\u201cThe more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one\u2019s self,\u201d wrote Igor Stravinsky in his book Poetics of Music. \u201cAnd the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF1 outdoes its counterpart in girth, complexity, range, and\u2014though it\u2019s subjective\u2014enjoyability. DQ1\u2019s score comprises eight unique pieces of music, mostly sticks to two voices, and is overall pretty somber. Fanfare-anthems bookend the game, and cheerful music plays in villages\u2014but the player spends an overwhelming majority of time listening to tense or windburned music, as in the battles, dungeons, and overworld. FF1, on the other hand, crosses the finish line with nineteen unique pieces of music, pretty consistently uses all three tone-channels, and takes the listener all over the emotional map: cheerfulness, anxiety, excitement, depression, and resolve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere\u2019s rhythm and there\u2019s melody,\u201d he says in a 1994 interview. \u201cRhythm only reaches the body. Melodies, however, do reach one\u2019s soul.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI love progressive rock,\u201d he said in a 2011 interview, \u201cbecause you can put any genre of music into it.\u201d Indeed, prog rock\u2019s influence on his work is sometimes baldly apparent. Compare, for example, Boston\u2019s \u201cForeplay \/ Long Time\u201d (1976) to FF5\u2019s \u201cBattle at the Big Bridge\u201d and FF6\u2019s \u201cDancing Mad.\u201d Or try comparing \u201cDancing Mad\u201d to the three-movement, organ-heavy \u201cThree Fates\u201d (1970) by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Tchaikovsky\u2019s influence is less explicit. Certain musical moments in Final Fantasy do recall his Romantic-era sensibilities: The last section in FF6\u2019s \u201cCyan\u201d resembles the love theme from Romeo and Juliet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Uematsu\u2019s pastiche encompasses more than rock and classical. He burgles from everywhere. No genre is safe. As a case study: Every FF game from FF2 onward incorporates his Chocobo theme\u2014which accompanies characters as they ride giant land-birds, a cross between an ostrich and a marshmallow Peep. Almost every recurrence of the theme is plunked into a new genre: samba, bluegrass, techno, mambo, chiptune, surf rock, mod, and Dave Brubeck-like quintuple meter. In his 16-bit games alone, he invokes sea shanties; Scandinavian, Celtic, and East Asian folk music; ragtime; West African drumming; industrial; rockabilly; and Viennese waltz.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
In the World of Balance, about two decades before the game begins, a political force known as the Empire\u2014headed by Emperor Gestahl and his flunky clown-mage, Kefka\u2014gained tremendous power. Gestahl was interested in acquiring and weaponizing magic power so his empire could crush, conquer, and rule the world. To do this, he located the portal to the world of the Espers, the race of beings at the heart of the War of the Magi, who had withdrawn from the human world to stop the bloodshed once and for all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF6\u2019s director, Yoshinori Kitase, said in a 2013 interview with Edge magazine: \u201cWe began work on Final Fantasy VI with the idea that every character is the protagonist of the story. The idea was to transform the characters from mere ciphers for fighting into true characters with substance and backstories who could evoke more interesting or complex feelings in the player.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF6\u2019s soundtrack spans three compact discs, totals 61 tracks, and clocks in at a little over three hours\u2014massive in comparison to its peers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The little chunky avatars in FF6 are detailed enough to resemble cartoon people while avoiding, by a long shot, the uncanny valley\u2019s downward dive into pseudo-human creepiness. The uncanny valley describes a low point in an object\u2019s trajectory towards human resemblance: Somewhere between the peaks of \u201ccute because it\u2019s not so human\u201d and \u201cindistinguishable from a person\u201d is a wide, disturbing gulf, the nadir of which is the 2004 film The Polar Express. When games aim for photorealistic characters, our brains fixate on their imperfections, on any hint of alienness. But games like the Mario series, and the 80s and 90s FF titles, provide enough physical detail to convey humanness while avoiding the downhill train-crash of Tom Hanks\u2019s most unfortunate cinematic endeavor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF6\u2019s characters are drawn chibi style, sometimes referred to as \u201csuper-deformed,\u201d meaning that their heads, torsos, and legs are in equal proportion, similar to Mario\u2019s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
One would think that, with limited pixel space, he would have pushed for the characters to appear as human as possible\u2014knowing that, even with the team\u2019s best efforts, they could never fall all the way into Ro-bob Hoskins or Lou Al-bot-o territory. Instead, they lean into their technological barriers and create the weird little nuggets we\u2019ve learned to love. They chose this spot on the curve of the uncanny valley intentionally: the equal head-torso-leg proportion, the large forehead, the chubby arms\u2014these recall the look of infants, beings we are evolutionarily trained to adore. That feeling of adoration, protracted over 40 hours of gameplay, slowly transforms into attachment. Not quite real love\u2014chibi love.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a little sad that Final Fantasy VI was the last chibi Final Fantasy game,\u201d Uematsu said later in our exchange. \u201cI wish I could have done one or two more with the same atmosphere.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
