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Media (Apple) Media Music Entertainment Games

Final Fantasy Music on iTunes 78

Posted by Zonk from the japanese-love dept.
Final Fantasy Online Warcry has the news that iTunes is now carrying Final Fantasy scores and music from the Black Mages. Square Enix has a listing of all of their iTunes offerings, which includes music from FFI - FFXI, a live concert offering, and two albums by the Black Mages (Nobuo Uematsu's rock band).
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Final Fantasy Music on iTunes More

Final Fantasy Music on iTunes

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  • The OSTs for FF1 and FF2 are listed as being released May 10th, 2005? Had the OSTs been released before this?
    • Generally, I think the release date is the date the music made it to iTunes, unless it states "Originally released" or something akin to that.

    • Re:Does anyone know why... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It might be because this is the first time they've been released separately. The FFI and FFII OSTs were originally released on one CD, which began and ended with orchestrally-performed medley tracks.

      At first glance, it looks like the FFI and FFII OSTs are a good deal (at the album price--$5.99)--until you realize that they were originally released as one album. The individual FFI and FFII OSTs themselves are only about 20 minutes each--for $6, that's not much; though it's definitely a better deal than payi
    • itunes exclusives

  • cool (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rritterson ( 588983 ) * on Saturday May 14, 2005 @05:03PM (#12531393)
    Final Fantasy VI (3 in the US) still rates as my favorite game of all time. No game before or since has actually caused me to dream about the characters.

    Even hearing the 30-second previews on iTunes brings back memories of that bastard kefka, that fucking octopus who always screwed things up and spending hours hoping I could keep general leo alive.

    My only complaint is that the versions for download are direct releases from the SNES cart. Why couldn't they orchestrate them instead of using the 8-bit sound system?

    • Re:cool (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There are plenty of orchestrated and arranged versions of some of the songs from across the entire series, you just have to look elsewhere (they're probably on itunes as well).
      Try "Final Fantasy VI Grand Finale" for starters. A bit older, but Final Fantasy Symphonic is also a great arrangement of Final Fantasy 1, 2 and 3 (japanese) from the Tokyo or London Philharmonic.

      The soundtracks youre currently listening to are OST's or OSV's, which are Original Sound Track/Version. You're not going to get anything
    • My only complaint is that the versions for download are direct releases from the SNES cart. Why couldn't they orchestrate them instead of using the 8-bit sound system?

      you can also get perfect quality from the snes cart by using .spc's [some info [snesmusic.org] ]

      • you can also get perfect quality from the snes cart by using .spc's

        Now that Square Enix has started to sell soundtracs on iTMS, does this mean that the game publishers will start suing the people who distribute .spc files (notably zophar.net)?

    • VI is still the best... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by solios ( 53048 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @07:35PM (#12532229) Homepage
      Six is the Empire Strikes Back of the FF series, in my opinion - its' easily the best of the series- deepest (again, imo) character development, most compelling characters, most fluid combat system, one of the better magic systems... I spent hundreds of hours with it as a teenager and got so deep into it that I eventually hand corrected innacuracies in the strategy guide I'd purchased (when it had become apparent I'd missed a few things).

      Then VII came along, completely and utterly failed to be better than VI in any way (in fact, amping up to a high level pretty much every shortcoming of the series), and my high hopes for the future of RPGs were rapidly deflated.

      I spent somewhere around 250 hours with FF VI - multiple runthroughs and couching with friends who were playing the game. I couldn't stomach VII or VIII for any more than 40-50, and never replayed either - they'd lost the magic that made VI so compelling for me.
      • I thought the plot kind of fell apart towards then end when it was essentially all "find lots of hidden powerful shit".
        • I thought the plot kind of fell apart towards then end when it was essentially all "find lots of hidden powerful shit".

          lol. I'd pretty much agree with that too. 6 remains my favorite FF, but I'd agree with this statement.

