This deserves it's own paragraph, so I'm going to take a moment aside to talk about the opera. To those who don't know how an opera fits into a video game I will go in depth on this particular part of the game(since it's my favorite game of all time, I will tell you the rest later, but right now, just the opera). One trick Final Fantasy uses to keep players where they belong in the story is to create roadblocks to prevent you from going anywhere else, and then conveniently providing just the right form of transportation to get where you need to go, the most iconic of all being the Airship, featured in every game. In FF6, it belongs to Setzer Gabianni, the wandering gambler, who happens to be obsessed with an opera singer who bears a striking resemblance to one of the members of your party. The brilliant plan is to have your girl stand in for the singer on the night Setzer is going to abduct her in the middle of the show, which conveniently occurs right after you find out you need to go to the southern continent and due to your war with the Empire you are banned from all other forms of transportation. The only thing more ridiculous than this plot twist is that it works exactly as planned. Anyway, to make this work, the player actually has to sit through the first two songs of the opera and participate in the second one since your girl is singing and you need to remember lyrics and stay in time with the music. This is not a sidequest, you are actually required to join in an opera in order for the story to move forward. Nobuo Uematsu actually wrote the songs which appear in full within the game as much as technology allowed and since then the songs have actually been performed live. I just want to make this point clear to anyone who does not believe that video games have culture.
On a completely different note, Nobuo Uematsu's most famous composition is probably "One-Winged Angel" from Final Fantasy VII. Inspired somewhat by Carmina Burana, and yes for the record I know what Carmina Burana is primarily because of this song, this heavy metal mix is the theme for the final battle against Sephiroth. For those who don't know, final boss music is generally intense. You are almost finished with the game and for your final moments before victory, you are supposed to be totally immersed in the experience that you are saving the world, and the background music better damn well do it's part to double your heart rate with the belief that the fate of the world is in your hands at this very moment and everyone you love will in fact be killed by this guy if you do not kill him first. In FF7, Sephiroth has gone insane and believes that if he can magically call up a meteor to descend on the planet and blow a crater clear into the core of the planet and then sits in the center of that crater he can absorb the energy of the planet and become a god. Now you may be thinking that will instantly kill half of the planet's population and leave the other half to die a slow painful death. Sephiroth does not care. In fact he actually kind of enjoys it as a perk of his evil plan. This is what you are fighting against in this final battle, not just Sephiroth, the madman with the big sword and one black wing who flies despite the fact that you really can't do that, 'cause f**k the laws of physics along with everything else, he's about to be a god, on top of this you are fighting to stop him from dropping a meteor on the planet. Not only is this the height of tense final battles, but Nobuo Uematsu set the bar for what kind of music you should expect to accompany the apocalypse. FF7 fans have a giant sword and a stock of materia knowing that if they ever hear this song just playing, it is a choir of fallen angels ushering in the end of the world and we are going to go down swinging. I personally do expect that should Lucifer ever return to complete the prophecy of Armageddon, this is the music that will be playing and the chanting will be done by the angels and demons as they clash in the skies.
Okay, so now that I have sung the praises of Nobuo Uematsu, let me tell you about Final Fantasy VI, the greatest game ever made in the history of video games-and let me stress, I'm even talking about games yet to be made, this is the best in the Akhashic Record of video games. FF6 was the best and everyone just needs to stop trying and bow down to the king. The game starts out talking about how a great war of magic a thousand years ago almost destroyed the world and in order to stop the war, the magi who created magic took the espers, the beings they gave magic to, into another world effectively removing magic altogether. Those who survived rebuilt a world without magic, but now someone has figured out a way to bring magic back and lord it over those who do not have magic and rule the world. The story then begins focusing on three soldiers pursuing a frozen esper that has been found in the mines of Narshe. They make short work of the villagers only to be blown away by the esper itself, which by the way remains frozen because it's that powerful it can take down three soldiers without even breaking free. To our knowledge only one of the three soldiers survives, and she has amnesia, remembering only that her name is Terra. A young man named Locke sneaks her out of town to the Kingdom of Figaro where it happens he is friends with King Edgar. Enter Kefka, the Emperor's lackey who makes his grand entrance asking his guards to dust off his boots while he walks through the desert, no he doesn't really care that it is redundant because they will just get more sand on them, he just doesn't want anyone to forget for a second what a dick he is. Kefka asks Edgar about Terra, and Edgar denies he knows anything about her, even though they did in fact just meet, but Edgar knows that if Kefka's looking for her, it would not be good for him to find her. So Kefka sets the castle on fire, because, again, if you forgot, he's a dick. Edgar makes an epic escape on a chocobo with Terra and Locke while the castle sinks under the sand and an angry Kefka sends his guards after our heroes. To keep them away, Terra uses magic, which is brand new and the boys realize why the Empire wants Terra. They decide to take her to headquarters for the Returners, their rebel group, and pick up Edgar's twin brother Sabin along the way. Circumstances cause the party to be split up, Locke goes back to South Figaro to spy on the Imperial Occupation and meets a rogue general named Celes who he recruits to their cause since she's apparently