The Music Of Final Fantasy 16: Part 1 – Creating The Prelude

gameinformer.com:

For my money, one of the most interesting aspects of a game’s creation is the composition and orchestration of its music. With Final Fantasy, that’s doubly the case because for me, and I imagine for so many others, the music of this series is one of its best parts. Be it lo-fi channels, new arrangements, compilations, piano versions, or something else, Final Fantasy music makes its way into many of my playlists. 

That’s why I was so excited to chat with composer Masayoshi Soken about his score for Final Fantasy XVI. You might recognize his name as he’s also the composer of Final Fantasy XIV. Still, if you don’t, there’s a chance it’s a name you come to remember following the release of FFXVI, because after more than three hours of hands-on time with the game in Square Enix’s Tokyo, Japan, office, I’m confident we’re about to get a banger of a score. 

In talking with Soken, I wanted to speak to him about some of the major themes and melodies of any Final Fantasy game – things like the Prelude, the main theme, the Victory Fanfare, and more – and he had plenty to say. In this four-part series, I’ll be breaking down different aspects of the music that excite me and hopefully you too. 

The Prelude is a piece of music, or rather a melody, that’s appeared in almost every Final Fantasy game in one way or another. It’s a relatively simple series of arpeggios that famed Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu created in just 10 minutes for the original game. There’s no way Uematsu could have predicted the legacy of this melody in the 1980s when he created it, but he and many other composers have remixed, recomposed, reorchestrated, and composed new iterations of it for other games in the series and more. If you don’t recognize it