          What they could have done is kept it a lot more structured when you were re-discovering the characters. It KIND OF did this, as in if you actually did follow the "clues" along the way, you WOULD find most (all?) of them in a story-driven order, and that makes it quite a bit better. B
        • How does getting powerful have anything to do with the plot? I found that getting more powerful was a good diversion to the plot. And I don't think that there was any really powerful items that you absolutely HAD to find. The story is the core of that game, not the gameplay. Sure, having a completely obvious solution to every obstacle would have eventually become overwhelmingly boring, but as it was it didn't detract too much from the game's major focus: the story.
      • IMO, 6-10 with the exception of 8 were all extremely good in their own ways. 8 was boring as hell. Only one in the series that I enjoyed less was 2 (not to be confused with FF4).
      • FFIX did it for me, couldn't stand the "Prescious moments" graphics, the cartoony villians, the way too easy gameplay, or the dumbed down card game. THey need to make FF VI today with totally modern graphics, and maybe some voice acting, change the limit breaks to something most people will see at least once during the game, and you have as perfect as a game could be.
    • You didn't dream about tetris? Damn those blocks!
    • If you're looking for FFVI orchestrated music, here's what you can find:

      - There's a couple tracks in the 20022002 concert, including, obviously, Tina's theme.

      - If you can find the Final Fantasy VI: Grand Finale CD you'll probably wet your pants (good luck finding a non-bootleg one. I do treasure my original one even though it's quite battered by now). You might be able to find it at amazon.co.jp and specialized importers (hmmm... www.gamemusic.com?).

      - You can also find the WHOLE opera (a 21 minute track

  • Rediculous pricing (Score:4, Interesting)

    by inio ( 26835 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @05:37PM (#12531578) Homepage
    This is a great move, but the pricing scheme is ridiculous. For most of the games, you'd end up paying half of the game's original retail price just to get the soundtrack. That's unacceptable when you take into account that most of the music was written for and preformed by a Z80.

    • Re:Rediculous pricing (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 2nd Post! ( 213333 ) <gundbear@pacbe l l .net> on Saturday May 14, 2005 @05:43PM (#12531609) Homepage
      Doesn't that imply that the music is worth approximately half the game's retail price?

      Perhaps to you the music is worth less than that, but to me (and others who have purchased game music) the soundtrack is worth MORE than the game, once you've played the game.

      • A different perspective (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I don't know about that. I have no problem ripping or downloading the music for a game I already own. If I bought the game, don't I own the music on it already as well? I don't see much difference between taking it off the CD manually and grabbing it from someone's website. To me the cost of most OST's is a little inflated, and not justifiable if I've already got the original medium.

    • Re:Rediculous pricing (Score:4, Informative)

      by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @08:16PM (#12532447)
      http://www.ocremix.org/index.php [ocremix.org]

      Just go to Overclock Remix site's, there are plenty of outstanding FREE mp3s to download. Not only for final fantasy, but a ton of other games too. I have downloaded so much, I am amazed my cable company haven't killed my connection yet.

      • Just go to Overclock Remix site's, there are plenty of outstanding FREE mp3s to download.

        And with respect to the underlying musical works embodied in the video games in question, how is ocremix.org any more lawful than allofmp3.com?

        • Re:Ocremix.org legal? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Cecil ( 37810 )
          Or look at it from the other point of view: how is it illegal?

          If you've ever listened to any of those songs, the vast majority of them are making songs that sound similar to the originals using entirely original performances and scores, with only a few distinct melodies and riffs to remind you of the original. There are no lyrics, so no worry of copyright infringement there. And to the best of my knowledge, the actual melodies of the music cannot be copyrighted, only specific arrangements of the whole song

          • Re:Ocremix.org legal? (Score:3, Informative)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            Nothing you read on Slashdot is legal advice.

            There are no lyrics, so no worry of copyright infringement there. And to the best of my knowledge, the actual melodies of the music cannot be copyrighted

            Sorry, but the best of your knowledge is incorrect. Please read these cases [columbia.edu] and this analysis [slashdot.org].

            • Well, based on the first link, the conditions they use seem to be the following:

              There are two conjunctive considerations for determining "substantial similarity." 5 See Dam Things From Denmark, 290 F.3d at 561 (citing Whelan, 797 F.2d at 1232 (following Arnstein v. Porter, 154 F.2d 464, 468-69 (2d Cir. 1946) and subdividing test for substantial similarity into two considerations). First, with the aid of expert testimony, the fact-finder must decide whether there is sufficient similarity between the wo

              • There's no mistaking one of the remixes for the original songs. If you substituted one of them into the game, it would sound bizzare.

