Welcome to Modding the Score, a (hopefully) recurring series of articles where I create custom playlists from game score albums. The first article concerns the much celebrated score to Final Fantasy VII Remake. Enjoy!

I’ve long wanted to make an abridged playlist for Final Fantasy VII Remake, if only out of practical reasons– I will rarely have eight-plus hours in my day to listen to the full release that Square Enix put out, and the current, shorter releases (the mini-soundtrack that came with the pre-order and the orchestral suites recording that came some time after the full album was released) just don’t cover enough ground for them to be meaningful to me.

Making playlists for myself (and then more recently for fellow film/TV/game music fans) is something I’ve been doing for a long time, and when I finally launched this site, one of my first thoughts was whether to share my current and future playlists with the larger audience that might read this would be worth it. Eventually my answer was yes, so here we are.

A labor of love, here’s my custom playlist for Final Fantasy VII Remake. Stay after the jump if you’re interested to know the process behind its creation.

TRACKLIST:
1. The Prelude – Reunion
2. Midgar, City of Mako
3. Bombing Mission
4. Shinra’s Theme
5. Main Theme of FFVII – Nightfall in the Undercity
6. Chance Meeting in Sector 8
7. Let the Battles Begin! – Break Through
8. Tifa’s Theme – Seventh Heaven
9. Getaway
10. Jessie’s Theme
11. On Our Way
12. The Airbuster
13. Flowers Blooming in the Church
14. Main Theme of FFVII – Sector 7 Undercity
15. Crab Warden
16. J-E-N-O-V-A – Quickening
17. Aerith and Marlene – A Familiar Flower
18. Daughter’s Farewell
19. Rufus Shinra
20. Aerith’s Theme – Home Again
21. Midgar Expressway
22. A Broken World
23. Arbiter of Fate – Rebirth
24. Arbiter of Fate – Singularity
25. I’m Waiting, Cloud
26. One-Winged Angel – Rebirth
27. Credits

Behind The Scenes

If you’re still around, let me walk you through the process of how I assembled the playlist.

One of the very first things I did when I set out to do this, was put myself a simple set of rules to target, as a way of picturing a structure for it right at the beginning. These were:

1. The playlist opens with The Prelude, the title cue and Bombing Mission. There’s no way that that doesn’t happen.
2. It has to be under two hours long.
3. It will feature NO tracks with fade-outs. This is mostly out of the principle that I hate tracks fading out instead of having proper endings.
4. The playlist ends with One-Winged Angel – Rebirth and the Credits track. It’s too good an ending not to have it.

I’m happy to report that only half of those rules came to apply to the final version. The first iteration was a playlist with some pretty good music, but stripped of many of the things that made Final Fantasy VII Remake’s score so special. For starters, many of the re-arrangements of original FFVII music by Nobuo Uematsu were missing because they faded out at the end, instead featuring reworkings of those original ideas but still weren’t quite the thing (Bombing Mission was replaced with Getaway, Tifa’s theme and the main theme were almost entirely absent). Many of my favorite musical moments from the score were also missing because of fade-outs (On Our Way is one of my favorite OG melodies and it wasn’t in there).

It was a disaster that I naively thought I could fix. For the several following iterations, in fact, I thought that I was doing a pretty good job at mitigating the impact of so many important things missing from the playlist. Eventually, of course, I realized that I just couldn’t have a playlist of highlights… that didn’t feature many of the highlights. So I ended up caving in, and added in everything that I forced myself to cut because of fade-outs.

That solved many of the issues, but then created others, mostly stemming from the fact that the fade-outs messed with the natural flow of the music. I’ll get to that in a little bit.

Initially, I (also naively) added all of the boss tracks into the playlist. Back when there were no tracks with fade-outs, this barely crossed the two-hour mark, but the downside of that was that it was overloaded with action music, and in FFVIIR, that means insanely complicated and overbearingly loud music that is always going at 1000%. On top of that, when I added the tracks with fade-outs back, the runtime increased much more. It very quickly became unsustainable, so I naturally started cutting boss tracks.

Lesser bosses like Abzu and Scorpion Sentinel weren’t that big a deal because their music were reworkings of Uematsu music from the original game; a similar process made me cut the first of the Arbiter of Fate tracks, since much of what was in there is featured in the following two. Harder cuts came in the form of the Reno fight in Sector 5, the Roche chase in Sector 4, the fight on the Pillar, the Hell House and Ghoul; Roche and Ghoul were particularly painful, since they’re among the rare bosses in the game scored by entirely new music.

Another thing to consider was just how much I wanted to represent the entirety of FFVIIR’s tonal spectrum. The standard sound of the music is sophisticated orchestral music, but much of the new material ranges from jazz, funk and rock to electropop, dance and industrial music. To be fair, it’s not particularly novel for Japanese video game scores to cover a lot of ground in musical genres (in fact, the original FFVII did so too, to a much lesser degree), but it represented a problem of whether or not I wanted the playlist to be representative of every single musical genre that the score touches.

In the end, I decided against this, because while that works in an eight-hour score that has plenty of time to explore these wildly different musical genres in depth, this playlist was intended to be only a fraction of that time, and there was a serious risk of it feeling severely schizophrenic and hard to listen to. So further cuts were made. Tracks like Johnny’s Theme or Scarlet’s Theme, which explore more jazzy sounds, and the more modern tracks for the highway chase before the ending, or for places like Wall Market were removed from the more recent iterations.

