Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy

Was anyone else at this? It was on recently in London and Edinburgh, both were special concerts for Final Fantasy's 25th anniversary. I went to the London show with my girlfriend and it's my second time going.

My advice is that if you get the chance to go to one of these shows you really should. I was very impressed with the London show and the Royal Albert Hall is spectacular. I'll be a little bit negative about this show but it's just nitpicking since I felt the show before that wasn't for the 25th anniversary was the better one.

One of the best things about the Anniversary concert was that they tried out a lot of new material and there was also at least one song from each game. I was really excited to hear Battle with the Four Fiends from FF4 since I also thought it would sound great orchestrated. The main theme of FFV was another new song and another highlight.

Two problems I had with both performances were One Winged Angel and Eyes on Me. Both were excellently performed I've no complaints there. One Winged Angel is a fan favourite and is expected but I would have rather that they played something else from the FFVII soundtrack since this one always gets played. At the 25th anniversary concert it was the only FFVII track played. There's plenty of excellent pieces from FFVII I'd like to hear. Eyes on Me on the other hand is just hands down a dreadful pop song. Again FFVIII has a superb soundtrack and I'd love to hear more tracks from it (Balamb Garden wold be wonderful). Thankfully it wasn't the only track from FFVIII played, the battle theme from the game was present and was really well done.

My big disappointment is they didn't play Dancing Mad. At the first concert they played this and it was absolutely mind blowing. I think it's pretty much the best thing Uematsu has written and hearing all 15 minutes of it by a real orchestra gave me goosebumps. The first concert ended with One Winged Angel but it felt like an anti-climax after Dancing Mad. The thing about dancing mad is that being in the Royal Albert Hall we were very privileged to hear it. They can only play it in a handful of places in the world because it requires a pipe organ and the Royal Albert Hall really has an impressive instrument. I suppose they needed to be able to play all the same songs in all locations for the anniversary shows so its understandable but they better play it when they return.

One other thing, whatever about FFXIII it has a great soundtrack and the track they played sounded amazing.

One nice surprise was that not only was Nobuo Uematsu present as well as FFXII composer Masashi Hamauzu but so was Hironobu Sakaguchi, perhaps there's less bad blood now between him and Square Enix.