Happy October! Episode 23 of “Into the Score” tackles an incredible score by composers Masaharu Iwata and Hitoshi Sakimoto… it’s called “Final Fantasy Tactics.” It was released for the Sony PlayStation by Squaresoft in 1997 and it is a story of complexity, drama, love and the strive for goodness in the world - not one that you want to miss!
In this episode, we continue the second part of our study of the symphony orchestra, as well as concepts of tone colour, musical texture and thematic pairing!
The two documents that I discussed in the show are below and free for you to download!
Final Fantasy Tactics - Thematic Study
Final Fantasy Tactics - Sound Test Listing
Thanks for listening! Enjoy!
hearing this makes me want to hear a Vagrant Story show, unless of course you already did and I somehow missed it in the archives… as far as I’m concerned, that’s absolutely one of the best Sakimoto projets, if not one of the best soundtracks PERIOD. Loving it as always, keep up the good work!
Hey everyone - I just realized that I didn’t upload those two extra documents! Oh no!
They’ll be up by Wednesday night (as my school has its band camp for the next three days!)
Thanks for waiting - as always, I really appreciate your listenership and patience!
Kenley
Best 80 minutes I’ve spent in a long while. FFT is by far my favorite game even without knowing everything about the music. Just knowing so makes it even more interesting about how everything ties together. Great one, please do keep it up!
Some comments on the show…
First of all, YMO is awesome, and Ryuichi Sakamoto at least has done a ton of interesting stuff since he left the band, so if you like Yellow Magic Orchestra you’d do well to follow up with his later solo work.
Second, its funny that you bring up Berlioz in the podcast, since I find more than a bit of similarity between Hitoshi Sakimoto’s style and Berlioz’ highly rythmically-oriented style of writing. Its worth noting that Berlioz’ influence was instrumental in the formation of the Russian school of composition, his music having a huge influence on the group of composers known as The Five, as well as his work on orchestration serving as an inspiration for Rimsky-Korsakov’s definitive work “Principles of Orchestration.”
To feed your Mahler fanboyism, Decca released a Canadian-only recording of the entire Mahler symphony cycle, with conductor Ricardo Chailly and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Its ridiculously cheap, and an absolute steal for such a huge body of work.
And I hate to say it, but Hitoshi Sakimoto’s music has never really done that much for me. He writes short but incredibly dense orchestral compositions that never feel like they have room to expand or breathe. I think giving him the opportunity to write a full length symphony would result in something absolutely sublime, but for videogame music his stuff just totally doesn’t work for me.
As always, a fantastic podcast, and even though it was heinously late this time, its always worth the wait.
Very nicely done. I like the fact that you do pretty in depth analysis, with out being hoyty-toyty. Being a person of musical learning, I understand a lot of what you say without the explanation. But if I wasn’t, I’d find it quite helpful indeed. Which is along winded way of saying, You do a good job.
But I’m curious, why do you like the release of FFT better? I thought that the “retranslation” was… tedious. I mean all the Middle-English stuff was annoying to me. And the changing of the names (i.e magic to magick, fire 2, 3, 4, to fira, firaga, firaja. ect) I dunno, it just seemed kinda pointless. Just about the only good thing good about it was the addition of the new classes. But even then, the dark knights are WAY OVERPOWERED. And, (I hate to ramble on here) but also the PSP seems to not have enough power to handle the graphics. So just about everytime you cast a spell, is slows down bad.
Anyway, all that aside, Tactics has amazing music. And I’m glad that you decided to do a show on it.
Great! New Episode!! Can’t wait to listen
Well it’s about darn time, hah.
Wild Arms came out in 97 as well, GRRR! I must angst about this because I was a fan of the wild west style music. That is all on that, :).
Again I enjoy your informative posts. I’ve played through tactics more than once and loved the story. The music and story is what kept me attached to this genre of franchise.
Great job man, I learn new things every day and a refreshing on what I knew before, hah.
I had to cut short on the whole listening, so I’ll hear the rest later, can’t wait to hear the rest.
Thanks to everyone for posting replies! I really appreciate the discussion that this episode has brought upon the site!
