brick on the accelerator pedal; Challenge, the boss theme of Yunalesca and others, is a bit heavier and more contemporary as well as just kinda unnerving; Otherworld's a lot heavier and almost incongruously metal were it not for its connection to badass asshole (badasshole? that sounds like a medical condition) Jecht; A Contest of Aeons is the other kind of common Final Fantasy boss theme where it's all grandiose and sweeping to suggest that there's a lot on the line; while the Final Battle is more the all-out orchestral final boss tune that Final Fantasy tends to work with often. FFX's best known for its far more melodic guitar stuff, though, like Suteki da ne, To Zanarkand, Spira Unplugged and A Fleeting Dream.
Final Fantasy XI - "Nirvana'diel's Nevermind"
I have zero experience with Final Fantasy XI, so in this case I'm approaching a game's music without the advantage of having any added in-game context behind them. It's easy to tell if a song's happy or sad, but when connected to a very specific mood or feeling, like a character having just lost their homeland or sacrificing themselves for another, the emotional impact of the music becomes more potent still. As much as I don't care for the MMOs, I can't deny that they have some great music. XI's main themes tend to be medieval folksy and orchestral choral stuff, and it works surprising well alongside the game's western MMORPG bent (it's said Sakaguchi wanted to create a global online FF game after being impressed with MMOs like EverQuest while on vacation to the US).
Final Fantasy XII - "Vaan Halen"
The expansive Final Fantasy XII is a schizophrenic game in many respects, due to how its lead designer changed halfway through and how so much of the world is entirely optional and designed for RPG players who want to spend a hundred hours looking for loot and finishing side-missions instead of following a story, an open-world design philosophy that Dragon Age: Inquisition is very much keeping alive. Its soundtrack is a little more structured, however, and that also means that it's kind of dull, though entirely competent. It's almost all standard orchestral business as usual, though certain tracks like the Dalmasca Estersand and Boss Battle (that :55 second mark, holy shit) still get me stoked for adventure. It's great background music, and reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics (see below), so I can't denigrate it too much.
Final Fantasy XIII - "One Track Lover"
Final Fantasy XIII's soundtrack's kind of weird. It's a mix of heavy orchestral and heavy synthesized business, lots of weird J-pop type stuff thrown in with the usual big John Williams type business. The Sunleth Waterscape is a perfect example of this, a gentle and melodic overworld theme crossed with some kind of "un-tss, un-tss" nightclub electro. I really like Saber's Edge though. And the Gapra Whitewood, which almost sounds like a Ghost in the Shell tune. In fact, there's a lot to like about the music in this game, as thematically unusual as a lot of it is.
Final Fantasy XIV - "Realm Reborn to Run"
Likewise, Final Fantasy XIV is kind of all over the place with its music because the game itself is so huge and varied, as the second MMO on this list. It's more of the usual orchestral fare mixed in with some heavy metal tracks (Under the Weight) and very pleasant folksy material similar to XI's (To the Sun). It's the newest game featured in Curtain Call, along with Lightning Returns, and because it's an MMO I have no reason to believe this music isn't getting worked on and tweaked along with everything else as we speak. It's a good set of tracks, though of course without any kind of added context because hell no am I playing an MMO.
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest - "All About the Benjamins"
My second favorite soundtrack. To the extent that I'm genuinely angry that this game only features a paltry two songs, Battle 1 and Battle 2, as if they were only required to acknowledge Final Fantasy Mystic Quest before moving on. Mystic Quest, though in embarrassment in many respects, has one of the most unexpectedly great soundtracks of any Final Fantasy spin-off and is easily my favorite of the pre-CD games. Doom Castle? Dark King? Fireburg? Focus Tower? Bone Dungeon? Nope, not here. Just the two standard battle themes. Such a missed opportunity. (There aren't even any DLC additions! What the crap? The only high point of this game was its soundtrack, and this could've been its one chance to redeem itself in some way.)
Final Fantasy Tactics - "Ramzastein"
Final Fantasy Tactics's soundtrack is more of what I've been reductively calling "folksy" elsewhere, but there's a very distinctive tone to it. It feels like medieval war music, but I'd have no idea what "medieval war music" would even sound like. They didn't really press a whole lot of vinyls back then. FFT's sort of like Mystic Quest in that it's sorely underrepresented (though at least it has a whole bunch of DLC tracks) with its meager five track offering, including favorites like Antipyretic and Trisection. For comparison's sake, the official FFT album has 71 tracks. Final Fantasy Tactics is debatably the best Final Fantasy game in the entire franchise, and not even debatably the best written, so it deserves more than what it gets here. Ah well, maybe the spin-offs were always meant to be less of a focus.
