Why Final Fantasy VII’s Music Still Has a Place in My Heart

Final Fantasy VII came out when I was about seven, and it wasn’t my game. It belonged to my older brother. I played it anyway, and I kept starting over from a new save, again and again. Four of the songs I care about most are tied up with that memory.

Seven of Nobuo Uematsu’s tracks from the original 1997 score have a hold on me, each for a different reason.

The four from those restarts are Opening — Bombing Mission, Hurry!, Let the Battles Begin! and Fight On! When I think about being a little kid on my brother’s game, starting from the top one more time, these are the songs that come with it.

Two of those four are battle themes, and the battle music is its own category for me. All of it moves me, probably harder than most songs I’ve heard anywhere, game or not. That’s a strange thing to say about music whose job is to play under a fight. Battle themes in a role-playing game come around again and again, so they have to survive repetition in a way a one-off cutscene song never does. Let the Battles Begin! and Fight On! survive it, and then some.

Costa del Sol is a different animal. It’s a beach scene and a chill atmosphere rolled into one song, and it’s my dream place. The destination and the music both hit you like a dream. To me the track is hypnotic and calming, and somehow a little suspicious, like the town is a touch too relaxed to be completely trustworthy. But mostly it’s a huge, positive vibe. To my ear it has strong bossa nova energy, the kind of music you’d want drifting out of a beach bar while you do nothing in particular for the rest of the afternoon.

I want to retire there. I mean the Costa del Sol in the game, to be clear, which makes this a retirement plan with no address. Still, why would I ever want to leave? Part of me keeps asking whether it’s a real place, and that’s what a great destination does to you. You show up, the music starts, and the question of where you’d spend the rest of your life seems settled.

The Oppressed works on me in a completely different way. It’s an early song in the game, and it always felt a bit like home. It pulled me in. Midgar was a whole new world, and somehow it felt familiar at the same time. Some of that is imagination. The game gives you the music and the setting, and your own head fills in the rest of the people living there.

I grew up somewhat middle class. I was never poor, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But for some reason I felt for the people living in that part of the game, and The Oppressed is a big part of why. The song sets the scene before anyone explains anything. You hear it and you get a sense of what life is like down there, and you start caring about the place before you’ve done much in it. For an early track, that’s a lot of work for one piece of music to do.

Then there’s Tifa’s Theme. Of all seven, it’s the one that hits me hardest emotionally. That’s a high bar, because I’ve already said the battle music moves me harder than most songs, and Tifa’s Theme still gets further in.