                The same way if you substitute "My Sweet Lord", written by George Harrison (based without permission on a melody by Robert Mack) and performed by George Harrison, for "He's So Fine", written by Robert Mack and performed by the Chiffons, but that didn't stop a judge from issuing a seven-figure judgment in favor of Mack's publisher. Go search for Bright Tunes Music v. Harris

                • The world will never know what really happened inside Harrison's head, because musicians can't create the kind of "chinese wall" between the music they listen to and the music they create. It's almost impossible to write music without being derivitive, and without occasionally "ripping" themes and tracks.

                  The infamous "Nickelback vs Nickelback" remix going around the net is the perfect example. There's two different songs that "everyone" knows have basically the same music. Except, if you start doing that i

                  • The infamous "Nickelback vs Nickelback" remix going around the net is the perfect example.

                    For one thing, it's the same band, and it's likely to be the same songwriter. For another, though the bass lines of "How You Remind Me" and "Someday" are similar, bass lines aren't nearly as strongly restricted under copyright law as melodies are, and the melodies in this case aren't even close to the same.

                    Besides, you can sing any of the lyrics to "Waltzing Matilda".

                    For one thing, the copyright in "Waltzing

                    • You seem to have read my message as making the exact opposite of the point that I was intending to make. I apologise for the confusion, and I'll try and clear it up.

                      First of all, I was contrasting the Nickelback and Waltzing Matilda examples with Paul Simon to hilight the main difference between the Harrison case and OCRemix... and that is that Harrison didn't credit his source, and OCRemix's members do.

                      Your Paul Simon quote implies that he might have got permission.

                      I'm sure he got permission, and I wo
                    • I wrote: Harrison didn't credit his source

                      Of course I should have written "Harrison didn't credit his alleged source".

                      Sorry about that.
        • The legality is gray-area, sure. However, given OCR's popularity, I doubt the major game companies are unaware of them. If they wanted to sue, they would have sued by now. I think they realize that OCR is actually a benefit to them: it's essentially free advertising, getting people interested in the original games and soundtracks. If the original copyright holders don't mind, then who cares if it is technically legal?
          • Well, I know at that at least one video game composer, Jeremy Soule, has expressed his support for them and even submitted a FFVI remix of his own. [ocremix.org]

            Granted, that's an individual opinion and the video game companies may think a little differently. But it's good to know that there's at least one composer who is aware of and doesn't mind remixes of his work up there.
      • I have downloaded and listened to every single OC Remix. Some of them are some of my favorite music ever (Zeal Love by Unipulator!). However, they do not constitute a replacement for the original soundtracks.

    • Re:Rediculous pricing (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      'Rediculous' - the internet's most misspelled word.
    • It's a steal. The local Japanese store here in the Ann Arbor area sells some of these albums for $40. On iTunes they only want $25.
      • Agreed. I've bought many a game soundtrack in my time (including quite a few Final Fantasy ones), and believe me, the iTunes prices are nothing to sneeze at. This is especially true for the arrange albums ($10 as opposed to $25-30).
    • That's unacceptable when you take into account that most of the music was written for and preformed by a Z80.

      Hey, most of the music out there was written and performed on instruments that had NO CPU AT ALL.

      And, actually, wasn't most of the music written for and performed by a 6502 or 65816, sometimes assisted by a synthesizer chip like an AY38910 or SPC700? The only Z80 in the Nintendo lineup was in the Gameboy.
      • Mostly correct.

        NES CPU was a 65c02, and sound was (AFAIK) straight off a couple of pins of it. Konami games had a tendency to include a Yamaha synth chip in the cart that allowed for deeper bass. Not all games with deep basslines had a secondary synth, though. Most notably, Journey to Silius used the saw channel for drums and worked some sort of voodoo to get "awesome" (for NES anyway...) guitars out of the square and noise channels.

