Customer Reviews

The Black Mages: Final Fantasy

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Words cannot describe how ecstatic I was to hear that Uematsu was going to release an arrange album of various Final Fantasy battle themes redone in heavy metal. "Official" metal or rock arrange albums have an incredible track record. Konami's "Battle Perfect Selection" series was the first crusade into metal arrangement of video game music. Since those five CDs were released in 1993-1995, only F-Zero X Guitar Arrange has been nearly as good. The Black Mages puts an end to the drought.

Almost every song has a synth lead, with guitar playing rhythm in the background, eventually emerging to do a solo or to switch places with the synth. "Battle Scene I" is a good example of this. The guitar is not used ineffectively, however. At about 3'09", the guitar re-enters after a short interlude, and kicks back into the chorus, with the guitar joining the bass in the background rumblings, adding a whole new dimension to the song. Brilliant.

As you may have noticed, I said "almost" every song was synth led. "Force Your Way" is a prime example of an exception. There is a short, synthy opening, but after that two guitars (as opposed to the one featured in most other songs) take over. From 1'25" to about 2'25" there is nothing but chaos. Guitar solo, synth solo, guitar solo. It's truly crazy. After that, the song enters a slower part, and eventually ends where it began.

The last song I should mention is "Dancing Mad", a 12 minute epic. A lot of people have felt disappointed with this arrangement. Some say the synth sample quality is too low, others complain that the guitar barely plays for five minutes. While both points are true, I still love this song. It's easily the best arrangement I've heard of the theme. It's a lot heavier than the original, and although it's not so guitar heavy, it still sounds distinctly rock-ish.

The rest of the album is just as good as the songs mentioned above. Tracks like "Those Who Fight Further" ("Still More Fighting") were just itching to have a real guitar thrown into the mix, while others will have you saying, "Wow, I never imagined the song could sound like this." On another note, this CD is very loud. If you keep your speakers set at a certain loudness all the time, I'm pretty sure you'll have to turn them down. It's easily the loudest CD I own.

In whole, this album is nothing short of brilliant. A fair warning: It is not going to be everyones cup of tea. However, it's a soundtrack that every Final Fantasy fan who even mildly likes rock music should have

I have always loved playing Final Fantasy games and the music has consistently been of a very high standard. Nobuo Uematsu just so happens to like Rock music and has his own Rock Band called The Black Mages.

The tracks on this CD are excellent. Some of the themes I had not heard before as they were from older Final Fantasy games that I have not yet played, but I did recognize a lot of them. The guitars sound great and often trade solos back and forth between the keyboards.

"Clash on the Big Bridge" and "Those Who Fight Further" are my favorites. The riff on "...Big Bridge" is very powerful and the bridge section is very uplifting. "Those Who Fight..." is one of my favorite tracks from FFVII and has a fantastic main riff. I also love the organ/keyboard playing on both of these tracks and how they work well with the heavy distorted guitars.

With rock and metal being my favorite music genre, due to the fact that I play guitar, I could really appreciate the fantastic musicianship. This CD is a must for anyone who loves hard rock music and has listened to any of Nobuo's work. Even if you have not heard of all the tracks in their original form, you will still love this CD. The tracks that you have heard however, will really stand out and it will make you wish that The Black Mages will be used on future Final Fantasy Soundtracks!!!

If you love the music of Final Fantasy, especially the battle music, then you will love this album. Being a musician myself, I always wished I could do something akin to this album: get a bunch of my friends together and play rock-band arranged versions of Final Fantasy music (video game music, in general). Geeky, I know. Anyway, the arrangements are excellent and the recordings are really high quality. If for no other reason, this album is worth it for "Dancing Mad", the final battle music from Final Fantasy VI (III in the US). A great album that I definitely recommend.

Get your gaming blood boiling with epic final fantasy rock. This album is not for everyone; lesser gamers might suffer severe injury at the awesomeness that is the black mages. If you love final fantasy you also love the black mages and this cd.

