Sunday, January 26, 2014

My oh my. I'm not the #1 blogger in the world, am I?

Yup. It's been like a year since the last time I blogged something here. Maybe I'm too busy procrastinating on Twitter.. Maybe I'm just playing video games TOO DAMN MUCH!! Or maybe I just have a so called "life". Who knows right?? I certainly don't have a clue what happened.

But you.. Yes, YOU! The two people who ever read anything I blogged here!You deserve better. So here goes. My first post in hundreds of days!!

I'm hereby naming this post: The Post Because Why Not.

I kind of wanted to post something about my views on the numerous issues related to human rights right now. But that wouldn't be so great cause, to be frank, I'm not so good at arguing on stuff in english. I'm much much much better at it in my good old french language. Let me just say that I long for the time when humans will only view others as humans.. not as men/women/black people/white people/muslims/christians/etc/etc/etc. Over categorizing is one of the biggest problems society has, me thinks. Everything needs to have a sticker glued on it. Kind of sick of that.

But hey, I said I wouldn't talk about that so here goes!!! Let me just talk about something related to what I tweeted today. Chrono Trigger Symphony!! As you may know, this is the last volume of a series of three that Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra is doing (see http://syntheticorchestra.bandcamp.com/). It is a fully reorchestrated soundtrack of the game. So I kinda decided to talk about Chrono Trigger. And I know I know. I'm talking about games again. SHOCKING!!!

Well, as some of you may know, Chrono Trigger happens to be one of the most important video games ever made. It literally was made by a dream team:  Hironobu Sakaguchi, producer and creator of the Final Fantasy series; Yuji Horii, director and creator of the Dragon Quest series; and Akira Toriyama, famous manga artist and creator of the Dragon Ball series who also worked on Dragon Quest. I mean, are you even seeing this so often nowadays? It was a HUGE achievement.

And this was in 1995, mind you. The goden days of the so called "console wars". The days when consoles didn't had games that were composed of 80% cross platform games. Enix and Squaresoft had been huge competitors for years at that time. Both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had been a huge success. But then, we got on one console, a game created by some of the biggest names in japanese video game history. This was obviously an insanely HUGE game at the time.

What made the game special was arguably it's visual style, it's combat system, it's time traveling mechanics and how it drove the story. Yes, it was an amazing game alright. But I think that it wouldn't have been such a classic now if it's soundtrack didn't sound that amazing. Composed largely by Yasunori Mitsuda (Nobuo Uematsu did ten or so tracks btw), the soundtrack really stood the test of time. It is a soundtrack that has personnality and strong emotionnal themes. You only need to hear a couple of tracks to understand how this soundtrack made history.

Chrono Trigger had everything and the music was awesome. "Memorable" is the best word to describe the game. I played it when I was 17 years of age, I believe. And playing it today is a very different experience. There are moments in the game I find more sad today. Like the moment when Lavos crashes down to the planet, destroying the reptite race (and making it possible for the apes to become the dominant species on the planet). As a grown man playing the game on my DS, I found that moment to be genuinely sad.

I'm gonna end this post with my usual sharing of awesome game music! Here is my little selection of favorite tracks from the soundtrack. What an amazing soundtrack right?? Feel free to hook me up on twitter if you wanna talk about the game!! @sly16bit is the account name you'll be looking for! See ya later folks! (hopefully in less than a year this time around... oh and don't forget to check out Chrono Trigger Symphony here!! )










I hope you enjoyed my little post! 'til next time!

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