Final Fantasy XIII-2 OST album review

Last week I dared to watch a trailer for Final Fantasy XIII part 2 despite having an immense dislike for Final Fantasy XIII and just about everything else Square Enix has produced since it was formed! I was delightfully shocked by how good it was, something really stood out about it too and you can probably guess what... yup, the soundtracks! So I decided to listen to a few more picked out at random and after my eardrums agreed with those, I decided to search for the entire OST album. Four discs, 79 soundtracks, and I love them so much that I wish I could show my appreciation by purchasing a physical copy of the album however it seems it isn't openly available in the UK, or at least it isn't YET, I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.

This is quite easily my new favourite OST album.

The soundtracks can be separated out between the main three composers of the album, Masashi Hamauzu, Naoshi Mizuta, and Mitsuto Suzuki.

Masashi who's contributed to the least number of soundtracks of the three appears to have focused on maintaining the originality of the Final Fantasy series by providing us with some orchestral pieces such as the opening, ending and title themes, a few epic battle themes such as 'Knight of the Goddess' and emotive character themes! 

Naoshi has provided the game with some of the most seemingly unfitting soundtracks I've ever come across, they're very conflicting and inconsistent yet beautiful at the same time, 'Worlds Collide' is probably the best example of unfitting, Naoshi worked on this using the vocals of David Whitaker who essentially, is a rap artist. When I first heard this soundtrack I thought it'd never fit into the game so I researched, and after finding the part of the game it's in, and watching it, I was glad to discover I was wrong.

'Run' is an interesting soundtrack by Naoshi, it sounds like a battle between strings, keys, and percussion, an amazing sensation for the ears, something I feel I've longed for. 'Noel's Theme' which follows is essentially a softer vocal version of it, a number of the soundtracks by all three composers are a reproduction of another with different arrangements and instruments, one normally more energetic than the other, they can normally be found together.

There's the contribution of trippy, lush, ambient, downtempo soundtracks from all three composers which really strike a chord with me, see 'Invisible Invaders'. Many of soundtracks on the album contain some fantastic female vocals and many others are what I call a 'transitional soundtrack', a soundtrack which merges seamlessly into another, I'm all in-favour of the use of these in games, they really work perfectly and keep the game fresh and free of repetitive soundtracks, 'Plains of Eternity' and 'Plains of Eternity -Aggressive Mix-' are a good example of this however, just one of many.

Finally we've got Mitsuto, futuristic atmospheric techno is what he adds to the album, a lot of which I hope fit the part in-game as much as I'd like to imagine they do, though I hope that of all the soundtracks! Obviously it's a little hard for me to review that part without actually playing the game! A number of the soundtracks Mitsuto has worked on use the vocals of, ORIGA, a female vocalist, Russian by nationality, she has such an enchanting and unique voice, see 'Historia Crux'.

The only thing that I can criticise is that the chocobo themes are terrible, all three of them, they shouldn't have to be resurrected for every new edition to the Final Fantasy series, just, leave, it, dead, make, something, new! Originality, urgh.

So, am I encouraging to buy the game on it's release? No, no I'm not, I've not even so much as touched it myself! What I do recommend though is that you keep your distance, pray for a good game and if you haven't already, watch the trailer, play the demo available on PSN or Xbox Live or alternatively do what I did and watch it, oh and of course, give the soundtracks a listen, they can all be found on YouTube! Thanks for reading!

Set the difficulty to 'unplayable' mode

The King of the Night has nothing on this, he's just a boss after all.

Here we have Chaos Legion, an entire fucking game that seems unbeatable.

A Playstation 2 game produced and published by Capcom, I got it upon it's release in 2003 and haven't touched it for a few years. I quite enjoyed playing it as a kid so I figured I'd give it another shot and perhaps produce some recording from it... you sadly won't be seeing any of those now, why? Well, because I struggled to play it from the beginning of the game through to stage 6 on NORMAL difficulty... if memory serves there's about 14 fucking stages!

Stage 7 made the game unplayable, the stage itself took me about two hours to complete and I felt I was going no where! Fighting re-spawning enemies over and over, then came the boss, this fucking shell thing...  unreachable, unbreachable (yes I did just make that word up) and seemingly unbeatable. Basically it forced you to fight minions while it stayed at just enough distance to be out of reach, occasionally to move in and attack you with a shock-wave, providing you with about 5 seconds to kick the shit out of it.

Now the part which made the game unplayable is the fact that this boss fight forced me to exhaust all my healing supplies and they happen to be a necessity if I wanted to continue the game, so I thought, fuck this game, not before raping that seventh boss though, hahah. Bitch. May do a Let's Play Short of this to prove it's ridiculousness so keep an eye out.

(Originally wrote in Nov '11)

Too many hobbies, too little time

I've been playing Skylanders... I heard a soundtrack I quite liked so I decided I'd look it up, sadly it turned out to be one of those segmented, disjointed, transitional soundtracks... I was disappointed so I decided I'd take it upon myself to use my pro sound engineering skillz and fix up a more attractive, flowing version of it and after a couple of hours of toying I realised I didn't have time for it, and that there's a lot of other people out there that could do a better job than I, so I gave up... I decided I'd upload what I'd produced anyho, obviously it's unfinished, but hey.

Since I uploaded it I've received nothing but praise, listening back over it I didn't do such a bad job and probably should have another crack at it some time soon.