Welcome to this week’s VGM. I have decided that I would go with something that is from a game especially nostalgic to me, Final Fantasy VII. Of course, I’m never one to go with the predictable tracks like “One Winged Angel” or “Aerith’s Theme” or even slightly less common but still talked about tracks like “Still More Fighting” and “The Great Warrior.” The first track that comes to mind when I think of Final Fantasy VII is either “Interrupted by Fireworks” (which I honestly find more beautiful and emotionally moving than “Aerith’s Theme”) or “Holding My Thoughts in My Heart.”

When I hear those opening notes, the first image that pops into my head is that wide open room where the gate leading outside of Midgar is. The first 8 or so hours of Final Fantasy VII were a lost like a vast majority of Final Fantasy XIII; constructively linear. You just went wherever the game dumped you off at and kept pushing forward with little to explore. Those first few notes signify the entrance into the vast overworld that is about to occur, and that is something that is missing from a lot of game soundtracks. Music should be used to invoke emotions that are not even attempted through writing or dialogue, it shouldn’t just be there as background noise.

It is almost symbolic of growing into adulthood in a way. You spend a portion with everything done for you until you are thrust out on your own, and after a while, you see how small everything you dealt with at the start was in the grand scheme of things. The way that guitar scale continues to loop throughout the track shows that time keeps moving forward and that no matter how far you come, the future still awaits. This is along wit the main theme of Final Fantasy VII mixed in for good measure of course. Sorry, I don’t have any symbolic ideas for that, and I likely just made up all this shit as I went along.

But this really is a beautiful song that makes walking along those ruined train tracks all the more emotional, as I just imagine looking up at the night sky and the stars when those chimes come in. Almost as if I just want to watch the firewo… fuck wrong track!!! It still harmonizes so beautifully though, and that is perhaps what makes this track stick out to me so much. I carries a sense of beauty, wonderment, emotion, and overall nostalgia not just in the context of the plot, but in how it brings back my own childhood memories. Yes I know the latter doesn’t mean much objectively, but anything that can make me think fondly of a time where I willingly believed I was a boy and was too scared to even think otherwise deserves my praise, so thank you Uematsu-San, for the memories. Hopefully Final Fantasy VII Remake doesn’t completely fuck things up.

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