The Distant Worlds concert series has been touring the world playing Final Fantasy music for almost 20 years, and in that time, they’ve covered a lot of music! Many medleys. But not as much FF8 as you’d hope, because they have 16 games and various spinoffs to cover in their concerts. They can usually only squeeze one or zero FF8 pieces onto each of the six albums they’ve put out over the years.
But when they did it, OH MAN.
There are several variations of the “Eyes on Me” motif through the FF8 soundtrack. It gets a piano solo in “Julia,” as a ballroom dance number in “Waltz for the Moon,” as the second melody in “My Mind,” and as a weird quartet at the Garden Festival. It’s also prominently in “Love Grows,” which is basically an orchestral arrangement of the song.
The version of “Love Grows” in the game is sweet and poignant, and it makes a good undercurrent to Squall and Rinoa’s relationship. The arrangement is dead-on. I love how it cycles through different instruments for the melody, so the song keeps evolving like the characters are evolving. But it’s also quiet and meant to be in the background, never taking over the scene.
For the Distant Worlds arrangement, they blew up “Love Grows” into a massive orchestral piece. It starts out with the same quiet, deliberate arrangement, but every time it goes through the melody, it adds more and gets louder. There’s a beautiful piano countermelody that I never would’ve thought to include. The instruments keep layering up and up and up until the final EXPLOSION at 3:57. Oh my gOD. oh mMY GODD
The swooning brass. The cymbals. The hammering chords on the piano. If you know the melody, I cannot imagine listening to this without feeling some kind of emotional catharsis. I get a lump in my chest every time I hear this. This is what falling in love sounds like.
It’s great too because this is what a concert arrangement of this song SHOULD build to. Such a dramatic version of “Love Grows” would not have worked anywhere in the game itself, except for maybe the ending? In the actual game, it’s meant to be a bed of music underscoring romantic scenes. But as a standalone piece of music to be played in concert, it gets to juice this theme for every ounce of emotion it has.
As a bonus, Distant Worlds also did an arrangement of “Eyes on Me” last year too! “Eyes on Me” was already a pretty dramatic song, so the orchestral treatment isn’t quite as much of a glow-up as what “Love Grows” gets, but it’s a real good version of “Eyes on Me.” (Even if they did change the lyrics a little.)