Judging by reactions on twitter it seems like the new version of FF6 is where the pixel remasters hit their peak, just as FF6 itself was, unsurprisingly, the zenith of the original 2D era. I haven’t actually bought the game because I’d rather dedicate my FF time to playing new stuff than start 6 again, but it eventually occurred to me that the soundtrack would be on YouTube somewhere [timestamps refer to this video for anyone playing along at home], and … out of everything about these games, it’s the music that got me into them and continues to be the most important aspect of them to me. So, tbh, getting to listen to this is the main draw of these remastered versions as far as I’m concerned.
When I first played FF6 in 2020, that soundtrack already felt familiar. I listened to the whole thing every day for at least a week; I loved tracks like Setzer’s theme days before I actually got to the part of the game where Setzer appears (and turned out to be like my least favourite of the playable characters oops lol). FF6 kickstarted my proper FF obsession, and that soundtrack was what got me hooked. I have listened to various remixes and covers of parts of it since then, and I certainly haven’t loved every one of them, but I knew this iteration would be a banger for the simple reason that it’s in the spirit of the original game. This soundtrack is what the FF6 soundtrack would have been if FF6 had first been released in 2022 instead of 1994. It conveys the feelings and the atmospheres that Uematsu was attempting to portray on nineties hardware, in the way they can be conveyed 28 years down the line. Listening to this soundtrack, you understand why Uematsu made those decisions about instrumentation and tonalities and articulation at that time, because – this is like how the original soundtrack would have sounded in his head, before it had to be compressed into (googles) 64 kilobytes.
I could honestly provide some specific compliment about every single track in this, because they are all excellent, but some examples that really illustrate what I was going on about in the previous paragraph: Kefka’s theme 14:47–17:39 sounds so clowny and grotesque and made me realise, oh yes, that’s why the melody randomly jumps from one instrument to another; Cyan’s theme 26:03–27:26 actually made me feel things other than indifference towards Cyan’s theme and Cyan (amazing tbh); the upper strings in The Serpent Trench 36:20–38:36 actually sound like running water, and the brass is also so inexplicably effective for conveying the right atmosphere for that journey down the river – this track has real Moldau energy. In other news, that staccato top note 50:53 in the melody of Terra’s theme made me literally go “oh!” out loud, but, and I cannot stress this enough, it Works.
My biggest beef with most remixes of this stuff is that in trying to modernise the sound, a lot of people seem to be tempted to add some additional countermelody or extra section or, in actually quite a lot of cases, make the whole thing into a Big Orchestration. And yes, the countermelodies and extra sections do occur in a few of these (um … Forever Rachel? 57:35–58:03 Excuse me??), but they are tasteful and understated and they don’t detract from the original. As for the orchestrations … I’m sorry, but it is so good to be able to listen to a version of the opera 1:01:58–1:17:27 that isn’t a big bombastic Distant Worlds version. I have a, er, complicated relationship with this part of the soundtrack, and I think this is possibly the only version of it other than the original that I have actually been able to fully enjoy. My favourite moment, possibly my favourite part of the entire Pixel Remaster soundtrack, is where the strings come in for the second statement of the waltz theme, 1:11:28–1:12:03 and … that reharmonisation. This sounds like an actual waltz that people would have been dancing to in the late nineteenth century. That fucking perfect cadence onto I7!!! 1:11:42–1:11:45 D e l i c i o u s. Also … this is again the first version of the opera that hasn’t entirely missed the point of Celes’ aria. Honestly, every time I hear this sung by a real person, the singer is Celebrated Mezzo Soprano, and it actually sounds like opera – which totally ignores the fact that in the game it’s meant to be sung by Celes, a (presumably) untrained singer. The voice we hear should be clear and pure, and yet in all these covers, it’s just … Not. Honestly, I was actually nervous when I was about to listen to the new version, because this has been done so many times that I kind of thought the actual game developers might go down the same route, but … no!! They actually get it! The people who make the game understand the point of the very game they are making, shocking, I know.
Searching For Friends, 1:47:27–1:49:50 my favourite from the original soundtrack: actually, I was a bit surprised by how this one started off, but that buildup 1:48:43–1:48:47 into where the first melody comes back in the strings, and then that triplet in the brass 1:48:54 … omg sign me up. Also, literally the first fifteen seconds of Kefka’s Tower: 1:57:30–1:57:45 that’s it. That’s The Sound.
Apparently the cool thing to do on the onlines is to be very lukewarm about the new version of Dancing Mad 1:59:32–2:17:07 … ok, so. Lads. This track is like … a historically informed performance. It’s like some musicologist sat down in a seventeenth-century library with the original SPC file (I have no idea what file format the SNES actually used, we’re going with this one), and wrote a PhD thesis on Dancing Mad with a 200-page appendix consisting of their reconstruction of the score of Dancing Mad, and then a period orchestra took that score of Dancing Mad and made a recording of Dancing Mad. This is the Bärenreiter Urtext edition of Dancing Mad. If you want a “big beats are the best, get high all the time” version of Dancing Mad, go and listen to the (excellent) Black Mages one, or like, one of the very many other covers of this track that exist. If you want what was originally intended: that, yet again, is what the Pixel Remaster version is. Prior to the last section in particular, 1:59:32–2:11:03 it just sounds like someone is sitting in a deserted cathedral playing the organ in a vaguely evil manner, and … isn’t that what Kefka’s doing? Isn’t he, as it were, the phantom of the opera? (I have never seen The Phantom Of The Opera, in case that’s not obvious.)
In conclusion: sign 👏 me 👏 the 👏 fuck 👏 up. I just wish it was common practice to publish the original sheet music from all these orchestral game soundtracks, because I’m not spending 200 quid on a necklace or whatever other “premium” merchandise Square Enix seems to enjoy releasing, but yes, I would pay a substantial amount for the official as-played sheet music where it exists.