You might have realized by now how heavily the playlist relies on Uematsu’s original music and reworkings of it by Hamauzu, Suzuki and their team. This is precisely to maintain cohesiveness. I took advantage of the fact that Uematsu’s original themes form the majority of the thematic narrative in the score.

Since it was also never my intention to be comprehensive with this playlist, this is why the final version is missing minor thematic ideas from the score, like the aforementioned Johnny and Scarlet’s themes, but also Avalanche’s theme and, most notably, the title song that Uematsu wrote exclusively for this remake, Hollow. There was simply not a lot of room for all of them to fit in.

I ended up with pretty much the same tracks that made it to the final version, but in chronological order, as they appear on the album. The next issue was pacing and flow; while there are many breathing moments in-between the gigantic boss fights in the game, there was significantly less time on the playlist in-between them, and so I had to figure out a way not to exhaust listeners before the end.

This was a greater issue in the second half of the playlist, since it concentrated many later-game boss fights in quick succession. J-E-N-O-V-A – Quickening, Rufus Shinra, the Arbiter of Fate tracks and One-Winged Angel – Rebirth virtually played back-to-back. It wasn’t hard for me to decide to shuffle tracks around to create a better listening experience, as long as the opening and ending tracks stayed the same.

At first, this shuffling placed Jenova and Rufus’s boss tracks somewhere before the middle point of the playlist, while The Airbuster was moved to the end. There was still a lingering issue with the fade-out tracks, which was that their ordering was causing a bit of whiplash, after they faded to silence, a boss track would explode into being and it was jarring to hear when it was all put together.

An even greater problem was that the constant shifting of tracks was stripping the score of any sense of structure as a whole. I often aim to give an overall structure to the playlists I assemble, even if it’s not one based around the narrative of the score itself. This one had none, it was just a bunch of tracks listed in an arbitrary order that was mildly listenable.

A breakthrough that solved this problem and mitigated the whiplash caused by the fade-out tracks was taking The Airbuster and placing it as a sort of milestone within the playlist. Up to the point where The Airbuster exists in the playlist, the only track heavily reliant on electronics is Shinra’s Theme, and even then, it’s still deeply melodic and conventional. Since everything else is much more orchestral and conventional, introducing The Airbuster as the first proper boss track felt like blasting the doors open for what the score can do beyond just orchestral goodness.

After that, Jenova’s synth cascades or Rufus Shinra’s drum sequencing didn’t feel jarringly out of place. A happy coincidence of this is that I was able to place most of the fade-out tracks before The Airbuster even happens, which makes the second half of the playlist flow a lot better than the first.

The much better sequencing of tracks gave me more confidence to bring back a track that I had cut previously because it was much more unconventional than the other action tracks and thus felt like it didn’t fit with the tone– Midgar Expressway. Other than being an absolutely kickass boss track, it also turned out to be really helpful in paying off several of the larger thematic ideas of the score.

While Rufus Shinra was a fantastic climax of the Shinra theme and the mini-boss music from the original (which is thoroughly explored in The Airbuster), it felt weird for the playlist to just transition into the Whispers theme and Sephiroth’s music for the final action moments, neither of which had even been properly introduced into the playlist up to that point. I felt like I needed one more bit of previously-introduced material to serve as a pay-off before transitioning to the finale. Midgar Expressway fits the bill in every way, being an extensive treatment of the Bombing Mission music and Let the Battles Begin! It even features a bit of The Airbuster music in it for good measure, all embellished in superb synthwork and energetic electric guitars.

Along with Midgar Expressway, I also wanted to add Hell House back into the playlist, but then found myself in the unfortunate situation of having nowhere to put it. The best place I could find it was replacing Crab Warden, but because that track serves as a prelude of sorts to Jenova’s track, fitting Hell House there made them both too overwhelming. Alas, Hell House had to remain cut.

The last (and very late) editing done to it was the addition of I’m Waiting, Cloud between the penultimate and antepenultimate tracks. This cue scores an in-game cutscene that transitions the end of the final boss battle to the secret final boss battle of the game (spoilers!), and its inclusion was simply a way to create a smoother transition from the grandiose but relatively subdued Arbiter of Fate – Singularity to the obscenely explosive One-Winged Angel – Rebirth.

The final result was that the playlist ended up running at 2:21 hours, but because I was so happy with the result, I honestly wasn’t concerned with running 21 minutes more than planned.

After much iteration and hair-splitting, the final result arrived, which is what you’re seeing now. It turns out that cramming the highlights of an eight-hour score into a two-hour presentation was harder than I could have ever expected, which is honestly a testament to the quality of the music written for FFVIIR. There’s just so much great music in it.

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FINAL FANTASY VII REMAKE
Lead composers & arrangers: Masashi Hamauzu & Mitsuto Suzuki
Additional music by Shotaro Shima, Yoshitaka Suzuki, Yoshinori Nakamura, Tadayoshi Makino, Yasunori Nishiki, Keiki Kobayashi, Takafumi Imamura & Daiki Ishikawa
Original Final Fantasy VII music by Nobuo Uematsu
Additional arrangements by Naoyuki Honzawa, Kengo Tokusashi, Tsuyoshi Sekito, Ayumu Murai, Hiroko Sebu, Sachiko Miyano, Yuichi Tsuchiya, Masanori Akita, Miki Fujimoto, Sakiko Sakuragi & Hydra
Orchestrations by Shotaro Shima, Yoshitaka Suzuki, Yoshinori Nakamura, Sachiko Miyano & Yasunori Nishiki
“Hollow” Theme Song composed by Nobuo Uematsu & Kazushige Nojima; performed by Yosh