If you're a fan of old school final fantasy then you will love this album. Better than the second black mages album in my opinion, but there are a few tracks I was disappointed with. I really enjoyed hearing the tracks from the older games in the series (1, 2, 6,) since those were the games that originally got me hooked on final fantasy. Dancing mad was awesome, as was the other battle themes from six. Those three tracks alone make this album worthy of my collection. The only two tracks I was somewhat disappointed with were tracks seven (JENOVA) and ten (Fight With Seymour). I think they should have dropped those two tracks and picked some tracks from final fantasy 4 instead. But overall, it's an awesome album and I recommend it to any final fantasy fan!

I bought this and their second album one day by chance and absolutely fell in love with it. Being a fan of the Final fantasy games helps a lot and I have some of the game sound tracks and hearing them do it was really good I couldn't believe that no one told me about them sooner! if you like the Final fantasy games and the music to them i highly recommend you get this!

And that's my two cents!

when i saw the track lsit of this, i had to buy it, J-E-N-O-V-A from ff VII is my all time favorite battle theme. every song on here is wonderful.

I love hard rock and metal. I love video game music. Especially music from the Final Fantasy games. What do you get when you blend all these together? Here's my track by track lowdown.

BATTLE SCENE (FF1): Has some okay guitar parts, but strays too much from the source material.

CLASH ON THE BIG BRIDGE (FF2): Overall, I liked this one better than the previous track--except for the awful "Pseudo-Sax" that plays a little more than halfway through the song.

FORCE YOUR WAY (FF8): There was a part during this song where I simply couldn't help but wonder, "What on earth are they doing to those keyboards?" It sounded like they were just randomly banging keys. Stays pretty faithful to the original.

BATTLE, SCENE II (FF2): Has nice use of bass for the intro. Pseudo-sax makes an appearance again, but not as bad as on Battle Scene.

DECISIVE BATTLE (FF6): Argh! Pseudo-Sax ruins the song . . . again!

BATTLE THEME (FF6): Slower than the original. Okay.

J-E-N-O-V-A (FF7): Has an odd Drum & Bass/Jungle intro. Same as original in terms of pacing and sound, with few embellishments. Spacey-ending. Best song so far, but still not great.

THOSE WHO FIGHT FURTHER (FF7): Starts off with . . . a COWBELL! You can almost see Will Ferrell banging on his cowbell to this one. Faithful to the original, good speed, few embellishments. No pseudo-sax to ruin it.

DANCING MAD (FF6): My favorite song from Final Fantasy 6. Very similar to the original--at times I don't think they changed anything at all. They could have used real choirs instead of synthesized ones.

FIGHT WITH SEYMOUR (FF10): Very close to original, which is a good thing, because the original was really good to begin with. Even the short keyboard part towards the end that was pretty good.

OVERALL IMPRESSION:
This could have been a great album--they had some great source material to work with. Where I think they went wrong was in deciding how they wanted the songs to sound. Evidently, they were trying for a heavy metal sound for the songs, which begs the following question: When's the last time you heard a Heavy Metal band use a saxophone in their gig?! In all the years I've listened to Metal I've heard accordions, flutes, organs, keyboards, synthesizers, bagpipes and other obscure and traditional instruments--but never a saxophone.
For the love of hamsters, leave the Pseudo-Sax OUT!
I would have been content with this album if they had only left out the jazz and played a little more COWBELL!

Oh ya, this is the best guitar playing Ive ever heard on this masterpeace, Better the Van Halen. Give me a break. You are smokin it. The guitar playing on this is among the worst Ive ever heard. If You wanna hear real Guitar Get Van Halen 1, It blows this junk away. This cd hasnt even gone gold. Get in to real music, dont wast your time on this. I enjoy Some of the final Fantacy Games, But a sound track? Get into reality, this is far below average. The Black Mages, What Kind of name is that anyway, man.