22-track soundtrack and accompanying sheet music album.
“really capture[s] the ‘heart’ of classic JRPGs”
(review on itch.io)
soundtrack
Writing RPG music and themes has always been one of my favourite things — the music of Final Fantasy VII is one of the things that got me back into composing in a big way, as a teenager.
INFINITY CRYSTAL: Awakening (named in reference to all those crystals you have to find/collect/restore in order to save the world in games) is a short but plausibly complete soundtrack for a classic, Final Fantasy-style RPG. This was a personal project in April-May 2020 under lockdown. My aim and challenge was to cover all the essential elements in this kind of game – battles, locations, characters, etc. It’s a soundtrack rather than just a collection of pieces, with themes and motifs shared between tracks.
The music is available to download on bandcamp and itch.io, either for listening or for use in games, with seamless looping versions of the tracks provided.
The pieces are all more or less inspired by Final Fantasy and Nobuo Uematsu, but not to the degree of pastiche that my FFVII Remake Demakes are for instance. Some ideas and especially harmonies are definitely influenced, but have been absorbed into my own musical language long since. I wanted the soundset to somewhere between “retro” and “realistic”. I think hyper-realism and complexity isn’t really suitable or needed for this sort of highly melodic, linear looping game music, nor for the 16-bit graphics it could potentially be paired with on RPGmaker (etc) projects. On the other hand, I wasn’t going for a chiptune sound or a sound that evoked any era or system in particular – maybe just “PS1 or 2, ish” or “Final Fantasy VII through X”. So most of the sounds you hear on these tracks are from East West’s Goliath, and specifically the General Midi set.
piano album
An accompanying complete set of piano transcriptions of the soundtrack pieces. Free pdf download (gumroad)
Playing game music on piano was another key way I got to know it and got into the genre, so I kind of had to make an “official” piano OST to go alongside my Infinity Crystal project… I also wrote most of these pieces at the piano in the first place – game music pieces, especially of this genre, should stand melodically/memorably on their own.
Inspired by the DoReMi publications of Final Fantasy music, these are fairly literal piano versions of the pieces, with minimal performance directions. Most are of moderate difficulty, with some of the battle themes a little more challenging.
credits
Cover artwork by Eugene Frost