Music
Final Fantasy VI has one of the best soundtracks of not only any Final Fantasy, but it also easily tops the video game music charts. It’s what got me into VG music and had me making separate save files before certain scenes so I could listen to Nobuo-san’s masterpieces over and over again. This was decades before game music was readily available (I’m dating myself…and why wouldn’t I? I’m awesome!), and even when they started publishing it on CDs, they were still hard to come by as imports and also very expensive.
FFVI was my introduction to the concept of the leitmotif, which is a short, recurring musical phrase associated with a particular person, place, or idea. It’s usually credited to Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, but he’s not its originator nor did he himself use those terms (also Wagner was a proto-Nazi i.e. would’ve been a Nazi if Nazis had existed, so I kind of put him in the same wheelhouse as H. P. Lovecraft in terms of shitty but sadly relevant, but I digress), and Nobuo-san (who is delightful) used such a concept masterfully to not only give each character in the game a theme, but also tied certain themes, like Locke’s and Celes’, together.
Let’s start with the beginning “Omen,” though, which is the piece that plays as the game loads. It serves as a nice bookend to “Dancing Mad,” the final boss music, and both songs are reminiscent of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” (and I’m talking about more than just the famous opening) with that Gothic church music motif.
Lots of YouTube links incoming:
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