Classical Composer Reaction/Analysis to DANCING MAD from FINAL FANTASY by Nobuo Uematso | Ep. 766
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 23 апр 2024
- #finalfantasy #dancingmad
In this edition of #thedailydoug, I'm returning to the music of Nobuo Uematso and the Final Fantasy gaming franchise with the epic work Dancing Mad. This music accompanies the player through the culmination of the game and the final battle...and the music is simply epic. There's great orchestral rips and dissonances...choir chants...electric guitars...and everything in between! I know you'll love this one!
Reference Video: • Distant Worlds II: Dan...
Daily Doug Merch: www.bonfire.com/store/the-dai...
Thanks to our friend TIM WAURICK for providing the vocals on the Daily Doug Intro and extended Outro: / @timwaurickmusic
Catch up on my full album reactions at my Patreon!
JOIN THE NEW EXCLUSIVE DAILY DOUG COMMUNITY!
Patreon: / doughelvering
Instagram: / doug.helvering
Facebook: / helvering
Twitter: / helvering
Vimeo: vimeo.com/user146736659
The Daily Doug Directory: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...
While dancing mad is playing you ascend an almost biblical tower of flesh and machinery melded together by the twisting corrupted power of a long dead magic once again taken from it's source hidden away for thousands of years and now in the hands of a once lowly, traitorous jester turned and changed, descending from the heavens on rays of light, the God of Magic made flesh. This blew my 10 year old mind, I got into prog, metal, and classical because of this music, life changing.
There's a common saying that originated in a youtube comment somewhere, but someone said "Nobuo Uematsu composing Dancing Mad on the SNES sound chip would be like Michaelangelo making the Sistene Chapel out of crayon."
Nobuo Uematsu is a true master of video game composition. I would always recommend his work to anyone interrested in game soundtracks.
The most amazing thing of all is Nobuo Uematsu never had any formal training in music. So for him to be able to compose masterpieces like this is astounding. Uematsu would most definitely be named among modern composers like John Williams if he were composing for movies and not video games.
Dancing Mad is a proper suite, each of the four sections corresponds to a different phase in Kefka's penultimate bossfight. All of his battle stages have their own gimmicks that you have to adjust to, and if you fail you start aaaaall over again! This was both game mechanically and compositionally mind-blowing back in the mid-90s, one of the most memorable video game encounters of all time!
11:45
I was a child when I first faced this boss. My parents thought it was just a silly game for kids. I'm so grateful this composer decided to write and squeeze this absolute beast into something that's pretty much a floppy disk. He saw this pixel game with swords and decided the story deserves THIS.
This is a good track, even more incredible when you consider it was on a Nintendo cartridge.
Nobou Uematsu is a legend, and certainly one of the greatest modern composers.
I'm 43 just turned 43 on April 9th
The file size of FF6 is about 3 MB in total.
Never clicked so fast in my life. Edit: I love me some One Winged Angel, but Dancing Mad is definitely the best song Uematsu has ever written, and may well be the best video game piece of music ever written. Edit 2: If you want another one of Uematsu's best, look up "Answers" from Final Fantasy XIV. That one is definitely a journey of a song.
FYI, this is the final battle (after a 50+ hour game!), where you are fighting Kefka, the court jester of the evil empire who went power mad and killed the emperor before infusing himself with magic by upsetting the balance of the old gods and destroying most of the planet in the process - to become a nihilistic self-proclaimed God. After fighting all the way up his tower, you meet him with all of your party members and after a dialogue where you try to show him there is value in life and love, he decides to fight you all and destroy everything. The fight itself is made up of 4 parts, as is the musical piece, where each one is distinct visually also we get some musical references to familiar tracks. All in all, along with Chrono Trigger, this is the best soundtrack for a video game ever - and all done on the extremely limited synthesizer of the SNES!!!!! You can also find many renditions of tracks from it: solo piano albums, string quartets, metal bands, up to full orchestral arrangements - the music really is that iconic and well written. I'd suggest going for a few short themes and contrasting the original SNES track to those modern full-bodied versions for the fun of it, they are only a couple of minutes each (looping, in the game).
Well new you know why we were so loud about this piece! 😂
You'll have to do more of these, so cool, had everything a prog/classic/rock fan like me wants in a piece of music. I'm not a gamer but love the great tunes they come with!
8-bit Music Theory has a detailed analysis of the piece that I'm sure will interest you, Doug.
Honestly you missed out by not listening to the original version. Hearing what it accomplished with all the limitations it had on it from a technical perspective is really important for context.
Yeah, that Bach pastiche in the middle (which plays during the part of the fight where Kefka looks like a parody of an angelic being) was where I went from liking the song to loving it. And then that final prog-rock breakdown at the end solidified it. Uematsu was on fire for pretty much all of the 90's.
This is part of the reason why a lot of video game fans consider Uematsu-san one of the greats, and if you want to hear more of his compositions in a more "metal" style, check him out with his band The Black Mages.
13:27