After writing my article on why video game music is so important to the gaming experience, I decided to start a monthly segment where I’d look at some of the most iconic soundtracks of all time. Basically, the Video Game Music of the Month feature will take a soundtrack and look at the background to it, how it fits in to the video game industry at the time, and some of the key songs from the soundtrack.
I wanted to try and go for something a little bit more outside the box for the first month, but as anyone who read my last article will know, I’m a bit of a sucker for Final Fantasy VII, and it pretty much inevitable that it was going to make an appearance sooner rather than later, so why not the first edition?
Sephiroth: One of the coolest video game characters of all time.
Final Fantasy VII was first released in 1997, and has since become known as one of the best RPGs of all time, and definitely one of the best of the Final Fantasy series. I think most gamers will have played it at some point, but for those who haven’t, it’s a typical Japanese-style RPG, where the player takes control of Cloud, a former member of elite military group SOLDIER, as he gets involved in a battle to save the planet alongside a host of weird and wonderful characters including a guy with a machine gun arm, a wannabe-ninja and a giant stuffed toy/robot. Even if you’ve not played the game, you’ll probably have heard the name Sephiroth at some point, and he plays the role of the ultimate enemy in the game, and, as we’ll mention later, he has some of the coolest personal music in the entire world.
One of the most acclaimed and well-known composers of all time: Nobuo Uematsu.
To fit such a varied cast of characters and environments, and to match the epic scale of the game, a suitably diverse soundtrack was needed to really bring it to life, and the man responsible for trying to achieve that was Nobuo Uematsu, a composer who’d worked on most of the previous Final Fantasy games, and has worked on all but a few of the more recent games in the series as well.
Now something of a legend in the business, Uematsu was one of the first composers to try and write a major soundtrack for the Playstation. The improved hardware of the Playstation over previous consoles meant that Uematsu had the opportunity to craft a CD quality soundtrack, but he made the risky decision to stick with the more old-fashioned MIDI sound format, which definitely contributes to the very distinctive, quirky feel of the soundtrack.
The soundtrack, for me, is one of the most iconic and memorable soundtracks of all time, and whenever I listen to the soundtrack I can pretty much perfectly imagine the scene that the tracks play in. When I hear the opening ‘Bombing Mission’ track, I just remember the very first playable scene with Cloud jumping off a train after one of the most technically impressive cut scenes to date at this point in gaming history. The battle theme never fails to get my heart pumping, and the boss battle theme brings back all the tension and excitement of boss battles in a heartbeat. The arrangement of the boss battle theme, ‘Those Who Fight’, from the film based on the game, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, is one of my favourite pieces of music of all time.
For me though, the most iconic piece of music from the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack, and probably my most iconic piece of gaming music ever, is the music played during the very last boss battle in the game, One-Winged Angel. This was the piece where Nobuo Uematsu broke the most new ground by including digitized choral voices in Latin. The inclusion of the chorus really emphasises the importance of the last battle, and increases the tension in the final boss fight (which is already really tense after such an amazing story) to a ridiculous level. I don’t think there’ll be any video game music fans who haven’t had the pleasure of listening to One-Winged Angel at least once in their life.
Another of the most iconic pieces of the soundtrack, and definitely the most emotional, is Aerith’s Theme. Anyone who’s played the game will understand why the piece is so moving, but even without having any indication of the story, it’s a really beautiful piece of music that could easily stand alone as a composition even without the video game background. It’s got such a slow, emotive build to it that it’s impossible not to get sucked up in the music, and it makes some of the scenes absolutely heart-wrenching.
It’s fair to say that the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack is potentially Nobuo Uematsu’s greatest work ever, and it’s got a good claim to being the best video game soundtrack of all time. There’s even been numerous re-releases of the soundtrack, concert tours playing a variety of the tracks, and YouTube is absolutely full of covers of the songs, whether on Piano, Electric Guitar, Drums, A Capella or on basically any other instrument imaginable.
The soundtrack is definitely held in high esteem, and is very close to a lot of gamers’ hearts, but what do you think? Has the Final Fantasy VII theme got a claim to being the best video game soundtrack of all time?
