Soundtrack of Final Fantasy (FC/NES), with sheet
144See also: FF2 Soundtrack with scrolling score -
http://youtu.be/RVyQ7ugGacQ
This is the soundtrack of the original 1987 Final Fantasy for the Nintendo Family Computer (Famicom, or FC as referred by today's Japanese people), and later the 1990 North American localization for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Indeed it is 8-bit, and composed by Nobuo Uematsu. The audio used here (except the last one) is taken from the single-disc album All Sounds of Final Fantasy I & II, released 1989. Numbering of tracks in the sheets are based on the album too.
TRACK LIST in chronological order
00:04 - 02. Prelude
00:56 - 03. Opening Theme
02:19 - 04. Castle Cornelia
03:05 - 05. Main Theme
04:05 - 06. Chaos Shrine
05:04 - 07. Matoya's Cave
06:16 - 08. Town
07:06 - 09. Shop
08:05 - 10. Sailing Boat
08:51 - 12. Dungeon
09:46 - 13. Menu Screen
10:24 - 15. Mount Gulg
11:35 - 14. Airship
12:23 - 16. Flying Fortress
13:36 - 21. Save Jingle
13:43 - 11. Sunken Shrine
15:08 - 20. Game Over
16:00 - 17. Battle
17:34 - 18. Victory
18:11 - 19. Ending Theme
- I have rearranged them into an order closer to their in-game appearance.
- The last track (Ending Theme) is directly recorded by using Audacity while playing, because its coda is missing in the 1989 album.
Unlike (maybe) many people, I have no "memory" on this game, nor it was my "childhood"... no, I was born in 1995, and the first Final Fantasy game I played is VII in July 2013 (three months from this video), from a friend's motivation. I'm a guy which love to stick with a single subject that I like. I'm probably on a journey of playing through at least all its main series games, starting from the beginning, and this is it. Also, it seems that I absolutely have no resistance to such old-school graphics, I guess this is rare for new generation people. I'm lucky to find the way to appreciate this game.
If you have ever seen some of my other videos, you'd know I'm (somehow) a musician. The sheets of this video are my dictation did in the past few days. This is a useful resource for classical music theory studies (I'm serious), part for revision (it has adopted many classical aspects) and part for extensive learning (because it's modern). Sorry for being lazy, one page per slide. You may have to set it at least 720p and in full screen to read the sheets.
The constrains for FC or NES music is quite harsh; in summary, only 4 voices are allowed: 2 Pulse Wave (PW) tracks, 1 Triangle Wave (TW) track and 1 Noise track--Uematsu didn't even use the last track in FF1,--each track can have only one note at a time, and they have ranges just slightly wider than a harpsichord: 1 octave below the middle C to 3 octaves above it for Pulse Waves, and one octave all lower for the Triangle Wave. The range explains the weird voice motion (sudden octave switch) found in the first Prelude in the series. Such limits make the music becomes polyphonic, the last hope for making textually and harmonically rich music.
8-bit music has its own characteristics: crystal-clear attacks, polyphonic texture (tend to) as said before, and a very unique quality - you have no idea it belongs to the strings, winds, keyboard or percussion family. Nowadays we have prerecorded soundtracks even for video games, a few years earlier different generations of MIDI, with 8-bit all these are IMO different areas. There isn't anyone superior to all others, if you have considered them thoroughly. Just like the main series Final Fantasy games. All are awesome.
The score in this video is available at
http://www.mediafire.com/view/lp5b356wcczxlly