Thoughts About the Music in the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection

 

I bought the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection a while back, both on Steam and on the Switch.  All six NES/SNES-era Final Fantasy games in one collection, but each game is its own separate game.  But I'm not here to talk about the games, but the presentation within the games and the choice of which version of the music is played.  Each game comes with the original NES/Famicom sound chip soundtrack and a newly arranged version performed by the Japanese Century Symphony Orchestra.  The fact that the entirety of the soundtrack has been performed by a live orchestra is an amazing accomplishment in and of itself, and 14-year-old me would have been absolutely floored with this knowledge.

That being said, I have some thoughts.  Some curmudgeonly thoughts.  Some thoughts from a person born in the last century and last millennium.  

And I should preface that these thoughts are my personal opinion.

I love the orchestrated arrangement of each of the soundtracks.  I've listened to them all.  Final Fantasy I through VI, and they're amazing.  

But I don't have them playing when I'm playing.

For me, there's a kind of mental disconnect.  Something is off when I'm playing the original Final Fantasy that has a palette similar to that of Final Fantasy II (on the SNES), and I hear music performed by a live symphony orchestra.  It's similar to the "demand" from players when the pixel collection first came out in July, 2021, and the only font was a modern-looking one.  A pixelated font was added to the Steam and smartphone releases in a future update when it was released on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch in April 2023.

I did try having the newly orchestrated music playing when I first started playing Final Fantasy in June of 2025 (not my first time playing Final Fantasy, mind you), but I wasn't fond of the orchestrations for the "Chaos Temple," "Matoya's Cavern," "Dungeon," and "Mount Gulg" in the context of the video game.  On their own, I enjoy them significantly more, but they just didn't sit well with me.  So I reverted back to the original MIDI score.

Let me give you a brief example from Final Fantasy III, because it's the one I'm currently playing; brief because the Switch can only record 30-second videos.

That's really it.  I could give side-by-side comparisons to nearly all of the songs in the early games of the franchise, but I won't, for both our sakes.  I love listening to the newly arranaged/orchestrated/recorded music on their own, but when playing, I have to have the original music on.  The instrumentation of the MIDI instruments just sits better with the visuals for me.  The one exception, because of course there's an exception, was "Pandemonium Castle" from Final Fantasy II.  Because spending close to 15 hours in that dungeon, even when using the new sprinting mechanic, I was going to listen to this amazing and completely overblown arrangement instead of the original 27-second song.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

MIDI Week Singles: "Peace of Mind (Save Theme)" - Resident Evil / Bio Hazard (PSX)

 

"Peace of Mind (Save Theme)" from Resident Evil / Bio Hazard on the PlayStation, Windows, SEGA Saturn, Nintendo DS (1996 - 2006)
Composers: Makoto Tomozawa, Akari Kaida, Masami Ueda
Album: Resident Evil Original Soundtrack
Label: Laced Records
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom

As I started to write this article, I was convinced we'd already covered this song before in a MIDI Week Single, but that turned out not to be the case.

I feel like this theme is a quintessential "it's safe here" music cue.  The first time you hear it after stumbling upon an unmarked room on your map, you've already come across the first zombie and several others, and you're likely already starting to calculate how many more zombies you can take out with how much ammunition you have left.  You open a door tucked away behind a flight of stairs, and this music starts.  It's almost like your brain registers the calming tones before your eyes have time to register that there's nothing harmful in this tiny little room.  That small room with its warm orange glow is a haven, the first you find, and that cue, burned into your brain, signals safety away from the horrors of the mansion.

It's a wonderful little piece of music that has received variations throughout the series, at least in the games where safe rooms were utilized.

It's safe here; you can finally rest.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

And Then You Smile, And Hold My Hand

Hot Take: ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve is Playable with a Subpar Graphics Card

This isn't a first impressions article for ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve because I've only played the first three missions in the game for about 3 hours, and easily half of that was just watching replays. The other hour was playing ACE COMBAT Zero: The Belkan War, which is only accessible by launching AC8.  Anyway, this is my hot take about ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve, and I'm sure that it will be a controversial one in the ACE COMBAT community.

Like the title says, ACE COMBAT 8: Wings of Theve is, at least through the first three missions, playable with a subpar graphics card.  So y'all know where I'm coming from, here are the general/basic stats for my laptop:

OS: Windows 11 Pro

Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 7735 U Radeon Graphics

Memory: 32 GB RAM

Graphics Card: AMD Radeon Graphics 995 MB

For reference, the "Minimum Specs" as recommended to play AC8 are as follows (taken copy/paste from the Steam store page):

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system

OS: Windows 11

Processor: Intel Core i7-10700K / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X

Memory: 16 GB RAM

Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060[6 GB] / AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT[8 GB]

DirectX: Version 12

Storage: 150 GB available space

Additional Notes: This game requires an SSD, a hardware ray tracing-enabled graphics card, and DirectX 12 with Shader Model 6.6 or higher. Estimated performance: 1920×1080(Upscale)/30fps with graphics settings at "Low". Framerate might drop in graphics-intensive scenes.

Yeah, that graphics card is the main issue here, and I'm more or less okay with that.  It's not like I'm looking to play the newest high-end AAA video game releases over here.

I tried to run AC8 on the Steam Deck, but I couldn't even get the game to start, so I figured I'd try my laptop.  And you know what?  It worked.  Kind of.

On my laptop, the game automatically lowered all graphical settings to Low, which I fully expected, and I left them alone.  During the first mission, I had the FPS settings at 60 max, but then lowered it to 30 after Cinema scenes maxed out in the mid-to-high 30s.  While playing the campaign (I have zero interest in online play*), I'm anywhere between 13 and 20 fps.  No, that's not at all ideal.  But I was able to play through the first three missions.

I'm including what I recorded natively from Steam while playing, and yes, it's nowhere near as crisp and smooth as it should be, but I'm still really surprised that what I played was as playable as it was.  After a few minutes, I grew accustomed to the lower frame rates and, in all honesty, when you're watching FPS consistently between 15-20, a brief dip down to 11 for a half second is nearly imperceptible, as compared to a drop from 60 down to 10.

Obviously, I'd much rather play this on a system that could handle at least the recommended specs and was playable at a minimum of 30 FPS, but I'm making do with what I have.  I'm really just going to play as long as the game remains playable like this because I very much enjoy this series.  

So the tl;dr for those of y'all who've skipped to the end.  Ideal: no.  Playable: yes.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

*P.S.  Once more for the people in the back.  I don't have any interest in online play, so needing a higher-end system to play online with up to 100 other people in the HUB world or eight other players in a sortie is a non-issue for me.  Even if I had a top-of-the-line desktop, zero interest.

Monthly Update: October, 2026

 

I don't really even know where to start with October.  So let's quickly glance back at September while we ruminate.

I'm really enjoy doing the Game EXP Trilogy series, if only because it's gotten me to play or at least give a damn good, honest try, on older games that have been sitting in my Steam Queue for nigh on a decade or more.  I think Super Meat Boy surprised me the most; I'd written it off as too difficult before I came back to it, but that quickly faded as I started beating more and more stages in World 2.  I already have the next three games queued up for Game EXP Trilogy Part V, but I'm taking a month-long break between articles because a couple of these games will take me longer than the others.  Howlongtobeat.com has one of the games at 21 hours for a completionist run, not that I plan on 100%ing the game, but I find I tend to play slower than someone who's trying to beat the game faster than the average player.  Another game is estimated to take me up to 34 hours, but I don't know if I'll beat it, as it has a mechanic I've never been a fan of and has been something that's stopped me in the past.  The third game might only take me 8 hours, but it's a mind-bending puzzle game, so if I do beat it, I will likely use a walkthrough or a guide.  But anyway, that article will probably go up in the middle of November; then we'll likely take another break and post Part VI in January.

On the Switch OLED, I'm in the final battle in Triangle Strategy, and it's definitely kicking my ass.  Again.  Still.  I'm really tempted to lower the difficulty from Normal down to Easy because of how frustrating the whole stage is.  There are 15 enemy units while you're only allowed to choose 10 from the nearly 20+ that I have in my roster, which seems utterly ridiculous, especially for the final battle.  And then the game does the really annoying mechanic of enemy reserve troops showing up after a certain number of rounds.  So shortly after killing two knights, two archers spawned, and later, three more enemies spawned.  It's definitely crossed my mind that I built up my characters through skill purchases wrong and that I'm just ill-equipped for this beast of a fight.  I've already failed it three times.

Speaking of failing, on the Steam Deck, I'm still playing through Red Dead Redemption, and I might be in the final act on that as I'm doing quests in and around the town of Blackwater.  I've got John Marston's fame up to the point where everyone comments to/at him whenever people walk by, and I am no longer charged for drinks at taverns.  I did run into a bit of trouble the other night when I was outflanked by a bear that was off-screen and just knocked me over and proceeded to use John as a trampoline.  And then I was approached by a person who I only realized too late was affiliated with the bounty I was hunting, and got shotgunned in the face.  And then killed by another pair of bears while trying to rescue a man who was being run down by another bear.  And then I was swarmed by the bounty's bandits.  It took a total of six attempts to capture this bounty, and I ended up killing him because he burst through a door and I didn't have the lasso out, so he, too, got shotgunned multiple times.

On my laptop, I finished lily's world XD, which I will have a Game EXP article for in the next week or two.  That was a really fun and unsettling found laptop-type game, but I'm going to leave it at that so I can cover the rest in the article.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'll Never Forget

P.S.  And a big fucking P.S. at that.  "Promising young men don't rape people."  Burn their world down.