OC ReMix Releases Final Fantasy 4 Tribute Album 52
quintin3265 writes "Today Overclocked ReMix released its latest free fan tribute album, Final Fantasy IV: Echoes of Betrayal, Light of Redemption. The 46-track album is described by the project's coordinators as a 'narrative' set 'to recreate the story of Final Fantasy 4.' 36 artists contributed in a variety of genres, from classical to techno. This album is the latest of several free entirely fan-created albums produced by Overclocked ReMix, which recently composed the professional soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II HD Turbo Remix. Individual tracks can be downloaded from the website, or you can grab the torrent."
This is awesome news (Score:4, Informative)
I've been listening to it myself. I had to download the torrent from Legit Torrents [legittorrents.info] as bt.ocremix.org was down when I tried to grab it.
Unfortunately bt.ocremix.org is also the tracker so establishing the swarm was difficult, but it did happen and download rate was good from there. I'd recommend using a client that enables you to pick-and-choose what you want to download as the vast majority of the download is composed of lossless FLAC recordings. If you like FLAC you're not going to want 423 MB of MP3, if you aren't an audiophile you aren't going to want the 3GB or so (IIRC) of FLAC files. The download is only 423 MB if you want everything but the FLACs.
I've only listened once so far so I have no definite impressions, but it's hard not to take note of Act 1-15 Fighting for Tomorrow which includes a choir, of all things...
Torrent allready slashdotted (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Torrent allready slashdotted (Score:0, Informative)
Final_Fantasy_IV_-_Echoes_of_Betrayal_Light_of_Redemption.torrent [iddx.net]
Re:This is awesome news (Score:3, Informative)
The whole thing is 1.68GB and the flac files come in at 1.26GB. Still big, but not 3GB big.
Download/preview options, misc. (Score:5, Informative)
Our torrent tracker is indeed experiencing some load issues but we're working on getting the MP3s up in a single zip mediaupload/rapidshare fashion shortly, and individual MP3s are of course available at the site. The full torrent does include FLAC.
If running the site for almost ten years has told me one thing, it's that you can't please all the people all the time, but from a genre perspective at least this album features electronica, rock, orchestral, jazz, and much more. If Final Fantasy isn't your thing, please do check out the rest of our albums [ocremix.org] and individual mixes [ocremix.org]!
And, as a random side note, I administer/develop the site, it's LAMP, and I use Eclipse/PDT for all development and the Oxygen XML editor plugin for XSLT, which drives the frontend templating outside the wiki and forums. You know, just in case any one was wondering...
Biggest problem: Too long (Score:2, Informative)
I actually didn't listen to this album until after submitting it here.
The high point of this album is "Fallen Dragoon" (2-12). This song features what appears to be a live solo, and while my background as a violinist might make me partial to this track more than the metal-oriented tracks, it was performed beautifully. The vibrato and modulation in this piece are of professional caliber, and that part of the piece may be the second best remix the community has ever produced. (The best was a recently submitted FF9 vocal track). The artist obviously took the final boss theme from "The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time" as an influence to this work.
Also impressive is "Chocobo Chocobo." This song is a hit that could be played on the radio. The words are hilarious, the rapping is expertly done, and the song did not come out "corny" as videogame lyrics can (and as did happen with the final battle theme on this CD). Larry Orj obviously took his time writing exactly what he was going to say, and I'd be interested to know how many takes he needed to get the rapping right. It must have taken a hundred tries. The mixing and the baseline are also of the same quality as today's top 40 songs.
One of the things I noticed about Overclocked albums is that all of them advertise a "story" or a "build up" towards a finale, which is usually the final boss theme. I like this idea - I myself think that the final boss theme is the most important work in a game soundtrack. But, like the FF7 album, I was extremely disappointed in the way that the final boss theme (against Zeromus) was done here. In the Voices of the Lifestream album, the artists actually shortened One Winged Angel, which I thought was not a fitting conclusion to a four-disc, years long effort.
In this album, the Zeromus theme was similarly remixed too far from the original to make it a fitting conclusion to the work. The original melody was hidden behind the newer vocals and lost in the excessive guitars and bass, and, as stated above, the words selected did come out as "corny."
All in all, I think this project would have been better if some tracks were cut. There are far too many iterations of the "Main Theme," and the fist five mixes on the first disc had some variation of it. While each is good on its own, I became tired of listening to the same music over and over. Someone at The Shizz [theshizz.org] pointed out that many of the original influences for this OC ReMix CD were themselves remixes of the Main Theme, but I still think that the "story" didn't move forward during these similar pieces even though they weren't influenced by the same tracks. The original FF4 soundtrack, being from the SNES era, didn't have as much material to work with as FF7 or the other OC ReMix albums, and that shows in the repetition of many themes and tracks.