ReMix: Final Fantasy 'Warriors of Light'

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Darangen recalls:

"Nostalgia... This was always one of my favorite vg themes ever, and still is to this day. I can remember when my friend down the street brought Final Fantasy 1 over, we all thought it was the neatest thing to have 4 black mages with confuse and watch the enemies hit themselves (well, the few times that confuse would work). A few weeks later, my brother and I begged our parents enough to buy the game for ourselves. We finally got it, and I've loved the music ever since, the whole Final Fantasy 1 soundtrack is amazing."

I've been into Darangen's pieces to date, but this track especially shines and for me represents improvement in terms of both timbral and compositional variety. The intro mixes ambient with rock, with a piano lead over acoustic guitar and kit, with abysnthian/maelstromian pads and bells providing ambience, until an electric lead enters at 1'03" and the drums get a bit more mojo and some heavy cymbal additions. I love the Cream-style wah-lead that's transitioned into at 1'32". Now, I think the entire panel was basically in consensus that there's some of them dreaded "wrong notes" from 1'53" to 1'58" - analoq spoke with Mike about it and he indicated it was intentional and simply "odd", but for my money, there's good odd and bad odd, and this doesn't sound particularly intentional, even if it was... however, that's five seconds of a 4+ minute ReMix that's one of the more memorable Final Fantasy I mixes I've heard, and which takes Darangen's already polished guitar-driven sound and incorporates synth and piano successfully. GL writes:

"Being very familiar with this theme, I'm surprised someone was able to pull out a mix that gives the original its dues while at the same time going many steps further. Arrangement as a whole is splendid, and easily the best Darangen has done."

The one other thing that some pointed out was that the fade-out ending isn't executed in a fashion that the rest of the mix deserves - some people just have a thing against fadeouts in general, but I think it could have worked better here if the curve had been more gradual. I've personally had to do trial and error for almost an hour just on a fadeout for a track - if you get it right, it sounds natural, but if it's a little off, it can end up sounding like someone just turning the volume down on your music, which isn't ideal. So, I've done due diligence in mentioning the five seconds of squirreliness and truncated fade, but that should in no way damper my shared conviction that this is Darangen's best piece yet: epic, tragic, moody, cleanly produced, and goodstuffs.

― djpretzel