Final Fantasy music is presumably so profitable for Square Enix that there are always new ways to slice the pie, whether we’re talking piano covers, guitar versions, or expensive anniversary vinyl releases of its classic RPG soundtracks.
Final Fantasy 10 is getting one of the latter next month to mark its 25th anniversary. And as someone who once spent a lot of my meagre convenience store salary importing the CD collection from Play Asia back in the day, it’s undeniably a gorgeous sight:
Elsewhere, Square Enix continues to find more inventive ways to squeeze dollars out of its vast music catalogue, including some which push the music into different genres entirely. Final Fantasy 10: House Grooves—the second of its kind following a similar outing for FF9—is exactly what it sounds like. Can Final Fantasy 10’s often mournful or moody score become dance music?
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The answer is: kind of. You never quite shake the sense that an unholy Seymour-Guado-and-his-mother-style union has taken place with this album.
Some of the remixes sound like music I’d expect to hear in the bar of the W hotel during GDC circa 2014. I’d say that definitely applies to the rendition of ‘To Zanarkand’, the famous piano opening to the game. I get big ‘making small talk with the concierge’ energy from that one. Still, I do think the two styles ultimately gel in that case, even if the end result evokes vastly different feelings as piece of music.
‘Phantoms’, a track players may remember from the icy Macalania sections of the game, is my favourite remix on there. I’d already heard this atmospheric track sampled in vapourwave and chillwave playlists from the mid-’10s, so the fit made sense there.
Then there are other times where the two styles don’t totally mesh. Take ‘Wandering’, perhaps the saddest track in the game, which plays after the evil cosmic whale Sin turns up early in the game and murders loads of soldiers on a beach. You can’t really turn that one into a ‘bop’—so it just ends up sounding like two totally separate pieces of music playing over the top of each other. I still enjoy listening to it, however, because my taste in music is dogshit.
The reason I suspect the entire album exists is to turn the game’s most dancefloor-friendly boss theme into a legit club banger. Give it up for ‘Fight with Seymour’, which also slaps the Blitzball theme hook in there for good measure. Still, I wouldn’t play this at a party, unless only my most accepting dweeb friends were the ones on the guest list.
No one’s going to be spinning Final Fantasy 10: House Grooves on Boiler Room any time soon, but considering it’s reheated nostalgia, I am very satisfied. It’s an unhealthy level of pandering by Square Enix to the FF10 sickos like me, yet here I am, ready to play these house ‘grooves’ for the 20th time.
