My Gaming Audio History: Final Fantasy (1990)

Since I've already blogged about the music of Final Fantasy pretty extensively in a comparison between the original NES music and the iOS update music, I'll keep this a short with just a few thoughts about the music.  I can't believe that the game has less than 10 minutes of music.  For a NES game, that's not too bad, but considering that it takes 30 or 40 hours of gameplay, it's shocking to consider that ratio 1:180 ratio of music to gameplay.  Pretty incredible!  Especially considering that just about two minutes of those 10 minutes are end game music that's heard only once in those 30 hours.  So, that means 8 minutes of music keeps you occupied for all that time.

One of the things I find most incredible about these beginning game compositions is that the music is so superb.  These composers were working with very crude systems where the music had to be programmed in a very cumbersome way.  Not only that, but the limitations of only having three or four voices was extremely challenging as well.  Further this by the fact that there wasn't really much of a game music history for these composers to look back on and their groundbreaking, foundational work becomes even more inspiring.  Composers like Uematsu took these limitations and difficulties and created art.  The work he and others did was just incredible.  I'll never understand people who dismiss early game music as bleeps and bloops or not yet of age.  It's just like a great visual artist who decided to limit how colors or shapes are used, but still create incredible artwork.

I read on vgmpf that Final Fantasy used very little percussion in the soundtrack.  I'd never really thought about it, but it's definitely true.  For the battle music, the lack of percussion could be the fact that Uematsu didn't want the percussion dropping out to create the sound effects, which were typically created from the same noise maker channel.  There are plenty of scenes where percussion would've been possible, but clearly he didn't feel it necessary for this game.  And several of the tracks were used and reused many many times.  The victory fanfare, the main theme of Final Fantasy (when you cross the Cornelia bridge) and the opening arpeggiation.

Here's a link to the vgmpf Uematsu page.  I was checking it out to see where Final Fantasy fell in his game music compositional history.  I'd be very interested to hear Uematsu's television and radio jingles-- didn't know he'd been involved in that sort of thing.  I see that Rad Racer, was an even earlier NES game Uematsu did the music to.  I thought I hadn't played it, but I've just pulled up a longplay and I definitely have played this game with a friend a lot growing up.  Totally forgot about it.  I'm giving the longplay a watch/listen as I finish up this blog.  Check it out if you want to hear some earlier Uematsu.  Here's a link to the soundtrack if you prefer.

Having now watched that longplay of Rad Racer, the vgmpf page is pretty disparaging about the music in the game.   I don't really think it's all that bad!  Some tracks sound more classical, the ending theme is a nice blues theme that's pretty catchy...  Reading those comments makes me realize it's a really fine line for these websites that are maintain facts/history to not go too far into one person's opinion.  If the writer of that page wants to trash the audio, at least find a source that agrees to back the position up so that it's semi-legitimate.  That kind of opinionated stuff is hardly in the spirit of a "wiki" site.  That said, it's unquestionable that Uematsu's compositional skill has blossomed through his career.  Simultaneously, technological improvements allowed him to better realize his compositions, no doubt.

Lastly, I'll leave you with a link to a G4 Final Fantasy tribute I just watched.  Great stuff.  I'm all the more excited to see that FF4 is coming up in my list.  It's a way off, but still, I'm excited to see how his style grows with the technological advances of the SNES.