Unchained Melody: The Power of Game Music
I was around halfway through Final Fantasy X-2. I’d reached the cut scene where you’re supposed to “find out” Lenne and Shuyin’s final fates—which I hated, because I had been awake and attentive enough that I was pretty sure I had already figured out their fates—so I braced myself for some redundant info-dump and was completely blind-sided by what is still one of the best scenes I have ever seen in a video game.
Take one attractive young couple. Combine the flavor of a tragic, untimely death in which they express their undying love. Then add a bit of desperate bravado on his part, some heroic self-sacrifice on hers, make sure they reach out to each other after their bloodless, slow-motion mortal injuries, flavored with trademark Square-Enix visual bedazzlement, and assemble around one unabashedly romantic pop song…and you have the one and to-date only cut scene ever to move me to tears.
They say if you put 1,000 monkeys in front of a 1,000 typewriters they’ll write the great American novel… or something along those lines; all I ever remember is the monkey part. While getting even one monkey can prove to be difficult, (and believe me, I’ve tried), I doubt the same could be said of game design. But still, a gamer can dream, and lately I’ve been thinking about who I’d want to lock in a room (with all the basic necessities, of course) to design a game.
Those two names might not mean much to you at first glance if you don’t keep track of historic game developers, but you would recognize their work in a heartbeat. Both of these men were reasons the Final Fantasy franchise was (and is) so vastly successful, with Uematsu composing the most memorable scores in gaming and Amano providing extremely rich concept art and character design. Needless to say, getting these two men involved in a project is a recipe for its success and someone actually got them to collaborate on his proposal.
Video game composers have it rough. Not only do they attempt to create memorable, game-defining tunes that refuse to leave our heads, they also have to make sure that those songs still hold up after they’re repeated over and over. And to top it all off, they do so without the benefit of widespread recognition; it’s unlikely any game musician will ever have the household name power of someone like John Williams or Hans Zimmer. But when these dedicated men and women succeed, their creations permeate the fabric of popular culture so completely that the entire entertainment industry takes notice.