1UP COVER STORY
1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF June 25 | GAME MUSIC FESTIVAL
Theatrhythm Final Fantasy Review: Addiction Amidst Repetition
Cover Story: Square’s Final Fantasy music game may sing a one-note tune, but it’s a pretty compelling note.
M
y Super NES hadn’t yet lost its new-console smell when I first played Final Fantasy IV — masquerading under a slightly different name, of course — about 20 years ago. The console impressed me, but not because of its visuals; arcade graphics were already outpacing those of Nintendo’s admittedly impressive home hardware. No, what really got me was its sound output. The change from cold FM synthesis and simple sawtooth waveforms to digitized samples lent even the earliest SNES games a sort of muted warmth that distinguished the platform from its competition. From the echoing syncopation of riding Yoshi through a cavern in Super Mario World to the cribbed-from-John-Williams bombast of ActRaiser, the Super NES sounded like nothing before it.
But no game seized my ears and forced me to sit upright in rapt attention like that first 16-bit Final Fantasy did. I’d played its NES predecessor, and I’d certainly enjoyed it. Yet FFIV made it sound like a kindergarten kazoo band in comparison. Nobuo Uematsu’s “Into the Darkness,” a baroque faux-orchestrated composition whose strings swirled like the fog billowing through the cavern in which the tune made its debut, made me stop for the second time in my life to ignore my controller and simply soak up video game music. And I found myself doing it again and again as I played through to the end, and again when its sequel (Final Fantasy VI) made its way to the U.S. When I discovered that Squaresoft was selling a three-CD compilation of FFVI music, I didn’t hesitate for a second… even if $40 plus shipping was an insane amount of money to spend on a three-CD set back in 1994.