burned her bridges with the enemy, meanwhile the rest try to go back to Narshe and Sabin gets separated and takes a detour through Doma, a distant kingdom having their own war with the Empire. Sabin meets Cyan who is the sole survivor of Doma after Kefka poisons the entire kingdom including his own men who were captured and are currently prisoners of war and laughs while he watches them all drop dead because he wanted to make sure Cyan knows he's a dick too. Sabin calms Cyan and recruits him and a wild boy named Gau who is a cool addition to the party but irrelevant to the story beyond helping them back to Narshe. Once everyone reunites Kefka attacks and they succeed in fending him off, but then Terra reacts to the esper again, this time glowing pink and flying off. The party goes looking for Terra and when they find her she's under the care of an old man who says he's an esper named Ramuh. Ramuh tells them they need to go get his friends from the Imperial Capital of Vector on the Southern Continent, cue the opera interlude I mentioned earlier. The party returns with a dying esper named Maduin who reveals the truth, he is Terra's father and when the empire came looking for her mother twenty years ago, they found the lost esper realm and took everyone prisoner and the current magitek is drawn from their life force. Now they believe Terra can contact the espers who escaped capture and are still in the esper realm, but when they get her to the entrance, Kefka shows up to be a dick again and the espers go crazy and burn Vector. The Emperor asks the Returners for a truce while they get the espers under control. This involves a trip to Crescent Island where they meet Strago and Relm, who along with everyone else in town are the descendants of ancient Mage Knights. It seems there is another way to get magic from espers which the Mage Knights used and participated in the war, but when the Magi took the espers, the Mage Knights were left behind and became oddities and were persecuted for their part in the war, driving them to seclusion on the island. Their magic is what drew the espers and they find the espers then try to straighten everything out. It seems the espers lost control and really didn't mean to cause so much damage, to which General Leo of the Empire pleas mea culpa to abducting the espers to begin with. So everything seems to end peacefully and then Kefka shows up to be a dick again, Leo is outraged and fights Kefka who kills Leo and leaves everyone because...well he doesn't have a goo reason, he's clearly reaching a new level of dick. Now the Emperor pursues the magi directly and gets the continent that the esper realm used to be located on to float in the sky where he intends to lord over everyone as God. The Returners attack and intend for a final showdown with the Emperor, but then Kefka ascends to the ultimate level of dick by stabbing the Emperor, throwing him off the edge of the continent and taking center stage as the main villain of the game. Kefka then proceeds to use his new found power to rearrange the planet. Celes wakes up a year later to find the sky is dark, the sea is polluted, and the land has been rearranged so parts could be used to build a tower where Kefka now looks down on the world and smites towns for his amusement. I'm not even exaggerating, the first town you reach has people wearing rags huddled around trashcan fires and when you talk to them they say they are trying to avoid Kefka's wrath lest he smite them like so many others. At this point the story kind of breaks down, but you are driven by hatred for Kefka to wipe that smug look off his face and stop that laughing. The laughing, I still hear it in my nightmares.
Okay, now for the bad news, the one black mark on the history of Final Fantasy, Spirits Within. This film is so bad I will not torture you with even one frame. I frequently hear about fans getting their childhood ruined by a bad movie based on their favorite properties, but most are Oscar worthy compared to this load of chocobo droppings. One huge problem is the fact that the only thing about this that relates to Final Fantasy besides the title is a character named Dr. Sid. Cid is a recurring character in the Final Fantasy series and Dr. Sid is arguably a good member of the legacy, but they spelled his name wrong. The worst part is that this movie was made in house. Whereas most projects can blame Hollywood for screwing it up, Square actually made this one themselves. The most recent game at the time was Final Fantasy 8 which marked the worst era in the history of Square, when graphics were all that mattered, and sadly we are still in this era. Super-deformed midget sprites are hard to work with, but God bless Square they did more in six games, heck, more in just FF6, than many companies could ever hope to do. Then came Play Station and their fancy graphics and Square figured out they could do all kinds of cool crap and people loved FF7 even though it was just FF6 with better graphics. For FF8 they came up with photorealistic imagery, a term I believe was invented to describe the graphics of FF8 and Spirits Within. The upside is this technology led to Avatar and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the downside is Square clearly shifted the lion's share of the budget to the graphics department at the expense of story, gameplay, and everything else they had being doing well up to that point. Spirits Within was so bad, I'm not even going to bother with the synopsis, I just want to say Advent Children(seen above) was a way better effort. The critics at the time commented on the graphics as a polite way of saying there wasn't anything else worth talking about. If I could afford it, I would reimburse anyone who paid to see that movie, as well as the people who may have covered the critics expenses and the theaters who had to invest in the film reel to show it. I love Final Fantasy, but this movie, which could have been awesome was the worst ever. At least I wish I could say it was, in a future installment I will be covering other disasters and why Last Airbender and Dragon Ball Evolution don't even make the list(Super Mario Bros:the movie:DO NOT WATCH THIS MOVIE! IF YOU SEE THE DVD, THROW HOLY WATER AT IT, HOLD UP A CROSS AND RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!).
It may not come out in my writing, but the soundtrack to Final Fantasy VI ran through my head as I wrote 7th Moon and I recommend you listen to it while you read.
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