Part 90: Afterword

Chapter 90: Afterword


So of course everyone knows Melodies of Life.


It's rather ubiquitous, and has had many, many iterations.


No, like, seriously, I'm not kidding.


By far, though, my favorite one has got to be the 20020220 recording.


I mean, it's literally the same sheet music as from, say, Distant Worlds or Tour de Japon, but I think 20020220 is the best recording of it. The rest either have too high tempo, or a shitty singer, or whatever other personal nitpick I've got on it.


I think there's also a Karaoke Version without any singing that came on Melodies of Life single. That one also came with a song called Galway Sky, which has nothing to do with this song.


Let's see, what else about this song... well, obviously there's the singer, Emiko Shiratori.


I only learned this about a year ago when I was scouring the internet for the hundredth time in seven years for the 1990 Moomins soundtrack, but apparently her husband, Sumio Shiratori, was the composer for that show.


Obviously he brings in his wife because it's cheaper than hiring another singer.





She also narrates the drama parts of the OST, but I've never seen the original Japanese episodes, so I couldn't say if she actually narrated the series as well.


Hmmmmmm


Oh, yeah, the LP Effect.


At the end of Star Ocean 2, I realized even more how shit its story is. But I mean, you can't completely hate that game if only because it's self-aware.


Well, when Enix redid it, it lost its self-awareness and just ended at "horrible" instead of circling back around to "awesome."


But FF9?


Shit, I think I appreciate it more now.


protip: hironobu sakaguchi is a bro but fuck damn never ever ever ever ever let him write lyrics


I mean, it's one thing to play through a game and experience it at your own pace


--not to say that I didn't obviously experience this game at my own very leisurely pace at times during this LP--


but when you LP it, at least in screenshot format, you go through all the images you grabbed with a fine-toothed comb. Some stuff you definitely wanna keep, but in FF9's case, there's just so much you wanna keep! But then, this LP would've been nearly 20,000 images long. It's probably close to six or seven thousand anyway, to be honest.


Not a chump localizer to be seen


But yeah, you stare down all these setting materials and all this meat that makes the world, well, a world, you see the game script and you notice that it's not quite so disjointed as some naysayers claim.


You see a lot of visual symbolism and foreshadowing that you normally miss, too. Why do you miss it when you're playing? Because it's a goddamn video game, you just don't address these damn things with long-term memory, or critically like you would with literature.


So yeah. Again, folks who designed this game don't read this thread, and I'm sure they never will. But just know--not that you can--that I see the work that went into this. It was your guys' dream. I cherish and respect that.


In the very beginning of this LP, I said some shit about a "dream within a dream according to Nobuo Uematsu." This was from some post-concert interview in continental Europe.


Shit, I wanna say it's from '02 or '03 at the latest. But basically he says, "Back in the day, you had these tiny little teams that would do great things, and we could communicate our dreams to each other; we were making dreams. But with these huge production teams, you lose sight of that dream because you're just trying to make sure everyone gets his paycheck." So in a way, you could say that a video game is a dream.


But that dream gets diluted when there are too many hands at the stove. And then a CEO comes around and it's not about making dreams anymore. Once they show up, everything becomes about the income. Education becomes a business; medicine becomes a business; storybooks become a business; making video games becomes a business. It's no longer about making dreams. Now, it's just about making money, and it shows.


And y'know, on the flip side, you have the indie market. And you can still get dreamers. Pixel's a dreamer.


The guys who made Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers, though? iOS folks? Games are certainly fun, they're sort of inspired, but hell, that's no dream. Nothin' to tell, nothin' to make folks think. It's a by-the-book payday.


I wanna write picture books. Maybe some other stuff, but mostly picture books. Some folks are shallow, say there's nothing to be had there, no money, no glory. But it's a dream.


Glory and wealth are irrelevant, speaking in those terms.


I mean, I look up to these guys, Uematsu and Sakaguchi, the fellas nobody ever heard of before who stuck it out and slew the enemy against all odds.


If a shot in the dark--forget the riches, never mind the bitches--was good enough for them, it damn well better be good enough for a nobody like me, too.


Oh, that's right, I promised you guys something: what the fuck was up with those names?


Well, right up until that whole PAKI PAKI PAKI PAKI PAKI shitstorm, we were going with the Hawaiian versions of the names I used last time I played this game back in '08.

But things, y'know, they don't always pan out the way you intended. Particularly not, sometimes. So Paki for Pascal became Makakao, and I was like, "I can never remember the name I give to Freya, so let's go with Hawaiian for rat, I'm not feeling particularly creative." And someone requested an Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, and that wasn't a bad idea, so I delivered. I always called Iz "Paprika" before now, no clue why.

Everything else? Stayed the same, whether it was actually originally Hawaiian like Huihui or Kawelo, or not. I just kept Holly in English because shit, the Hawaiian version of it--Hali--sounds pretty much the same and every time I looked at it, I thought of pretty much any English word with the first letters hali-. Like halitosis.

In the end, the big secret is just that it was me and folks I know. But when it's in Hawaiian, well, that gets diluted and you can't tell anymore, and it's no longer "what are these stupid names what a fuckin' goon," it becomes "hey these Hawaiian names are pretty maika'i." That thing Shigesato Itoi said, etc. And that's what it's about, isn't it.


You've all been fantastic listeners. Or readers, or whatever you call yourselves. Without you, I'm just a fella who takes screenshots of video games and writes about them for himself, and that's a really quite sad mental image. This is nothing without you guys.

There were good times, there were sparse times, there were argumentative times, there were troll times, there were informative times, and there were even folks gettin' probated times! But it turned out all right in the end, didn't it.

So I dunno. Thank me for writing this? No; thank you for reading it. Much mahalos to you guys. Hope you guys enjoyed it. And an extra-special thanks to Concordat for picking out that image of Huihui--I was thinking "don't caption it," I consulted my literature buddy who said, "don't caption it" and in the end, it managed to stand out without being singled out, like I hoped. Now then, what was it that Working Designs always used to say...?

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