Single Unveiled: "Prelude (NES Ver. Final Fantasy I)"

A J Greengrove

Last updated: ; Published:

Let’s Play Final Fantasy I - with Guitar! “Prelude” (NES Version specifically) and “Game Over” for starters. Konsta Airisto’s mage art captures nicely the hidden music theory wizardries in the game’s soundtrack. I now explain the journey that awaits us (EP and Album to come).

  • I’ll write a short music theory blogpost for each of the game soundtracks.
  • Then I use that knowledge to compose custom game music, and learn something new about enhancing games with music;
  • filling the game composer’s “zibaldone” tome; a quest I previously declared in the post Album Unveiled: “Wherever The Wind Takes Me”.

The choice of Final Fantasy I vs. early music theory is not a coincidence. ; )

As usual, to peek into the ‘audio dungeon explorations’ of this album: you can access the streams with “smart Link” (apple music requires a search):

https://snd.click/a-j-greengrove-250825

A mage's face that is lit with a spell, perhaps arcane fire

Figure 1: “Prelude (NES Ver. Final Fantasy I)” Single cover by Konsta Airisto

And as before, as I write of these 19(+?) dungeon explorations, you can find the automagically filling list with short summaries in: Final Fantasy I. In fact, that category page gets updated with any FF1 -related blogposts.

Why Final Fantasy I? Just like V, it perfectly captures the idea of a magical land, with the damsel in distress you save from the dragon, except this time he’s an evil knight named Garland. Theres’ other reasons:

  • The fact that it took inspiration from Dragon Quest, which we can possibly discuss later
  • We have especially the NES (1987), PS1 (2002) and Pixel Remaster (2021) versions, which provide a nice comparison point for advances in soundtrack styles,
  • The composer being Nobuo Uematsu, who is rightfully called a grandfather of video game composing

This recording is captured with Csound / Ecasound command line magic to capture the guitar’s tunes and mix the music.

Updates

Addendum story: I had already recorded almost all of Final Fantasy I, but then my laptop broke; stupid me did not have a backup system robust enough. Now I’m a happy user of B2 Backblaze (just 1 CLI command and backup begins!) but I thought screw it, let’s follow the waterfall release model to get started already (single, then EP, then the actual damn full album).