Mar

Last Saturday, I attended the Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy concert in Chicago. I was impressed by the turnout since the crowd was made up of all kinds of people young and old. I saw a couple dressed as a Red Mage/White Mage combo, an Advent Children Cloud cosplayer, as well as a young woman dressed up as Edea from Final Fantasy VIII. Besides that, I saw mostly normal people who looked like they were dressed up to go see the opera. And boy did we did get to see opera that night.

As we all sat at our seats waiting for the show to begin, a man surrounded by a Japanese entourage walked into the room to sit about 20 seats away in the same row as us. The entire room stood up in respect and started applauding furiously. This man was none other than Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for all the music from the Final Fantasy series.

It started off with some music from Final Fantasy VIII. 3 large projector screens were hung above the symphony displaying FMV and in-game footage from the games. They proceeded to play music from every Final Fantasy game from the series, even FFXI. One of my favorites was a jazzy swing interpretation of the Chocobo theme called “Swing de Chocobo.” Here’s YouTube footage of it from another Final Fantasy concert:

For another song, “Maria and Draco,” they brought out 3 opera singers to do the opera scene from Final Fantasy VI.

The opera song from FFVI was supposed to be the last song for the night, but they came out for an encore, which happened to be my favorite song from all the Final Fantasy games, “Terra’s Theme” from Final Fantasy VI.

The crowd went nuts and yelled for another encore. That’s when the conductor came back out and played everyone’s favorite, “One Winged Angel,” from Final Fantasy VII with Advent Children scenes playing in the background and a full choir singing along.

It was an excellent show and definitely worth watching, especially since Uematsu-san was the special guest of the night. I have never seen young people get so excited to go see a symphony. During “One-Winged Angel,” one attendee stood up and started pumping his fist in the air to the music like it was punk concert. For those that are interested, you can check out the CD of Distant Worlds when they performed in Stokholm, Sweden here. If it ever comes back to Chicago, I’ll definitely go see it again and next time I’m putting on my robe and wizard hat.

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