Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazrim
I made a concious effort to play the games with the arranged tracks since they're far more likely to stick with you if you play with the context behind them. If you went straight to your favorites, listened to 30 seconds and noped out, then yeah I can see why you might feel that way.
There's always going to be fan mixes of FF songs I love more than any others (I was a backer of OC Remix's Balance and Ruin kickstarter which turned out really well!) but it's nearly an impossible task to "modernize" these tracks without some of them being duds. I think they used the right amount of "retro" sounding stuff mixed in with clean modern instruments to update the songs.
Searching For Friends is a perfect example since you can hear some of the sounds from the original in there combined with a flute doing the melody during the first half. The second half of the arranged track swells with strings and brass and it's awesome. The songs I felt were dead-on to the originals were the FFVI battle theme and victory theme. On the flipside, I think songs like The Decisive Battle (in both FFV and FFVI) and Dancing Mad (Phase 1) are missing some of the intensity or instrumentation the original versions had and that was disappointing.
The credits music for FFVI (specifically the part after leaving the tower) still hits me hard. The arranged version was fantastic.
I'll have to reload the games and find out how many chests I found in each. With the hidden paths being easier to see I gotta think I managed to do most of them!
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Fair points -- I actually imported the OSTs years ago (actually, the VI soundtrack WAS released in NA), so the original versions also have a soft spot. I think since I've only really spent time with IV so far, the other thing that the arranged music didn't hit was the numerous great remixes in XIV (Troia, Battle 2, Zeromus).
Searching for Friends is actually my one exception so far. I loved the original, and the arranged is pretty good as well.