To paint Shadow through music, Uematsu pays homage to Ennio Morricone\u2019s work, specifically from the Dollars trilogy\u2014A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). He mashes up elements from each of these three movies\u2019 theme songs (the omnipresent whistle, the strum of a guitar, the mouth harp) to create an instantly recognizable reference that captures Shadow\u2019s withdrawn, prickly personality, recalling Clint Eastwood\u2019s iconic stone-faced screen presence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A Fistful of Dollars was an unlicensed remake of Akira Kurosawa\u2019s Yojimbo (1961), about a dark-robed ronin. This cowboy music, repurposed for a mysterious ninja, traces a line back to Kurosawa, who himself borrowed heavily from American Westerns.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Magitek Factory\u2019s theme, \u201cDevil\u2019s Lab,\u201d also gives an immediate sense of place. Uematsu\u2019s use of synthesizers to indicate artificiality and evil, and to hint that a confrontation with Kefka is on the horizon, is front-and-center. The piece begins with a steady beat of industrial sound effects\u2014mechanical clicks and anvil-like clangs\u2014then a killer bass-synth riff (figure 3.5). It may be the stankiest groove in video game music history, rolling and locking like someone doing the robot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Phantom Train delivers souls from the material world to the afterlife. Early in the game, you accidentally board it while it\u2019s parked at its platform in the Phantom Forest, then you must find a way to get off the train before it reaches the afterlife. Only when the train delivers you back to your origin in the woods do you see how grim it truly is: You are forced to watch the murdered people of Doma slowly file aboard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
EarthBound, released in Japan about four months after FF6, features a Blues Brothers\u2013like band called the Runaway Five; helping the band (and watching them play a set) is a required part of the game. In many respects, this sequence is similar to FF6\u2019s opera\u2014though it strikes me as a much less risky move.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Broadly held cultural notions about opera as highly intellectual and inaccessibly beautiful may contribute to the scene\u2019s aesthetic success by leading the player to believe that something extraordinary is about to happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF6\u2019s opera voices are actual recordings of people singing, but storage capacity on SNES cartridges necessitated compromise in audio quality. The voice samples are stretched to their limits: They\u2019re compressed to a relatively low quality, and they further lose fidelity as the SNES hardware manipulates the samples up and down the scale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Music can help us navigate and survive the social Thunderdome we call adolescence, determining in part who our friends are, how we interact with the world, and how we begin to carve out our adult identities. The growing independence that comes with our ascent to adulthood means we can increasingly forage for our own music and define our own tastes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
We remember our adolescence and young adulthood disproportionately to the rest of our lives\u2014a psychological phenomenon called the reminiscence bump. During this same period, puberty can make our emotions virtually explosive. The collision of these two phenomena means our hormone-addled brains document our most awkward years with laser-cut clarity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The Los Angeles Philharmonic had barely hung up its coat at its new home at the Walt Disney Concert Hall\u2014that silvery mishmash of deflating polyhedra designed by Frank Gehry\u2014when it suddenly found itself party to a weird side-quest in the history of classical music: On May 10, 2004, it became the first-ever American orchestra to put on a concert of video game music. That concert, \u201cDear Friends \u2013 Music from Final Fantasy,\u201d featured Nobuo Uematsu\u2019s work exclusively (only one piece from Final Fantasy VI made the cut: Terra\u2019s theme).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
A 2015 album of arrangements of Uematsu\u2019s work, Final Symphony\u2014based on the music of FF6, FF7, and FF10, and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Eckehard Stier\u2014topped the iTunes classical charts in at least ten countries and reached the top five on both the Billboard classical charts and the Official UK Charts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
FF6\u2019s opera scene\u2014still humbled by its synthesizers and warbly diva\u2014was the real inflection point, not just for the Final Fantasy series but for the way we think about video game music as a whole. This was the first time a video game sat the player down in the dress circle and said, \u201cShush. Listen.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
These highlights are from the Kindle version of Final Fantasy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":15162,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\n
"Final Fantasy VI" Highlights<\/title>\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n\t \n