Ever since Final Fantasy VII was released, one of the biggest gripes I hear about it is the music, and I can't blame anyone for having that opinion. The real problem of these complaints is that the 'complainies' blame Nobuo Uematsu for the lackluster music when it really isn't the man's fault. The first thing people should realize is that RPG's are built from the story up, not from the music up. Uematsu-San must make his music fit into the mood and feel of the current place in the game, whether it be a battle or a town. The next big thing (and this is REALLY important) is that the quality of the music REALLY sucked, and that wasn't Uematsu-San's fault. If you have ever heard the Overworld Theme or Aerith's Theme played by a real orchestra (RPGFan editor's note: you can find those 2 songs on the Real Audio page of RPGFan), the music is considerably better and sounds very beautiful, better than some of the great masterpieces in my opinion.

This is where the problem with video game music lies, I don't know why the quality of music has dropped since moving into the 32-bit era on what are supposed to be superior systems, but it has. And in the end, you can't blame Square or other companies because they don't want to fill their CDs with memorable music, they want to fill it with pretty eye-candy so that they can appeal to the casual gamer and make more money while coldly tossing aside the people who originally helped to build the industry up into what it is today. This is the reward for being a devoted fan, sucks doesn't it? Well, there is Final Fantasy Anthology but that's another editorial.

Written by Adam Lisbon