Final Fantasy X-2 - "House of Paine"
Final Fantasy X-2's music is, well, an acquired taste, to put it diplomatically. I might've intimated that XIII's music is a bit J-pop-esque, but not quite to the overt degree that X-2's is. It's bubbly and clubby and entirely incongruous to the tone of the original game and the dour, pessimistic setting in which said game is set. 1000 Words, the big love song that plays during a pivotal moment in the game, is here as one of the thankfully few Event Stages. YRP Fight, We're the Gullwings and Let me Blow You a Kiss sound like they should be on the soundtrack of a Totally Spies! movie. I'm entirely not sure if this is a bad thing, but it sure is weird.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles - "Caravan of Love"
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles's soundtrack couldn't be any more different than X-2's. It's all super melodic singing with tribal wind instruments, very subtle and atmospheric, especially with tracks like Monster Ronde and Sound of the Wind. The exception is the This is the End For You boss track, which is a crazy good rock track that doesn't seem to fit with the rest. (That's because it's a Crystal Bearers track, I discovered later. That game has some personality to it, to put it mildly.) It's been a long while since I played the game (and my memories of it tend to involve playing stages over and over to get all the artifacts and worrying about keeping the fog away), but this soundtrack makes me think that playing it again wouldn't be a bad thing. I'd just need to figure out where my GBA/GC adapter cable is...
Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children - "Get Off of My Cloud"
More Final Fantasy VII. Somehow the fact that FFT and FFMQ got a short shrift is made even more egregious that the developers determined that tracks for a damn FFVII movie that mostly uses remixes of the game's music were more important. Divinity II, one of the few new songs, isn't bad though. Definitely foreboding.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII - "Zack Attack"
Thankfully, most of Crisis Core's music was made especially for the game. The two Field Stages are FFVII remixes, but the three Battle Stage tracks are all new. And excellent! I really liked Crisis Core, and it's great to be able to play the plaintive The Price of Freedom or the rocking Encounter and The SOLDIER Way. Much like its leading man, the music of Crisis Core was too kickass for its world.
Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon - "When We Was Fables"
Chocobo's Dungeon is distinctive because you have to unlock all three of these tracks by earning Rhythmia rather than having them available from the offset, not so distinctive when you discover that all three tracks are remixes from other games: FFVIII's Man With the Machine Gun, FFV's Clash on the Big Bridge and FFXI's Awakening, to be precise. Another mystifying addition given the amount of original material left out.
Dissidia Final Fantasy - "We Built Dissidia Rock and Roll"
Dissidia Final Fantasy's like Final Fantasy's version of Smash Bros, both conceptually and musically. Most of Dissidia's soundtrack is remixes and arrangements of Final Fantasy music from other games in the series, and to Theatrhythm's credit it does at least try to pick the few pieces of original music created for Dissidia. Unfortunately, that's just a handful of themes that share a similar underlying riff, similar to something like how Brawl's choral main theme and its Final Destination theme are the same song but with different compositions. I actually like Dissidia's main theme and battle theme, but it feels like an odd inclusion when there are other FF spin-offs that don't quite rely so heavily on the music of prior Final Fantasy games (especially when Theatrhythm itself is doing a very similar thing).
Dissidia 012 Final Fantasy - "Dio Decim"
Yeah, see above. Just the handful of original themes that aren't based on any of the other Final Fantasies. Like this one.
Final Fantasy Type-0 - "School's Out For Summer"
Final Fantasy Type-0's music is unique on this soundtrack because the game it pertains to doesn't have a US/EU release. Or, I should say, not yet. The HD version (of what was originally a PSP game) will be out in March for the two newer consoles in all territories. Its music is actually quite a lot of fun, especially War: The White Weapon and Vermillion Flame. (Oddly, nowhere on the internet refers to these tracks by these names, which suggests that they're the official titles for the localizations that haven't been released yet.) It's getting me interested in playing it, as does hearing that its gameplay is very similar to Crisis Core (and that its story is similar to Valkyria Chronicles 2).
Final Fantasy XIII-2 - "Que Serah, Serah"
Final Fantasy XIII-2's music is similar to XIII's soundtrack, perhaps unsurprisingly. Same mix of staple piano (Noel's Theme) and orchestral (Heart of Chaos) themes juxtaposed with some upbeat clubmix battle themes (The Last Hunter). Maybe not quite as memorable or varied as the first, but still decent enough. The game itself was completely bonkers, but even so it was a sequel and that meant quite a number of familiar tracks and leitmotifs from the original found their way back in. Still, they gathered up enough of the new stuff to make a strong selection.
Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns - "Chain Lightning"
I've tried my best to avoid listening to the music of Lightning Returns, as it just so happens to be the next game on my itinerary and I imagine I'm going to be hearing a lot of it regardless. From what I've heard, it's like XIII and XIII-2, just... more of it. (I suppose that was mostly everyone's reaction to XIII-3 as well...)
Well, that's enough listening material. Petered out towards the end there, but that's because it felt like a lot of these were late-stage inclusions with only a few applicable tunes. I'm cagey around listening to anything from the newer Final Fantasy games I've yet to play, for whatever reason. It's not like Theatrhythm's packed with spoilers either; on the contrary, it synopsizes the various games it features as if presenting them for the first time to the uninitiated. Given Theatrhythm's low barrier to entry, they might be onto something by bringing in new fans this way.
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