Final Fantasy IV Fan Archives

Songs over music from the first six chapters in the Finbal Fantasy series, written and sung by the Goddess of Videogame Music, Risa Ohki. Alternately in Japanese, Portuguese, English and French.

Tracks list	language	actual music
1. The Prelude	none	FF Crystal theme
2. The Promised Land	english	Main theme from Final Fantasy II
3. Mon P'tit Chat	french	The Music Box [FFV]
4. Toki no Hourousha	japanese	Tina (Terra) [FFVI]
5. Hikari no naka e	japanese	Theme of Love (Rosa) [FFIV]
6. Esperanta Do Amor	portuguese	Dear Friends [FFV]
7. Voyage	japanese	The Boundless Ocean [FFIII]
8. Au Palais de Verre	french	Matouya's Cave (Matoya) [FFI]
9. Once You Meet Her	english	Elia, The Water Priestess [FFIII]
10. PRAY	jap(eng)	Final Fantasy (theme)
11. Nao Chora Menina	portuguese	Kids Run Through The City Corner[FFVI]

Review:
Every once in a while when buying CDs you've never heard, you just hit a gem you'd never seen coming and totally fall in love with it. This is one such gem.

As I said before, PRAY features "vocal tracks over Final Fantasy music in four different languages". Scary. But it's not done by just ANYBODY...

First let's note that Risa Ohki's voice is truly beautiful, that she has a very good mastery of english and [I guess] potuguese, and that though her french is heavily accented, she has excellent command of the language and makes it sound lovely anyway. Second let's note that although I know very little about her,it seems quite opbvious that she has at least rudimentary knowledge of the games, for she truly captures the feel of Final Fantasy, sometimes in ways that go beyond [composer] Nobuo Uematsu's own renditions. Oky now here's for the CD:

If you are in any way a Final Fantasy Fan there is NO WAY that "The Prelude" alone will not make the whole CD a must-have. This is the best rendition of ANY videogame music track ever done. "The Promised Land", for all the FFVII reference in the title, is the Map theme from the second [japanese] Final Fantasy on NES. Very nice. The third song on the CD is actually a major annoyance that most people will end up skipping whenever they listen to it. Sorry for the inconvenience. But as you press the skip button, the track titled "wanderer of time" [or something] rocks your sound system with deep percussions. This song sounds a lot like a requiem upon Tina's music from FFVI, and is a VERY powerful track, with the ability to bring tears to the eyes of someone with the appropriate mindset. The next track, translated as "into the light" is an excellent vocal version of Rosa's theme in FFIV. As for track number 6 "hope of love", one could accuse me of having a bias agaisnt tracks in portuguese, but I'm very neutral to it. Voyage is good music. "Au Palais de Verre" [in the palace of glass] is the big surprise of the CD, as not only it is very good and insanely catchy [especially if you understand it!], but the words are actually VERY CLOSELY related to the FFI storyline. Track 9 is again, very good. Track 10 would make a great closing theme for the Final Fantasy movie, as it shapes the Final Fantasy theme with a sense of farewell that is really cool... Very excellent. Then the last track [a lullaby] is quite hard to giv a rating to, but consider this: I've never liked musch the town theme in FFVI, AND it is in portuguese... Therefore I am *MOST* probably unfair in claiming it is a relatively bland track.

The CD comes with a booklet with the words for all songs and japanese translations for the ones in french and portuguese.

As an added bonus, I will supply a [very personal] english translation of the VERY COOL track number eight, with some annotations:

[Earth in french is "Terre" and the planet in the FF anime is planet 'R', pronounced]

Note that to a point I gave more importance to matching the music than accuracy in the translation, so it's not quite 100% exact.

For all the true FF/Uematsu fans out there, and for those who would like some excellent FF music but are unfamiliar with the older NES titles, I cannot recommend this CD enough.