        SNES had a 65c816 CPU, but sound was mostly handled by the SPC700. I thin
    • Well, it's the same with movies, of course. A fairly typical movie DVD might sell at lots of outlets for about $20, and its soundtrack album CD might be anywhere from half to three quarters of that. I know of a number of movies for which the DVD of the movie is cheaper than the soundtrack CD.
    • I don't find the prices to be that out of line. For example, while the soundtrack to FF X is priced at a whopping $24.99 for the album, you'll notice that the album contains 89 tracks. And while a few of those tracks are a bit short in duration, at what amounts to approximately 28 cents each, I think that the price is reasonable.

  • Not in Canada yet? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mh101 ( 620659 ) on Saturday May 14, 2005 @06:02PM (#12531722)
    So, when's this going to end up on the Canadian iTMS, I wonder?

  • ...there's only the OSTs for now, and not much else. And every serious video game fan knows that OSTs are worthless because you can rip and convert them from the games yourself (or someone else already has). I already paid for the game, and I know the music is buried somewhere there =)

    There has been some wonderful reworked orchestral and piano adaptations of these things. I'm more interested in finding those - good that they're releasing some of those as well.

    In this post-OCRemix world, we need to think

    • Ripping music from games wasn't always trivial.

      Tell me how to 'trivially' grab the music for FFI, released on the original Famicom?

      Now compare that effort with the $5.99 download from iTunes.

      Tell me how to capture all the music, with tags and titles, from FFVII, vs the effort of grabbing it from iTunes for $24.99

      I've bought my share of OSTs over the years because for a long time it wasn't trivial (lack of emulators, lack of rom rippers, etc) to grab music from cartridges or CDs. Even now I couldn't name

      • Re:Good good, but.... (Score:2, Informative)

        by WWWWolf ( 2428 )

        That's why I added "or someone already has". NES [zophar.net] tracks and GBA [caitsith2.net] tracks. Legally quite gray area, agreed... but personally I don't see much wrong with it, especially if I have the game.

        Granted, I'm more of a PC-grown person, and on the PC the ripping is generally in form of "okay, another silly proprietary archive format, how do I extract these?" ... "weird proprietary file format, how do I convert it to mid/s3m/wav?" There's often a tool someone has written. And, of course, in modern days, it's fashionabl

        • I'm also not quite sure about the legality or morality of ripping music from a game ROM/disc. Yes, it is technically possible, but I'm not sure that grabbing them online is kosher.

          Much in the same way that ripping music off CDs for your mp3 player is fine, but grabbing them online, even if you own the CD, becomes a copyright infringement because ownership of the game does not give you free and clear the ability to share the files with other people.

          Regardless, I don't think of OSTs as a ripoff, and the iTM

          • No, it's not really legal. But a lot of things that aren't legal are not wrong.

            Yes, technically you're not allowed to download the stuff from the net. But if you already have the exact same data at hand and paid for, is it really wrong?

            Technically we could go into the Heavy Nitpicking Mode that you really are only allowed to distribute lists of ROM offsets (feed a ROM you ripped yourself to the program and it spits out the music files based on the list of offsets someone else figured out). It isn't ill

    • There has been some wonderful reworked orchestral and piano adaptations of these things. I'm more interested in finding those - good that they're releasing some of those as well.

