Final Fantasy XIII - Blinded By Light | Reacting To Video Game Music! 

Not to diminish anything about Masashi Hamauzu (he's great) but when you said "the composer" it implies you think he is the chief composer of the FF13 trilogy? FF13-2 was a collaboration (so was 13-3 and Hamauzu has less credits there), including Naoshi Mizuta, and Mitsuto Suzuki. Naoshi had the lions share of new tracks in 13-2 and wrote music for most of the main characters and scenarios (Serah, Noel, Caius etc) Hamauzu is mainly credited because of his music in FF13 being reused in 13-2 and 13-3. Mizuta also wrote most of the music in FF11. I think Nobuo contributed a lot to the base game, but everything past the base game was purely by Naoshi Mizuta, iirc

I have the platinum for all 3 games and don't regret one second of it. The Pokemon crap in part 2 was pretty mid and I still don't like.Caius, but Noel was genuinely one of the best male leads in ages.

I legitmately have not seen ANY FFXIII hate online at all in the past ~5 years. It's exclusively comments like yours that say the hate is unwarranted and the game is underrated. Well, after hating the game initially, and then seeing this new wave of positivity for it, I went back and revisited it. The game fucking sucks. The "soulless corridor simulator" critiques that people levied against the game on release still hold true. I finished the game on launch and disliked it, and will never go back to it. I'm not trying to yuck your yum here, I'm just trying to offer what I now view as the underrepresented viewpoint - that the game is *severely* flawed and the strongpoints of visuals, musical composition, and character design are all but wasted on that husk of a game with that borderline offensive storyline. As gimped as XV was with its story, XIII is somehow just as gimped. My love for games comes from character drama, storylines, and gameplay. XIII lacked all three. XIII did however have excellent visuals and music, as stated earlier. It just depends on what you prioritize as a gamer. I will say that building different rosters of teams and having to switch between them did get more fun in later boss fights, but we are talking about, like, 30+ hours in before the fights get fun, and the journey to get to those fights are never fun, it's just a slog of a straight line of constant nonstop encounters

@@_badmadsadlad you haven't looked for very hard then

@@_badmadsadlad Then you haven't looked enough. There are a ton of hate still.

My favorite series right after 7. Think i’m the only one with that top 2 lol. 13 has a beautiful dynamic world. Esch installation brought us to a new world and every characters had good growth and you could relate to them

It’s as much a ramrod railroad as 10. Yet for some reason 10 gets massive praise when 13 gets slammed. Hope and Snow are awful, but there are wonky characters in all FF games. The 13 story wasn’t the best, but it’s not worse than 8 or 12.

I haven't owned Playstations up until the PS4, so i was more than happy when they announced FFXIII would be coming out for the X-Box 360, because up until that time, i had only played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Which i loved, dearly, it's still one of my fav games ever, but it wasn't a main entry to the series, of course. Then XIII came out and i barely made it six or seven hours into the game or so before i dropped it, because i couldn't stand it at all... i'll admit thought, the music is great, the graphics were, too, and i really like Lightning. I am glad though that my next foray into the series were XIV and VII Remake, they definitely salvaged my bad first experiences with the main series...

@@BlakeAustin2011 Nah, 13 is bashed hard because it's a tragedy novel in ways that just don't mesh well as a videogame. If it was a book, it probably wouldn't feel as poignant as it does. Ultimately the gameplay and the story just don't mesh together particularly well, so the hallways feel like more of a chore. But frankly the comparison to 10 is good, and more than that, a good point can be made towards a lot of other FF titles! The problem is the presentation of the gameplay, mixed with a plot that's a downer for like 80% of the game, with a gameplay that's deceptively complex but doesn't open up to that control until way way way later into the game... ultimately it feels like a drag in several levels. I dunno, I love it and hate it at the same time. It's got potential, but it's got its interesting points. ...XIII-2? Lightning Returns? _No, silly, there was only one FF13 game._ q^q

I dunno. I always found the music in FF13 to be a bit... repetitive. It seems like there were only 2 or 3 tracks they played at 3 or 4 tempos in 5 or 6 styles. his reaction 'oh, its already looped' is basically my reaction to most of the music unfortunately.

@@BlakeAustin2011 my issue is that ff13s linearity is very poorly masked, not that it's linear. There are lots of things and side quests to do in FFX. You can go back to almost every area eventually and do something different there , you can customize your weapon and accessories with almost every status element in the game, the sphere grid allows for characters to take on any skill with some planning, there are secret summons out of the way of the main plot you can completely miss etc With ff13 it's almost the complete opposite. The crystarium is locked by story progression on a specific track, so you can't grind or decide anything specific, all moves are specific to the character via class even when you open up all the class types. Most of the game railroads you into not having your whole team available for team usage so your forced to play in the way the characters available dictate. There is not even an illusion of exploration as all the shops that would otherwise be in towns which also don't exist are confined to a menu in the save station, NPCs in general are otherwise completely non existent outside of like 1 area in the game and even then you cant directly talk with them. Even inside the shops all your doing is buying selling and breaking down generic scrap to funnel into getting your weapon to max damage rather than the freedom to customize your load out further. That leaves many people with the sense that all your doing is running from story cutscene to story cutscene with nothing in between. Even when granpulse opens up all your doing is hunting monsters. The surface level appearance of "linearity" may be there but how both games execute is completely different.

