Music Analysis with Evan Davis

Now for the time you've all been waiting for!! Today's post is about "Mysterious Thing" from Final Fantasy Legend II which was the bane of my childhood. I love looking through game music and trying to understand the compositional logic behind pieces, but this one just did not click back then. I must have listened to this minute long piece for over a hundred hours, and I figured our what the notes were, but never got why he chose them. To this day, it still strikes me as one of the most biblically important pieces of music ever written. In the game, the first time you hear this song is after Asura's men procure shrinking potions to invade the Sage, Ki's, body to steal magical relics from inside of her, and... wow, this sounds really weird out of context. Anyway, you suck up to a former giant and learn where the giants kept their stash of micron potions. You use the potion to temporarily shrink yourself and fight your way through Asura's men and her body...

I do not think it is a stretch to say that Nobuo Uematsu is one of the greatest composers the world has ever seen, but the reason I say that has very little to do with his more well known works. I love final fantasy. I grew up with VI (or III if you're old), and I understand why those soundtracks have been scrutinized to heck and back, but none of that music could say that they single handedly made me a music theorist. The two pieces of music that skyrocketed me from human to musical mutant was "Wandering Soul" and "Mysterious Thing" from Final Fantasy Legend II (SaGa 2 Hihou Densetsu) on gameboy. Now, you are probably wondering how music that could only utilize up to 3 voices could have made such a difference in my life, but believe me when I say, solving the puzzle of these two pieces was the greatest achievement of my childhood. It really took until I was nineteen or twenty to put the piece to rest for good, but I still think about whether my solution is tru...

The Gameboy SaGa trilogy ( Final Fantasy Legend in the west) is the brain child of the highly controversial developer, Akitoshi Kawazu. He invented a system that rewards players statistical increases to stats based on usage. While he absolutely butchered this system in Final Fantasy II , he sought to prove the soundness of his concept with the SaGa series. Even though you do not hear a lot of discussion about SaGa , it was actually more popular than Final Fantasy when it originally came out, and had a massive following in Japan.  SaGa 1  ( Makai Toushi SaGa ) was even one of the main inspirations for Pokémon. Its success was largely due to the overhaul to the implementation of usage based stat increases. In addition to having the ability to build a party from scratch with a variety of customization options, the HP stat no longer required taking damage to train, so multiple hour long "hitting yourself" sessions are not required to make it through the game. Stat decrease...

When I was in middle school, I played my real copy of Chrono Trigger DS on a one-hundred percent existent and legal DS. As a music obsessed kid, I spent a ridiculous amount of time figuring out how to play the music from the game on the piano.  Now, over a decade later, I will finally reveal the secret of the harmony of the main theme that I figured out all those years ago. I remember hearing a rumor circulating around the internet, at that time, that Yasunori Mitsuda wrote the Chrono Trigger theme in one unhealthy composition session. Now that I am a composer myself, that doesn't seem too unbelievable, but that doesn't make it any less badass. Chrono Trigger was his first soundtrack at Square Soft, and it worked that poor man into the ground. He actually had to get Uematsu's help because he was under so much stress that he developed chronic stomach ulcers and couldn't spend enough time in the office to finish writing. Under all this stress, it is understandable that...

Okay fine, I'll talk about something mainstream for once. People who study Japanese music with me eventually learn how much I dislike Junichi Masuda's music. Early Pokémon music was characterized by ugly counterpoint and a juvenile palate of harmonic sonority. I know 5th graders with a better musical taste then him. It's not all terrible, but there is no doubt that he is the weakest composer to ever work on a main series Pokémon game. With that said, the generation 2 composer, Go Ichinose, is one of my favorites from my childhood. He famously arranged a bunch of the  Pokémon R/B/Y music in G/S/C and improved or massively iterated on Masuda's tracks, breathing way more life into them. For example, old "Viridian Forest" was a bunch of discordant screeching of tritones on a 10 second loop  while Ichinose turned it into a funk ballad. For Arkoos' sake, listen to this: Old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wufz_8FOMzE New: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL...