I played FF Tactics Advanced, but not its sequel, so for the longest time I was uninterested in whatever musical quality it might have to offer. But I gave up on that standard long ago, and have been downloading music from all sorts of games I never played these days.
FFTA2's music is by the same composer behind the music of Ogre Battle, FF Tactics and FF 12. Hitoshi Sakimoto is a god of the musical world, my #3 composer of all time behind only Sakuraba and Uematsu. The moment I saw an opportunity at more of his wonderful music that I'd overlooked up until now, I jumped on it.
Since I found two more remixes among my FF9 music, it's obvious that I'll run out of music entirely unless I keep adding these additional games in, too. Dark Messenger is just an upbeat remix of Wicked Melody, and Through the Gate eventually ended up being a remix of Mistaken Love around 2/3 of the way into the song. Then there were three more remixes from The Burning Crusade by Russel Brower, all using the same blood elf themes. The remixes are everywhere, haunting everything.
A2 was actually full of remixes itself. A soundtrack that started with 56 songs only had 25 or so that weren't in previous FF games. Out of those, 21 of them were high enough quality to merit entry into my music hall of fame. The biggest obstacle to good music seems to be remixes. If you can just get over that hump and make an actual new tune, it's almost certain to be good, given that it's composed by the likes of Sakimoto.
A2's music was good, but the original Tactics, and even the first Tactics Advanced, was incomparably better. This may be the third best composer of all time, but this game wasn't his best composition. We're really wading into the land of diminishing returns here, so it might be best to patiently wait for Xenoblade 2 to come out and not try to expand any further.
The new music hall of fame total is 4329 songs, still 9.7 days in continuous play length.
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