Without a doubt, Final Fantasy VII brought me into the JRPG fold in a very big way. It wasn’t that I hadn’t played an RPG before that point, but that it was like a perfect storm of my age, timing, and awareness. As I have written many times before, my awareness of all things Japan came from a single Christmas just after the release of Final Fantasy VII, where my cousin hit me with the origin of Dragon Ball, let me read his downloaded copy of Akira, and capped it all off with letting me play the intro to Final Fantasy VII. If that isn’t a trifecta, I don’t know what is. But this isn’t really about Final Fantasy VII, but rather the dark, angsty horse Final Fantasy VIII, the place where my true love lies. And maybe even more strangely, this is about a single song on what I believe to be the strongest contender for best soundtrack of the entire franchise. This is about the overworld theme “Blue Fields” and how it might be composer Nobuo Uematsu’s strongest musical thesis combining the themes of the game with the characters we play as. In other words, it’s the perfect translation of the game into music.

“What the hell are you talking about?”, I can already hear you saying. But I know you already are aware that musical themes help create emotional depth with the content we are engaged in, and not only that, whether we know it or not, we are already well versed in the language of music. Certain notes can make us happy and others sad. Myself, I don’t even have any real credentials to be talking to you about this with any great certainty, and yet I can feel within myself that my original thesis is true. “Blue Fields” is a perfect example of a song that can define your relationship with this particular game and that across the entire Final Fantasy franchise, it does so better than any other. Before I send you on a journey to go and listen to the song, first I want you to conjure everything you remember about the characters, plot, and themes of Final Fantasy VIII. Did it make an impact on you? It was advertised primarily as a kind of adventure story with a romance attached or a romance with an adventure attached. It wasn’t entirely clear to American audiences that it would be about kids in a mercenary school. What even is that? Maybe that was just my take. It was 1999 and I was still very new to the world of localization and my understanding of Japanese culture was very shallow. Never the less, this song still carries the motifs we are about to discuss and that maybe now after 25 years it works even better. Take a listen.

The first time you hear this song is actually pretty far removed from the opening of the game. Instead you are served up an opening cinematic that is more of a television advertisement than a straightforward opening. In a way, it may actually be story related. In the immediate aftermath, Squall is in a battle with Seifer, which is meant to be a training exercise that ends up injuring both of them. Actually, I am not entirely sure if Seifer is physically hurt, but maybe his pride was injured? Anyway, you wake up in the hospital, meet with your teacher, go to class, run into Selphie, do a quick tour of the campus, and then finally meet up with your teacher to engage in the final part of your exam. This is the first time you will hear this song, when you leave the campus with your teacher. If you are casually playing, this might be about an hour. In that time, we establish that Squall is a bit cold and that he sees many of his responsibilities to others as a chore. The world to him is, at best, blue. 

Throughout the game, we almost exclusively not only see the world through Squall’s point of view, but we hear his thoughts (and sometimes the thoughts of others THROUGH him, but lets put that to the side for now). In any case, this really narrows our experience by comparison to other Final Fantasy properties. Its not as if there is a narrator or other framing device in these games, but somehow that is what “Blue Fields” becomes. If you listen to the other Playstation 1 games in this series, you will also notice that the overworld theme is meant to bring together all of the disparate locations the story will take us to. But because FF8 is focused through Squall, we have this narrowing that allows us to focus all of our attention to this one plight. His inner hesitation and disconnectedness. 

In Final Fantasy VII, the overworld theme is the theme of the entire game. It so encompasses our characters that it must define all of them. In Final Fantasy IX, we are met with a song that implies exploration and the romance of discovery. But with Final Fantasy VIII, we are met with a song that sees the world in shades of blue; that sees the world as a chore to swim through. It’s aimless and wanting. Squall and his companions are all missing their memories and searching for the truth in a world that has been fractured by witches and time compression. Don’t worry about that last sentence, this story is also the least coherent in the catalog. It tries to marry maybe a bit too many amorphous ideas with a terrain that was entirely new to the franchise. In fact, as an aside, Final Fantasy has not done so well every time they try to tell a story in a more sci-fi bent locale. 

So what really made me think of this? Why do I feel so connected to a song for a game that may not, even by the sum of its parts, be one of the greats in the franchise? I think its because of who I was when it came out. I think it is also that it’s such a lonely game, with a romance that doesn’t quite live up to its promise, almost exactly like what happens to you at their highschool-like age. And I think that even Nobuo Uematsu knows the importance of this song as it is also the opening song to the piano collection album of songs. I have been listening to this song to go to sleep for years. Take a listen.

In reality, it is this version that really cemented this feeling for me. You can hear the heart and soul of the game in this song. It’s clearer than any rendition of any other song in the franchise. The wandering. The loneliness, even in a crowd. The weight of responsibility. This song is like an exercise in trying to lift all of that, putting it on your shoulders and carrying on. You can hear the players fingers wander across the keys, sometimes plodding and other times light. With each key plonk, we are pulled further into what will become the theme of the game as a whole, filtered entirely through Squall (and whoever else is in his head). And really, its as simple as that. The song is so good at what it does exactly because its focus is clearer than any other in the franchise. I can’t say for certain that this was created by any one person with that in mind. Each of these games have anywhere from 20 to 50 songs across the entire game, and that is quite a bit to compose. But I do think they realize certain songs are anchors, like the overworld or battle songs. And here, they just happened to hit the bullseye.

I can’t help but feel like I said a whole lot but told you absolutely nothing. This was a real exercise for me, trying to describe the relationship two mediums can have with each other; the game and its music. Independently, I have listened to this music longer than I have played the game, and across all of the games, the Final Fantasy VIII soundtrack is the one I come back to most often. It might be just a feeling, but “Blue Fields” really resonated with me in ways that words can’t seem to describe the way I would like. Maybe it’s about the journey and not the destination.