Tag Archives: Final Fantasy VII

Train2Game News: Game music on Classic FM

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Aerith's ThemeEver since I became your Train2Game blogger I have been contacted by a PR Guy for some of the biggest games developers. He has been leading his own personal campaign.

The guy I am talking about is a man called Mark Robins. Mark is a 13-year games industry veteran who used to work as a journalist at Computec and Future Publishing before moving into PR. The firm he works at, Lunch PR, is an agency whose clients include Bethesda Softworks.

The campaign he has been leading is to get some of the orchestral game music more well known. Robins’ campaign made amazing headway last year and recorded amazing success. Thanks to his efforts, he and his followers not only propelled Aerith’s Theme from Final Fantasy 7 and the theme from Skyrim into the Classic FM Hall of Fame, but Classic FM produced a pair of two-hour shows featuring nothing but video game music.

Mark has been using his contacts he gets through his job to ask for there help in spreading the word about his cause.

He firstly stresses “This campaign has nothing, nor has it ever had, anything to do with any of the clients I represent”

He goes on to say “This is a purely personal crusade. Skyrim made the Hall of Fame thanks to community motivation by Bethesda’s social media team. It’s no secret that I run the campaign, but I don’t actively tell people who I am via the social media channels and I’m actually really keen to keep this as distant from my work as possible.

“One of the interesting things I found when I started this was just how accepting the people at Classic FM were of the music. To them the revelation was, ‘Oh, we thought game music was all beeps and bloops, but actually this stuff is great. If Mozart or Beethoven were alive today then who’s to say this isn’t the stuff they’d be composing. It absolutely sits alongside movie and traditional classical music.'”

This year Robins is encouraging people to vote for Nobuo Uematsu’s soundtrack to Final Fantasy 7 again. He points out that thanks to last year’s voting effort there is now loads of video game music in Classic FM’s voting database, making it easy for people to highlight particular favourites. He also encourages fans of classical game music to join the Facebook group – not just to rock the vote, but also to share their enthusiasm.

This is great news for the games industry as it further cements the games industry as a main stream art form. I think it would be a good idea to further spread the news of this around to as many people as we can.

Train2Game News: Mid-week round up – 24.10.12

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Steams Workshop, which is used to create content for games such as Team Fortress 2 and Skyrim, has turned one. The user created content has subsequently earned “millions of dollars” for their creators and Steam themselves.

The Greatest Video Game Music 2, the follow-up to the best-selling video game album of all time, will be released worldwide on Nov 6 and has been performed by The London Philharmonic Orchestra. The digital soundtrack album will include 17 new orchestral renditions of video game theme songs like Halo, Batman: Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations and the ever-so classic Final Fantasy VII.

Following the success of Borderlands 2, an iOS spin-off has been confirmed with a release date of October 31. The game sees you play as the original 4 vault hunters from the first Borderlands in a wave-based survival game. Additionally, in true Borderlands style you can earn experience and level up your characters, unlocking new skills and abilities with each character having their own set of unique skills and abilities.

The first reviews of Hitman: Absolution have surface in Official Playstation Magazine UK and Official Xbox Magazine. Both magazines gave the game 9 out of 10. OPM said “This is the peak of the series so far” and OXM said “it a triumph of stealth and sandbox design that retains everything that fans have ever loved about the series”.

Wish Studios, a newly formed studio in Brighton, is working with Sony to develop a new IP. While other details about the partnership remain shrouded in secrecy, the status of Wish’s new client will likely serve as a significant help to the recently founded start-up’s presence in the industry.

A report by Google has said that over 50% of people use their tablet for gaming. The only activity performed more than gaming on a tablet is checking emails. The study, which was commissioned and published by Google, found that 51.5 per cent of its participants used their tablet for gaming in a two-week period.

The new dashboard for the Xbox was launched yesterday. It includes an internet explorer app giving the console a browser and the newly launched Xbox music which is similar to that of Spotify. The update also saw the removal of the Twitter and Facebook apps.

In an interesting collaboration, a new mod was made for the MMO World of Warcraft which sees the newly introduced pet battles become Pokemon battles. The aptly name WOWkemon sees a short tutorial by Professor Birch describing the Pokémon-ified battle screens and ability menus with the familiar sounds, screen effects, and even the font closely resembling the style of the handheld game legend.

Train2Game news: Square on Final Fantasy VII remake – it’d take too long to develop

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Train2Game forum users regularly post in the ‘If you could remake any game…’ thread, sharing which classic titles they’d like to see remade.  Final Fantasy VII is a title that keeps popping up in the discussion, and there are many out there who wish to see the classic PlayStation RPG remade.

Square have never really given a definitive answer fan requests for Final Fantasy VII to be remade, but in an interview with OXM, Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase said remaking the older titles in the series would take too long and cost too much. Meanwhile, Kitase also states that making Final Fantasy XIII-2 in a relatively short space of time is possible because its technology is so similar to Final Fantasy XIII.

“In the transition between XIII to XIII-2, it was quite easy because obviously we kept all the data and the engine – we had just finished using them so it was almost like they hadn’t gone cold. The technology was already warm and ready to use, so it was quite good.” Kitase told OXM.

Also within the team, we still had a feel for the game, it was still new to us, still lingering with us, so we were ready to move on to the sequel.” he added

Kitase says that it’d be a challenge to work on a past Final Fantasy title not only because it’d need a huge graphic overhaul, but also because the game worlds were bigger.

“But if we were to take one of the past Final Fantasy titles and make a sequel to it, I think that would be a lot more challenging because when they were on PlayStation and PlayStation 2 their actual game volume was a lot bigger, kind of.” said the Final Fantasy XIII producer.

“Graphically they weren’t as advanced as they are now, but there were lots of towns and worlds and cities and whatever.” he continued.

“So if we were to recreate the same kind of game – sequel or not – with the same volume, but give it a much higher level of graphical quality, it would us take three times, four times, even ten times longer to make such a game. So making a sequel for an old game would be a lot more challenging.” Kitase concluded.

As previously reported by the Train2Game blog, Final Fantasy XIII-2 was announced earlier this year and marks only the send direct sequel in the series. It’s scheduled for release on 3rd February 2012.

So Train2Game, what are your thoughts on Kitase’s comments about not being able to remake older Final Fantasy titles? Does the acknowledgement that older game worlds were bigger suggest style over substance with current gen Final Fantasy titles?

Leave your comments here on the Train2Game blog, or on the Train2Game forum.

[Source: OXM]