Game:

Final Fantasy XIII-2 (2011)

Duration: 4:49

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328

"Valhalla...is calling me to the end...i can hear now, the beating hearts of lost friends...."

I WAS TODAY YEARS OLD WHEN I FOUND OUT THIS WAS WRITTEN BY NAOSHI MIZUTA NOT HAMAUZU 😭 SORRY MR. MIZUTA! But I mean look how seamlessly this theme slots into a Hamauzu-dominated OST with all those tasty 13th chords and flat 5s, therefore it counts as an honorary Summer of Hamauzu entry lol. Seriously though, Mizuta is a wonderful composer in his own right, writer of such notable bangers as The Fire Within from Episode Prompto, the entire FFXI OST, and most recently, Stranger of Paradise, which I have been SUPER curious to check out if not for like, neverending games backlog 😭😭 And FFXI is the only mainline FF i have not played and would dearly love for a single player offline version to be readily available at some point in the future so I can experience Vana'Diel with the best of them. Hopefully Square won't abandon that IP!!

My history with this one goes back a ways, as my solo arrangement of this is based on a terrific piano/vocal/strings arrangement my dear friend @dwpiddy did of this one ages ago, and we performed it as such back in my community orchestra days. But I have always really wanted a version I could play by myself on piano because I love this theme so much, and while I was happy to dink around with the official XIII-2 piano book arrangement of it for a number of years, it just wasn't cutting it anymore since it was an overly simplified version that didn't have all those wonderful string harmonies that made the piece as hauntingly beautiful as it was. Solution: take Dan's arrangement for vocals and strings and MASH ALL SIX PARTS INTO TWO LINES OTL

While doing this definitely gave me the Noel's Theme of my dreams it was an incredibly finicky exercise in voicing the lyric line throughout, especially when the violins would be doing cool stuff on top with the cellos doing cool stuff on the low end and the vocals sandwiched in the middle where I would have to navigate around the viola lines as well AHAHAHAHAHAHAKDJFHSFHDFJDFHSKLF BUT WORTH IT! 100% ❤️ There's really nothing like having this gorgeous theme sung, but for the times when you can't pull Akiko Yoshida out of your back pocket, a solo version is nice to have.

We're back to Sakimoto after this with my two Tactics arrangements, but Summer of Hamauzu will be back! Even though summer (and possibly Hamauzu lmao) may be done, I'm not! =P

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