Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy

As I mentioned previously, on Saturday Sarah and I headed to the city for multiple events. one would be the Japanese Foundation's small expo called "Kingdom of Characters", which had information about characters that Japan had created, along with historical context (a lot of them were done in reaction to events occurring at the time). More on that another time, perhaps.

 It is an Opera House. In Sydney. I am taller than it

Later that evening, we headed to the Sydney Opera House for the main event - Distant Worlds: music from Final Fantasy. This is a show where a bunch of songs from various Final Fantasy games is played by a symphony orchestra.

The orchestra was conducted by Arnie Roth, who was in Sydney a few years ago for Play: A Videogame Symphony, which I also attended, so I knew that this show was going to be well done. Play was insanely awesome (though a little jarring when it began with the original Super Mario theme, which I'm used to hearing in chiptune form).

Distant Worlds followed form, and was, as far as I'm concerned, better than Play was. Admittedly, a large part of this can be attributed to the music itself, as well as the role that the Final Fantasy games have played in my existence. Final Fantasy VII was the very first RPG that I ever finished (I had played copious amounts of Baldur's Gate before this, but never finished it, and hadn't understood anything about it at that point). Final Fantasy VIII remains my favourite Final Fantasy title to date, and one of my favourite games overall still. I am currently playing through Dissidia Duodecim, Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy XIII, having recently completed I, II and Tactics. Beginning to get the idea here?

Nobuo Uematsu - the composer behind the vast majority of the Final Fantasy music was in attendance at the show. Naturally, I assumed this meant he was going to be there, and possibly doing a signing event afterwards (which was correct), but would be in his own private box for the show itself.

I have never been more wrong in my life. I have also never been so happy that I have been wrong.

After the first song (Prelude, which appears in almost all of the FF series), Nobuo was introduced. He took a bow, accepted the applause, and then sat down. In the crowd. About 8 rows behind me. The people he sat next to were just fans, who had paid to come to the show like everyone else. He just had a regular seat like everyone else!
Naturally, the people who he sat near freaked out. Hell, I would have freaked out too!

The show continued brilliantly - they played all their Final Fantasy VIII songs quite early on though, and later on, it got a little weaker near the end though, by playing songs from Final Fantasy XIV Online (which I don't think many people would have recognised - I played the beta of said game, and didn't purchase it afterwards because I didn't enjoy it), and then the 15 minute opera scene from Final Fantasy VI. While it was performed well, I didn't know the scene, having not played through much of FFVI, and as such it made it difficult. This was remedied with the encore though, being a song everyone knew. This particular encore surprised noone. It was still brilliant though.

The encore, in action

After the show, we linked up with a couple of friends who were up from Melbourne for the show, and lined up for the post-show signing event. There were only 100 tickets sold for this (apparently), and we were lucky enough to get some. We even managed to get fairly close to the front of the line, only waiting about 15 minutes or so to meet Nobuo, Arnie and Kanon (Kanon being a performer they brought in from Japan to sing two of the songs - Suteki da Ne and Memora de la Stono ~ Distant Worlds).
Nobuo had a good laugh at the item I brought for him to sign - a cartridge of the original Final Fantasy game for NES. Or Famicom, since it was actually an original Japanese edition.

Front: Arnie Roth, Nobuo Uematsu

Back: Me, Spritza

So, I met Nobuo, he's awesome. Arnie is also really nice. Unfortunately, I had to move on so others in the line could get their time, so I only got to say thanks to Kanon as she handed me a poster with the trio or autographs on it - although I'm sure she's really cool too. In fact, I plan on buying her new CD when it gets released. Admittedly, a big part of the reason for that is that she has sung 4 Final Fantasy songs on it :P