Matt - “Vagrant Story” is epic and you’re right, that should definitely make it onto the show in the near future! (but not the next two episodes, because I have those planned out already
Josh - thanks for the kind words!
secretbass - perhaps one of the first fans of the show! I’m pumped about that Decca release, I’m going to have to get my hands on that…
You pose a lot of good points with Berlioz being similar to Sakimoto… I agree, they both really expose the colour within the orchestra (and add some extra stuff too), hence comparing the two in the podcast. With regards to Sakimoto’s writing, I like it much more when I’m playing the games at the same time. I mean, I LOVE the OST to “Tactics”, and I really like “Final Fantasy XII” (for example), but I’m not a huge fan of XII’s score on its own. I really like it when I’m playing the game, but I don’t think that I could sit down and listen to it on its own.
James - thanks for the compliments! It’s easy to be “hoity-toity”, but it’s a lot of fun using VGM to really teach big musical concepts and I think that it comes across really casual because we’re using video games as a medium, rather than, say… Beethoven or Schubert. It does also help that I’m a music teacher, so I’ve got some degree of music pedagogy, but I’m glad that you don’t think that the show comes off as pretentious
That’s important!
I agree, the Dark Knights are killing machines, but if you’ve got the time to get them…
I liked the re-translation because the Middle-English in the original PS1 release was really awkward and I feel that it kind of missed the mark. However, I think that the localization and translations teams for “WotL” really put a lot of work into making the dialogue legitimate and really deep. With regards to spells and stuff, whatevs, so long as it does that same thing then I don’t really mind what they call it 
VGTO - glad to have you listening! I’m glad that you learn things, that’s one of the aims of the podcast! I have to get my hands on “Wild Arms”, I’ve heard that the score it good…
Thanks for the comments and keep’em coming!
Your listenership means a lot to me!
Kenley
Finally found time to listen to this - another great episode, well done. Sakimoto’s style has always obviously been really dense orchestral, but I’d never sat down to pick apart just how *many* lines can be going through a single piece at once. Fun stuff.
Personally, Sakimoto’s work has really grown on me as stand-alone music in the last few years. I used to not enjoy it as much as, say, Uematsu, due to the dearth of catchy and recognizable melodies in favor of sweeping moods and textures, but lately I find I could really listen to FFXII music all day.
Definitely looking forward to Earthbound and the jazz combo in the next episode as well.
Oh, and I also enjoy a lot of the music from Wild Arms; it would certainly be something different to talk about. Of course, it also provides some prime examples of some video game composers’ tendency to “borrow” themes from pre-existing works pretty liberally. I don’t have the reference off the top of my head, but a few of the WA melodies are almost note-for-note with some old spaghetti western movie scores.
Hey Kenley, great show, I have been a fan of all the FF’s through the years, and I have played every incarnation of FF Tactics that I could get my hands on. The PS1, GBA, PSP, even the sequel for DS, so thank you very much. I agree with what you said about Sakimoto, his music is good, but unlike other artists who either work for Square or used to work for Square, like Uematsu or Shimomura, I can’t listen to his music alone. Granted that I sometimes have trouble listening to lots of Shimomura music, especially from Kingdom Hearts, because the orchestral music far outshines the majority of the music that you hear during the game, but that’s another fight. Just wanted to let you know that this is one of my favorite podcasts, and keep on trucking
Hey kenley great 2 have u back
Awsome show and cant wait for the next 1
lately ive been listening to the final fantasy x piano collection and love EVERY note of it. anyway 2 my point im wondering if you could do an episode on FFX?
I LOVE that game so much, the music, the world, the characters and the storry.
I didnt like XII 2 much so FFX is the last great FF, and with the FFX team making FFXIII I think i’d be a great way to look at them both and compare the music from FFXIII we have with FFXs music
Well thanks for reading and please reply =D
have fun @ camp
Donald
Just wanted to pop in and say that I love this podcast. Seriously, this gives me hope that the internet is not a waste. Keep up the great work!
Hello,
Not sure that this is true) but thanks
Thank you
Elcoj
Nice podcast! That opening theme still gives me chills when I hear it. I used to just pop the disc in the old Playstation and just let the 3 fmvs and intro theme play over and over. Wild Arms was good in this same way…
Ohhhh Wild Arms! Seriously, one of the greatest soundtracks on the PSX, even though all the Wild Arms afterwards were lacking in the soundtrack (and gameplay) department. Great westernly/classic music with actual hooks that remind me of older 8/16-bit tunes.
And to be back on the subject of FFT, what other game can top a battle theme with the title “Bloody Excrement”?
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music