Can confirm

The one from XIII-2 is a banger

I’ve never found any Final Fantasy battle theme to be boring… Given that I tended to grind a bunch, I’d say that they can’t be that bad… Then again, I am easily amused and don’t get annoyed with many things as much as others >_>; Personally, I probably prefer the FF7 battle theme most… Man with the Machine Gun from FF8 is always a joy… I don’t know if I’d say this is one of the best, necessarily, but then you have two or three that are amazing, then everything else is pretty great lol… Although, if you include boss battles, I’d say this fails off pretty sharply…. Still pretty good either way

For one of the best games in the series too

​@@KitsyX Final Fantasy X Battle Theme is immensely boring. A fantastic game with fantastic soundtrack,but main battle theme is immensely boring.

​@@GameslordXYI heavily disagree with that, but it's your opinion. I personally love all the battle themes. The only one that gets slightly annoying for me is maybe FF1, and that's only because it's so short

@@GameslordXY You're entitled to your opinion, but just to provide a counter opinion for people who haven't listened to it yet, I have to say I strongly disagree. FFXs Battle Theme is fantastic on a melodic level, shifts and changes in style throughout, and even has a number of cool time signature changes. As a musician, I'm in awe of how they composed it. I also just re-listened to it because you had me doubting myself, but nope, it's still just as fantastic as I remember. It reminded me of how addicting it was to hear the battle theme and the little post battle jingle - up there with FF7's battle and jingle. I used to love FF9 and FF10 battles so much and I think it's largely down to their battle themes.

Not even the best track on the ost, it's popular because most people didn't play the game long enough to hear the other bangers, but it is the main battle theme, so🤷🏾

Is that true ? What about sabers edge?

It gets a lot of unwarranted hate of it being a corridor simulator yet ffX is just as much a corridor simulator as 13 is take off those rose tinted glasses and look at 10 objectively and 10 has exactly the same style maps

As usual FF13 is a fantastic game but absolutely did not live up to the hype that every FF game gets.

@@christopherstanley9997 ffx is pretty linear, but ff13 is on a whole other level. Also the nature of how FFX's story is told makes it work in its favor.

@@JoseOrtiz-bx3vl They have near equal linearity. When FFXIII opens up on Gran Pulse, it begins to remind me more of FFXII, especially with the hunts. Although I remember being overwhelmed by it the first time through. What works in FFX's favor is the ability to travel back to old areas and the addition of towns and many more NPC's to interact with. FFXIII didn't have much of that, and I think it just felt odd to people.

The monster placement as well as the thin corridors practically made it impossible to avoid combat. The other divisive thing was how XIII’s story is told. It required datalogue reading to understand. X’s story kept you engaged the whole way through.

Underrated? It's like the most unanimously praised aspect of it with Blinded By Light being the most popular.

@@wulf8889 is it? I only ever hear people talking trash about 13 with no mention to the music. I guess in my circles.

He is certainly overlooked by a lot of fans imo. I love his work in FF13 and especially his contributions to FFX, which is one of my favorite soundtracks in all of media.

Final Fantasy games have made alot of missteps in recent years, but thei music is always great

Not the main musical director for Remake, just one of the main composers alongside Mitsuto Suzuki. Keiji Kawamori would be the music director/supervisor. He's also not the main composer anymore in XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, and the games' composition is shared more equally with Naoshi Mizuta and Suzuki. So similar to his role in FFX as a co-composer. Nevertheless, he's one of my favourite composers.

Naoshi Mizuta was the main composer in FF13-2 (as well as another composer that is rarely mentioned). He wrote music for the main characters and the main scenarios, and actually numerically has the most tracks credited to him as well People who just say Masashi Hamauzu is the sole composer for the entire trilogy didn't do any proper research

Even not counting the player character. Every XI expansion storyline had a main Heroine lead. Prishe for CoP, Aphmau/Nashmeira for ToAU, Lilisette for WotG, Arciela for SoA, and Iroha for Rhapsodies.

@@Volkaru Heck, even most of the time the heroine of the game is more important to the story than the hero. Aerith is more important than Cloud, Rinoa than Squall, Garnet than Zidane, Yuna than Tidus. The girls are the one that carried the heavier burden than the boys (Aerith being last of the Cetra, Rinoa being Ultimecia in the future, Garnet being one of the last summoner, Yuna being The Summoner).

He actually did Saber's edge already a while back. You can search it up

I'm already familiar with so I can't react, but I'm thinking of making a video breaking it down one day.

Ohh sweet, be looking forward to a breakdown of that in the future. Keep up the good work, Jesse!

That one's SUCH a good rendition of Eternal Wind!

@@Namadu7 It is, the cello at the beginning sounds glorious

It’s a good game

Yep and if you can make it through the 30+ish hour tutorial then the game opens up and theres lots of things to do...

It's still great before that

The comments are full of people doing this, yeah. 🤡 🤡 It's a reaction to a piece of music, and they can't help themselves (most of it being nonsense of course)

The music really is great, though.