The Black Mages: Final Fantasy

 (9 customer reviews)

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...Read more

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...Read more

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.