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...