Game Music Online: Square Enix Final Fantasy 13 Retrospective

Vince and I have been playing around with the Final Fantasy 13-3 demo that we downloaded a few nights ago.  The new game looks awesome, and any follower of the blog knows how much I love the FF series.  In another case of nostalgia-- just after my Campbell's Soup memory lane trip yesterday-- I'm really floored by this Square Enix video.  It's a retrospective on Final Fantasy 13 and 13-2 made to look as if it's from the SNES era.  

While Vince and I watched this, one of the things he said immediately was that the sounds were not as good as they could have been from the SNES.  Some of the sound effects are, of course, exactly the same as FF VI, but considering the musical sounds, I feel he may be right.  Why does the sound quality feel even more primitive than FF IV or VI did?

Why might the designers of this video take this direction with the music?  Why would the creators of this video choose to go with such a primitive sound quality?  Does it create even more feeling of "age" for the old game?  Or perhaps music composed for modern systems is created in a way that makes it difficult to translate back into 16 bit sounds?  I do think that the use of various voices actually does give a cool build up to the themes.  Also, it's a little mind blowing to think of this music in that old 16 bit style.  It was a Dali inspired moment when I heard this.

I want to write that I have no problem with old school game audio transitioning to live orchestra, and thus am wondering why this re-imagination in the reverse direction (orchestrated to 16-bit) is less successful for me.  However, now that I think about it, I don't love game audio when it's orchestrated.  Sometimes it's very successful; for instance, I think Zelda's Gerudo valley theme is orchestrated and performed well.  But other times, I feel orchestrated arrangements don't really do the original composition justice, changing rhythms or adding tacky tags/ intros (here, Matoya's cave theme, at 2:40... the change in melodic rhythm is not to my liking at all).

Perhaps, then, this FF 13 music is just another case of a transition across mediums that I didn't think worked as skillfully as it could have.  Yet, I suspect there were more deliberate choices in terms of voicing and sounds that are trying to make these SNES sounds seem even older than they were,  telescoping it to an even earlier era.  It's another nostalgic reach out to folks around my age who know and love these old games.  Seeing this video does make me think about how far game audio has come and its progression through time.  I think FF 13 has some of the greatest music I know.  In terms of interactivity, the game designers use of it is not cutting edge-- simple fades in and out are most of the "interactivity" with the audio.  And yet, because the music is brilliantly composed, orchestrated, and performed, that doesn't matter too much.

Considering all this, I suppose I should enjoy that this video gave me reflection on the progress of game audio.  Yet, I wish the look back 20 years didn't sound quite so exaggerated...

Note: follow the link to the YouTube video and notice that the quality of the audio is actually a topic of conversation in the video comments as well!  Nice to know that others had the same reaction!

Analysis: Listening to game music while playing

I've been playing around with Final Fantasy 4, 5, 6, 7, and 13 recently to see the audio progression from some of the earlier games to the current ones.  When I study the music, often I just listen to the game soundtracks-- I'm not always playing the game again (for the 300th time).  However, in picking up the controller and playing these games, I've had some interesting revelations:

Final Fantasy 13:  There's a LOT of background noise in this game, gunfire/military fighting related sounds in many portions of the game.  Even in some of the more secluded areas, there's just a background audio white noise that comes on-- for instance in the Vile Peaks.  Furthermore, the spoken audio is really loud in relation to the music.  When I listen to game audio from the soundtracks, I listen to it way louder than I could ever turn the game audio up on my home stereo system: the vocals and effects just make the audio experience way too loud before the music is overpowering.

Final Fantasy 7: This got me thinking back to my playthrough of FF7, and I thought about how I hear the music when I'm playing the game versus how I hear the music when studying it.  Do these tracks play in entirety and repeat, or do I just hear the same beginning section of them over and over?  Of course, this will differ from game to game, but I still have a couple old post-its from my Final Fantasy 7 playthrough, and one of them, an audio journal of my quest to get a Gold Chocobo, will help answer my query.

Late in my FF7 playthrough, I took notes on all the audio I heard as I got a Gold Chocobo.  This process took 7 hours and I heard the following music.  If I consistently heard way less than the whole track, I noted the length of time I heard the music:

The Great Northern Cave (now Overworld Theme)
Farm Boy
Fighting (Battle Theme)
Electric de Chocobo (Choco Battle ~:60)
Cinco de Choco
Highwind Takes to the Skies
Costa del Sole (I bought the Villa and rested here as needed ~:10)
Good Night Until Tomorrow
North Corel (Mining Town ~:15 secs)
Gold Saucer (~:30)
Choco Races- Place Your Bets!
Fiddle de Chocobo
A Great Success  (~:15 also could have heard Tango of Tears, but not this playthrough!)

Some of this music I heard many times by the nature of the quest (Choco Races, Fiddle de Chocobo, A Great Success, etc) and other tracks I heard many times because I left the TV running while I stopped to look something up, for instance, what battle combination gave a Great Chocobo (Overworld Theme, Farm Boy, Highwind Takes to the Skies).  Only the Good Night Until Tomorrow I'm certain that I heard all the way through.  And, I was shocked to realize that I could have never heard an audio track at all if this had been my only playthrough-- Tango of Tears-- which only plays if you lose a Chocobo Race.  After years of practice, that finally didn't happen!

When you think about it, I didn't really hear a lot of music in the seven hours, just 14 tracks, probably around 20 minutes of music total that I could have heard, and much of it I never heard in entirety.  The longest themes are the Battle music and the Northern Cave, each around 3 minutes.  Even though several of these are longer than I noted, I certainly didn't hear them because of the short time I was on the screen where they play.  For instance, in the battles to capture the Chocobos, if you're too slow, the birds run away, so it's nearly impossible to hear more than a minute of music in the battle and be successful.

What I realized from this experience is how differently I hear the music when I'm playing the games versus when I'm studying them.  Sound effects, vocal levels, mixing, and interactivity of game play all effect how the player hears the audio and even the duration of and possible audio tracks that can be heard.  Every game player has experienced this, though.  Imagine the original Super Mario Bros-- do you really recognize that theme very well past the opening minute or so?  I don't, because I was always dead by then or had gone down a pipe and reset the music!