Fuck Yeah Final Fantasy Music

livvyplaysfinalfantasy:

Nobuo Uematsu must be some kind of musical god.

How does he do it? How does he write songs that can bring so many people to tears?

Take a look at this. I hope most of you have seen it before. (I’m posting the Game Boy Advance version because of the updated lyrics and sound quality. Yes, I know that the SNES 1994 version came first and is therefore automatically superior and all that.)

This has been called the most touching scene in the game, followed shortly by Celes’s attempted suicide (which has the same melody playing at the time). Most people I’ve talked to about this scene say that it’s definitely tearjerking. But you don’t really stop and think about why it’s so touching. Here’s what happened leading up to the aria:

The party needs Setzer’s airship, so they have Celes impersonate Maria and get her kidnapped.

Celes has a drama queen moment.

BOOM! Opera.

Locke as good as admits that Celes is a replacement for his dead girlfriend. Ouch.

And then Celes walks onstage, this music starts, and the tears start running down the faces of gamers everywhere. The tone of the song itself shouldn’t really fit the mood of what’s been going on in the game, and yet it does. For some inexplicable reason, it just comes together so wonderfully.

We cannot forget Aerith’s theme, which is a wonderful spinoff of the work of art that is Celes’s theme. Yes, Sephiroth killing Aerith is immensely sad. But Aerith’s theme does come into play much earlier in the game, and it evokes the same emotional intensity at those times. It doesn’t matter whether we’re discussing Aerith’s past or discussing how she got run through by Masamune. That song is still there, telling us it’s okay to have feelings for this game, even if we don’t really understand why. It’s one of the most magical things about the entire Final Fantasy series.