My Connection with Final Fantasy and its Musical Magic

I started piano lessons when I was five years old at my local Fine Arts Center. A couple years into my musical journey, I upgraded to an advanced piano class, where the teacher, on top of making everyone learn and perform songs from the Suzuki Piano books and academic track, allowed students to choose their own songs to learn. I was a bit of an ambitious 8-year-old, bringing in works from the likes of the entire Piano-Conductor score of Les Misérables to classic songs by the Beatles, but I remember throughout the years of learning the Suzuki method, I consistently brought in music from the Final Fantasy series, specifically Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, both games I owned on my XBOX 360 and was obsessed with at the time.

For sake of context, Final Fantasy is a role-playing video game series known for its incredible world-building, deep character development, and rich combat systems, all of which change for every single game in the main franchise (for example, if you play through Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VII Remake, you’ll quickly realize that the two are not the same in terms of combat and even plot). The Final Fantasy series is also known for its rich and sprawling musical catalog in the repertoire of video gaming. The music is one of the main contributing factors to how the player delves into whatever world they are given, whether it’s Spira from FFX, Valisthea from FFXVI, or Gran Pulse and Cocoon from FFXIII (two worlds 8-year old me was VERY familiar with). 

The style of music Final Fantasy involves can mostly be attributed to composer Nobeo Uematsu, a self-taught piano player who composed the scores to Final Fantasy games I-X. Uematsu listened to quite a bit of conceptual and progressive rock music, such as the Beatles, Elton John, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson, citing all those names as his biggest influences for the Final Fantasy series. On a first listen, it may be initially confusing on how these bands and musicians could have influenced these scores so much, but luckily there’s a connection: the leitmotif. A leitmotif is any recurring musical theme, usually representing a symbol or character(think of the Imperial March playing EVERYTIME Darth Vader shows up in Star Wars – just the existence of that piece adds so much to Vader’s characterization as a terrifying and dark figure). These leitmotivs appear individually in albums such as Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Dark Side of the Moon, and In the Court of the Crimson King, usually representing symbols of emotional value, changed by the context in which they are found. 

These leitmotivs are more than prevalent in Uematsu’s work. If you listen to Kefka’s Theme from FFVI (the theme for main villain from the game which plays every time he appears, a la Imperial March), you hear a clown-like (yet simple) theme, mockingly played out through chiptune. Later, when he (spoiler alert) comes back as the final boss after becoming the ruling deity of the game’s universe, the final boss theme, a prog-rock epic called Dancing Mad, recites this same melody surrounded by shifting basslines and sporadic time signatures. The progression of the musical theme allows the player to identify with this character and also the progression of their arc throughout the game. Originally, this melody is played through an accordion-esque instrument, perfectly fit for a clown. When this melody comes back in Dancing Mad, it’s played with a church organ patch, an instrument used typically in a religious context, musically illustrating the “GOD” status Kefka has reached at this point in the game(for reference, look at the sheet music snippets below, specifically Kefka’s Theme and the top line of Dancing Mad — same melody, different contexts). These kind of leitmotivs are used throughout every single Final Fantasy game, even games Uematsu didn’t compose, showing both his influence and Final Fantasy’s roots in music that tells a story.

Kefka’s Theme (FFVI) – Nobeo Uematsu

Dancing Mad(FFVI) – Nobeo Uematsu

Nowadays, Final Fantasy music is popular, well-known, and revered by most people. “One Winged Angel” (Sephiroth’s theme from Final Fantasy VII) is known as one of the most recognizable songs from gaming due to both the popularity of FFVII and its Remake, as well as the features of Cloud and Sephiroth in Super Smash Bros. Square Enix has released three separate Theatrhythm rhythm games, which feature Final Fantasy characters fending off against monsters while the player presses buttons in time (think Guitar Hero but an RPG). Distant Worlds is a touring orchestra that specifically plays orchestral arrangements of Final Fantasy music, and they were just at the Nashville Schermerhorn Symphony Center last year. Clearly, Final Fantasy music has resonated with countless other fans besides me. In my free time, I still pull up a FFXIII Piano Collections sheet music book now and then to work out the melodies I grew up with and track my own personal musical journey, and it’s a really special constant in my creative life. It makes me glad to know that music I feel so fondly about has affected so many others.

