Music in the Final Fantasy Series

I recently came across an old hard drive with a lot of music that I must have "acquired" about 5-6 years ago and I've only now had a chance to properly go through it and it seems a big chunk of it is actually tracks from the various Final Fantasy games. It made me have a think about the franchise in general and I came to the conclusion that lately it sucks! Something I never thought I'd say or think possible about 10 years ago.

After I got over the shock of it all, I realized that while the direction the franchise has taken might be questionable, the one thing that rarely, if ever isn't top notch quality, is the music.

Nobuo Uematsu has been the leading man for Square pretty much since their inception back in the 80's and while he might not actually work for the company anymore he still scores for them, has produced some amazing music that was probably too good for video games and is the quality worthy of big screen movies.

I remember as a kid a lot of people turned their nose up at the Final Fantasy series because it wasn't fast paced action like most other games on the market but I think anyone who appreciates orchestrated music will find something they like in the soundtracks to these games, even if the game doesn't seem interesting to you. Square Enix really set a bar when it came to the quality expected for music in video games, something I always believed was a mechanism they used to execute the story where the graphics might not have been able to express the emotion required to really enjoy a scene in a game. This is something that isn't so apparent in games today thanks to HD graphics but it can be seen from the perspective that a lot of companies (including Square Enix themselves) believe that thanks to better graphics, they don't need solid gameplay and a good story to make a good game which is absolutely wrong but that's a different blog all together!

For those of you that might not know what Final Fantasy is(shame on you!) or have never played/heard the music I suggest you check out some tracks, for those of you that have played it I suggest you go back and listen to some old classics!

Here are a few tracks, in no particular order I suggest that can most definitely be found on YouTube.

1. Final Fantasy X - Suteki da ne (Orchestral)
2. Final Fantasy VI - Forever Rachel (Orchestral)
3. Final Fantasy VIII - Eyes on Me
4. Final Fantasy XI - Battle in the Dungeon
5. Final Fantasy XI - Battle in the Dunegon 2
6. Final Fantasy XI - Mhuara
7. Entire Tour De Japon Concert
8. Final Fantasy VII - Aeris' Theme
   
9. Final Fantasy IX - Kuja's Theme

I could literally keep naming off songs but those are some of my personal favorites that come to mind straight away.