      Well, there are tracks by the Black Mages... kinda like metal adaptions... kinda not... I guess they're kinda linkin parkish...
    • I completely agree. Prey, Symphonic Suite, Love Will Grow, just to name a few, aren't featured yet, nor have they been sold in the US anywhere I have seen. Almost every recent FF game has has another collection of remastered/different orchestrated songs too that don't see the light of day over here. I see no point to them not selling them other then just to laugh at us. I would pay for them, and I'm sure many others would too. But I'll just use PSTs and other console sound formats to play the music fro
  • This is certainly a great idea (I love alot of game music, Final Fantasy by far not the least), but Square Enix has alot of other good game soundtracks they could release. Chrono Trigger/Cross and Final Fantasy Tactics come immediatly to mind. Of course, those are by different composers, so that might have something to do with it.
    • Chrono Cross has some of the best "music to hack to", which is why Yasunori Mitsuda is the top artist on my Audioscrobbler page. Though I guess if I had it all tagged by Composer instead of Performer Bach would be #1.
  • If I hadn't just bought the CDs, this would be enough for me to have some interest in iTunes (ignoring the fact that it's not open in Australia yet...). I strongly recommend the 2 albums (The Black Mages 1 and 2) to anybody - rock arrangements of tracks from across the Final Fantasy series, by Nobuo Uematsu and a couple of other squaresoft musicians. Definitely worth the money.
    -ReK
  • Someone I worked with bought an iPod, and I hooked him up with the Final Fantasy Tactics soundtrack soundtrack, with one slight addition. I renamed and retagged the disco song, "It's Raining Men [seeklyrics.com]", to match the rest of the soundtrack and burned it to cd. He had a nice little suprise waiting for him to listen to...
  • Why did this have to be exclusive to iTunes? Yes, they're the largest. But why not recognize all of the non iTunes users and release for all of the major online stores? :(

    • Re:Why iTunes? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Chucker23N ( 661210 )
      Hmm, could it be because
      1) iTunes runs on two platforms
      2) iTunes uses a standard format, instead of the proprietary WMA
      3) iTunes syncs with the highest-market share MP3 player, as well as several other non-computer devices?

      Hmm. Nah. I'm sure it's just because everyone loves Apple so much. Yup.
      • Not to nitpick, but #2 is wrong in a small but important way. AAC is a standard, but Apple's DRM format, FairPlay is not. This means the format is essentially non-standard, because other systems can't freely access the songs.
        • True, and I should have pointed that out indeed ;-)

          However, there still is a subtle difference: if someone wants to build a DRM on top of WMA, they can't. Only Microsoft knows WMA, and only Microsoft provides DRM for it. If someone wants to build a DRM on top of AAC, they are free to (which still doesn't necessarily mean that Apple will allow the iPod to access files with this new DRM, but it's a step in the right direction either way).
      • Thanks for the list of reasons of why iTunes is great. I don't disagree, but you didn't answer my question.

        Perhaps I wasn't clear enough, so I'll use bold to mark the focus of my question:

        Why did this have to be exclusive to iTunes?

        • Apple might have put big money down for exclusive selling rights. Or maybe Square-Enix opted for iTunes because it's a successful and well-known online music store that they'd like to be associated with.

          No matter what the reason is, I only hope it paves the way for other video game soundtrack releases. Katamari Damacy, anyone?

      • Re: #2

        No, no they don't. Regular ACC is standard, but iTunes also adds fairplay, which is Apple only.

    • 4) iTunes is the only store interested in building a market for all types of MUSIC versus mooching a quick buck off the top 40 hits.. most of the other stores are only interested in "pop" stuff. Apple is trying to find new markets rather than just resell what's popular!!
    • I e-mailed Sony last month to suggest they get their game licensees to put their game soundtracks on their Connect music site for download to the PSP.

      I'm now going to e-mail Square-Enix to suggest they put their stuff on other music services besides iTunes.
    • Because you have to start somewhere, and you might as well start where you get the most bang for your buck.

      If you really want your music in a Windows-only format, I suppose you can always burn it to a disk from iTunes and then rip it in WMA. That's a lot less hassle than Mac users have to go through to play the games themselves. :)
  • It's a strange concept and there are some odd approaches being taken so that people can wrap their heads around the idea.

    I have real doubts about measuring or compairing one song to another. Does time = worth? How about how many notes are being used? Is classical worth more than pop?

    I guess in the end it just comes down to the same concept that governs all monitary transactions. How much will the market bear or what is the song worth to you?

  • Does this mean I actually have to delete the MIDIfied version of all the FF's songs from my computer to remain legal? (Or was that illegal in the first place...) *sniffle* But I wanna keep pestering my friend with the techno chocobo song from FF7...
  • I really hope this sparks some interest in the OST market. I'd really like to see them offer OSTs from their other games (current and past games, including those not released here) as well as seeing other companies follow suit. It'd be nice to buy these albums without having to pay the usual amount due to import costs, etc.

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