Distant Worlds: The Music of Final Fantasy

Nobuo Uematsu has been called the John Williams of video game music. It's quite clear why. From early on he composed rich and complicated music that had to be squeezed out of the NES's severely lacking sound chip. He would make themes for different moods, or characters within the games, some of which have carried over into each subsequent installment. Well before the music in a game was thought of as an important part of the game, Uematsu brought importance to it.

On Tuesday last week, I had the pleasure of attending a live symphony orchestra playing music of his. I stumbled upon this event less then a week before it was to occur, and was somewhat hesitant to go. While I've played Final Fantasy games since I was a kid, I'm not normally one who buys the soundtracks and listens to the music during non-gaming parts of my life. Still, I've always been a sucker for orchestrated music and full choirs and all that so I thought I'd give it a try.

I was quite impressed. This was definitely not just a cheap cash-in on the success of the game franchise. They could have done only music from the more recent installments, and probably more popular ones, that would have been easier to translate to an orchestra, but they pulled out a lot of surprises. One of particular note was the epic opera scene from Final Fantasy 6. Where on the SNES, it was almost archaic sounding by today's standards, in the translation done here it was brilliant and amazing. Everything I'm sure Uematsu imagined when he first wrote it.

There were lots of neat little touches to help bring gamers who have probably never been to a symphony before into the show. A large screen behind the orchestra would play clips from the games that originally featured the music being played. It was a great idea and wonderful to have something to watch other then tiny people playing instruments, but there were moments that shined greater then most.

During one song, they started up a clip of FF8 that was merely the characters talking. Then they took off and before you knew it the screen flashed, signifying a random battle, at the same moment the orchestra started into the song, which was the boss battle music from the game. Moments like that left me wanting more. Most of the clips they showed were just collections of the cut scenes from the games, but if they were all like that battle music it could have been so much better. That's what live video game music should be. Imagine watching an event from a game you love play out on screen, while a live orchestra is playing the music to it.

If shows like that were around for a bunch of popular video game series, it would certainly help draw the fans out to watch the show. Even so, Distant Worlds did not disappoint me, and it definitely helped draw in a crowd. The show I saw was the show that the orchestra had sold the most tickets to out of any of their performances the whole season. Gamers are clearly interested, so I hope more events like this come about. Just a tip of advice if you are thinking about going to something like this though: dress nice. Nobody cares about your Mario t-shirt that you think is giving you gamer cred. If we want people to respect games, we have to dress respectfully. We're at a symphony, not some cheap bar.