This year, the Final Fantasy VII remake was announced as a real, actually going to happen thing, and lo, did the people rejoice. I decided to play it for the first time in well over a decade, to see if it lived up in any way to my lofty childhood/teenage memories. It was, in all honesty, a mixed bag. In short it was easier than I remembered, more tonally disparate than I was able to understand as a youngster, and wonkier in many other ways: those hideous mini game mechanics made my head shudder. The one thing that anchored it to my grand memories was the story - not its characters - and the counterpoint that the superlative music formed to that.
Before I carry on, I’ll point out that I’m working off Michel Chion’s idea of musical counterpoint - the notion that earlier film theorists rather wrong headedly adapted the word ‘counterpoint’ when they actually meant ‘dissonant harmony’. For Chion, the former term arranges music in parallel with the visual, the latter represents the juxtaposition between image and sound. Nobuo Uematsu’s virtuoso score form such a unique and deep counterpoint to the themes and visuals in FFVII, that it ensures it will forever stand the test of time. It works so well in fact, that I think the all the missals of praise directed towards the relevance and poignancy of the game can almost be entirely laid to rest at the feet of these compositions.
