On Saturday, I went to the Music of Square Enix orchestra concert in Seattle as a capper on an extremely good week-long vacation. The concert was pretty good, and it was mainly because they played “Megalomania” from Live A Live as the capper to the first half of it, and also because I got to get pretend-mad that there was no Final Fantasy 6 music involved.
The concert took place at Benaroya Hall and was conducted by Eric Roth, and here’s where I’m going to get a little bit symphony-snobby: my mom is a professional musician who is in a symphony, so I grew up going to these things on a monthly basis. I wasn’t blown away by the music quality here! The conductor had to drag everyone along several times, most critically at the start of “Megalomania,” and there was something very upsetting happening in the horn section that killed one of the big moments of “Time’s Scar” from Chrono Cross.
I have some sympathy: generally, the way concerts like this work is NOT that an entire orchestra that has excessively practiced this specific program travels the world for weeks, performing the same songs again and again. Usually what happens is a local symphony (here I’d assume the Seattle Symphony) gets the music a bit in advance, and then the entire group gets together maybe one time before the actual performance to play through the whole thing. Actual practices may vary, but I feel pretty safe assuming this was not a group of people that’s been playing “Megalomania,” a song with a ridiculous rhythm, for weeks on end. Even though that sounds like a dream come true, personally.
Anyway, the sound wasn’t amazing, but that doesn’t really matter: it’s fun to go to these things and feel different emotions when they play songs you know and do not play songs you wish they would, and then imagine motivations for why certain tunes were picked and others were not. For instance, multiple songs from multiple Kingdom Hearts games were played. The Kingdom Hearts haters in the audience were irritated by this, but I was delighted, because one of those three songs was “Vector to the Heavens.” We got the joy of both listening to one of (certified banger producer) Yoko Shimomura’s best pieces in orchestra form, and of listening to a conductor awkwardly stumble over “Three-fifty-eight-over-two-days” when announcing it.
Another highlight of the concert was the Chrono Trigger section, which gave us four (4!) back-to-back Chrono Trigger songs, all of which are fantastic when a bunch of real-life string and horn and wind instruments blast ’em out. We heard, in order, “Wind Scene,” “Frog’s Theme,” “Corridors of Time” (YES!), and “Schala’s Theme.” The audience was very, very happy about all of this.
Another fun thing about going to concerts like this is getting to hear a couple of weird deep cuts. We got a piece from Final Fantasy Tactics, which I guess was top of mind due to the recent remake but I genuinely wasn’t expecting it, so that was cool. The orchestra also ended up playing one piece each from Xenogears and Romancing SaGa 2. I could not tell you which ones, as I have played neither game, but a small handful of VERY delighted people shouted when they realized what was going on. An added benefit is that thanks to the video on screen, I now have an extremely confusing and certainly incorrect idea of what the plot of each game actually is.
The concert officially ended on “Time’s Scar,” but there was an encore medley of Final Fantasy music that hit Final Fantasy V, X, XII, and ended on the battle theme from VII. This was great, but it’s weird that Final Fantasy VI wasn’t in there anywhere, and that game is probably the most egregious omission from the entire concert. I could complain about how there was zero Dragon Quest or Bravely Default in the whole show (I imagine the music rights for those are complex somehow) or no The World Ends With You (maybe that one requires a rock band rather than a symphony) but mostly I walked out of the theater pretty happy.
As a big proponent of hearing live, classical music and getting people to dress up a bit and go to the symphony, I highly recommend doing it while video game music is specifically in the program. There are still plenty of tour dates remaining and my performance was surprisingly sparsely attended—I guess folks are going to the dedicated Final Fantasy or Nier concerts instead. It’s worth it, though, to hear “Megalomania,” “Time’s Scar,” and yes, “One-Winged Angel” in all their symphonic glory.
