The Black Mages

A couple months ago I started on a bit of a Final Fantasy music binge. I'd search YouTube for random playlists of music from the games and listen to hours on end while doing other things on the computer. (Including Final Fantasy Legend II since the music quality from my emulator was giving me a headache.)

One thing I kept noticing every now and then were songs that were covers of iconic Final Fantasy music. Now, I hate covers in general. I find they often butcher the songs. Some of the covers popping up in these playlists were like that but I kept running into covers that were actually pretty awesome. I started paying attention to who was doing the covers I liked and it turned out they were all from the same band: The Black Mages. This prompted me to do some Googling about them...

It turns out one guy (Nobuo Uematsu) was the composer for practically every Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy I, II, Legend, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and XIV seem to be solely done by him. He also had a hand in Legend II, X, XI, and XII. And a whole ton of other games on top of that. To put it mildly, he is the man.

Two other composers at Square-Enix got together to do the music for a wrestling game and decided to put a rock spin on it. They liked how the rock spin turned out and started experimenting with doing other things in a rocking way. The toyed around with redoing some of Nobuo's Final Fantasy stuff as rock songs and got his approval. They convinced him to join them in a rock concert of some of those songs and had a great time. They ended up forming a band (The Black Mages) which went on to release three albums full of redone Final Fantasy songs. And it's all awesome! I guess covers can be good when it's the original artist redoing them?

I just beat The Four Fiends in my Final Fantasy IV game and the music in that fight is fantastic. The redone music by The Black Mages is also pretty great. Both versions are linked below, check them out!