Something I’ve appreciated more and more about Final Fantasy VIII‘s soundtrack over the years is how weird it is. By 1999, the Final Fantasy series had been around over a decade, and the template for JRPG soundtracks was already firmly in place. FF8 broke with the series’ soundtrack norms in a few ways, like using motifs for emotions rather than specific characters. Go back to the soundtracks for IV, V, VI, and VII, and you’ll find a lot of trumpets and orchestral fanfares. VIII errs in the direction of “Roses and Wine,” a guitar-and-theremin ballad that plays during a scene in outer space. It’s subtler and stranger and more unorthodox.
My favorite expression of this is “My Mind,” which becomes one of the runners for Squall and Rinoa’s romance.
This piece has an unusual pairing of electric guitar with some kind of crystal-y piano synth. They shouldn’t pair together, and they really don’t? It never stops being two separate melodies taking turns playing their part of the song. And yet they fold into each other perfectly. It’s a duet! Maybe Rinoa is the piano and Squall is the guitar. I don’t know. I guess that makes Angelo the synth bed playing under the melodies.
The closest comparison within the Final Fantasy series might be “Reina’s Theme” from Final Fantasy V, my favorite piece from that game and my favorite out of any SNES FF game. Despite the twinkly instrumentation and flute melody, it has one of the absolute hardest bass lines I have ever heard. It is borderline distracting and inappropriate, but it’s so good. That clash of contemporary electric instruments with typical fantasy arrangements is where some of Nobuo Uematsu’s best music comes from because he let them compete with and complement each other in the same song. That’s great on its own, but also so true to the motifs of Final Fantasy in general. “One-Winged Angel”? I sleep. Eddie Van Halen playing electric guitar over a toy piano? I wake.
I’m a sucker for a good delicate piece of game music. Music boxes go straight to my heart. So the only thing I like more than that is when it gets played for contrast.
It’d be absurd and ahistorical to claim that game music had never done something like this, but I think it’s notable that VIII went this way on the heels of a soundtrack that received acclaim for sounding like a symphony orchestra. When FF7‘s soundtrack comes up, it’s always in the context of the main theme or Aerith’s theme, never something like the Mog House music. There are still plenty of massive symphonies in FF8, but purposely going in a different direction with the composition gave it more freedom to play with recurring emotional motifs in odder arrangements like this. I think the bravery to make one of the main themes in such a high-profile game a duet between a mystical fantasy piano and an electric guitar set a positive example, at a time when the temptation would’ve been to go even bigger.