-Spencer 🙂

Sources:

MuseScore – musescore.com (transcriptions by Torby Brand(Kefka’s Theme) and Umbral Goat(Dancing Mad))

Bioshock: 9 Years ago, 6 Years ago, and 2 Years ago – Growing Up with a Game

I, like so many others of the Zoomer generation, grew up on Let’s Plays, whether that be Pewdiepie playing through some rage-inducing platformer or SkyDoesMinecraft and his friends playing through “parkour maps” on Minecraft(basically a backseat gaming sitcom I watched and adored).

The typical SkyDoesMinecraft thumbnail

It was about 9 years ago when I first saw a “Let’s Play” of Bioshock, the first game of a series I had heard about through online forums, comments, and friends with some more lenient parents than mine when it came to playing violent games. This “Let’s Play” was distinct and different to me – there were no rambunctious comedians playing rage-inducing or community-based games. In fact, there wasn’t even a voice at all, just the darkness and liminality of a game that came out 7 years before I watched this video. I only remember watching the first ten minutes and being absolutely enraptured (pun intended) by an intense plane crash and this mysterious lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. By the time the player went down the lighthouse’s elevator and was introduced to the failed underwater utopia of Rapture – cryptic, corrupted, and captivating – I immediately turned the Youtube video off, telling myself  even at the young and naive age of 10: “I have to experience this myself.”

Descending into Rapture for the first time

Those ten minutes were the only exposure I had to the Bioshock series, but the introduction to the world of Rapture really stuck with me, and when I did my bi-monthly late-middle school Gamestop trip (a ritual I begged my mom to occur more often than every two months) , I , at the age of 13, bought Bioshock: The Collection for my PS4. Eager, I got home, played through it, and was honestly pretty frightened. Bioshock utilizes a lot of horror elements to world-build (or really, “world-deteriorate” since it shows the effects of time on an isolated dystopian society). In fact, it was scarier than most horror games I had played at the time because of all the societal implications of collectible audio logs and even torn propaganda posters on the tattered walls. I felt completely immersed with the new world around me, and like the playable protagonist Jack, spent hours discovering the buried secrets of Rapture. After I beat the game, I played it again immediately, which had never happened for any game before for me. After playing through the entire series, I spent weeks going online to forums, subreddits, Youtube videos, and analyses to further understand the worlds I so excitedly delved into. Needless to say, I was a little obsessed.

One of the many posters you can find in Rapture.

Jump to 2021. I’m a senior in high school in a bunch of APs, including AP Literature and Composition. Out of all the teachers I talked to after class, it was the humanities teachers who really took interest in discussing media with me (David Lynch, Stephen King, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, etc.), and while having an after-school analysis session with my Latin teacher Mr. Weganhart(we all called him Wego), he told me to look back at video games I’ve played and see how much classic literature has affected the themes of those games. While Wego’s side-quest he gave me focused on Roman influences on modern media, I immediately jumped back to Bioshock and decided to delve deeper into the non-Classical literary references. Instead of delving into Rapture with a PS4 controller, I delved into wikis about Objectivism(“the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute”, quoted by philosopher/author Ayn Rand) and books written by Rand to further understand this game I loved so much when I was younger, and came to an incredible conclusion: I realized the game was actually satirizing the concept of Objectivism and the allusions to Ayn Rand were ample. Antagonist Andrew Ryan (of “Would you kindly…” fame) is a quasi-anagram of Rand’s name with the same initials. The entirety of Rapture, I found out, was based off of the Objectivist, hyper-capitalist society Rand outlines in her novel Atlas Shrugged, further emphasized with the final boss being a replicated statue of Rand’s book cover (see photo below). The game consistently blurs the line between emergence and progression game styles (as Juul outlines) with the moral system of killing or saving the Little Sisters, ultimately showing the futility of Objectivist ideals (no matter how much individuality or free will you may have, society can’t be perfect).

The cover of Atlas Shrugged and Atlas, the final boss of Bioshock

As I grew up and changed mindsets from a child seeking fantastical worlds to an adolescent seeking answers to a young adult seeking literary references and intertextuality, I realize how much this game has stuck around with me throughout my life. It’s pretty fantastic to say that a piece of media could take on so many different meanings to me throughout my life, on top of being a good nostalgia trip. If anyone has the chance, I would implore you to sink to Rapture in Bioshock and Bioshock 2 or fly to Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.

-Spencer

Sources:

Why Bioshock still has, and will always have, something to say , Ars Techina- https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/08/bioshock-objectivism-philosophy-analysis/

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real.