Arrangement of the Week: Still More Fighting

There’s been a lot of excitement about the remake of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy VII. I myself am cautiously optimistic about the game, but I’m still quite excited. To help celebrate the announcement of the long requested remake, I thought we’d take a look at a Final Fantasy VII cover for this week’s Arrangement of the Week.

There are of course tons of covers, remixes, and arrangements of Nobuo Uematsu’s original soundtrack. With so much to choose from, it was definitely hard to pick out a favorite. This week’s arrangement is called “Still More Fighting” and comes to us from guitarist Brian Autumn. The cover is of the Final Fantasy VII boss fight theme, “Fight On!” aka “Those Who Fight Further.”

The video does a great job of showing off Brian’s skills at electric guitar and bass, and features footage from one of Final Fantasy VII’s boss fights. Oddly enough, it’s not a boss that actually uses “Fight On!” for its battle music. While it’s very common to find rock guitar arrangements of this piece, this arrangement goes beyond being a pure guitar cover, with inclusion of organ, synths, and string pads. It all fits well with the style of the original piece and with the original game footage. Uematsu’s battle themes do have a strong rock influence, particularly in Final Fantasy VII, so this cover stays very true to the original in terms of tone.

The source material is broken up by occasional but brief deviations and improvisations. For example, at around 1’30” he launches into an impressive series of rapid arpeggios on the lead guitar. My favorite moment though is the sudden switch to an orchestral arrangement at 2’30” for the summon in the battle. It’s a cool switch up that, in addition to matching the battle on screen, gives the cover a little more variety.

This was a nice little find from Brian Autumn. This actually appears to be his only videogame music cover, and an excellent one at that. If you’d like to listen to or download a copy of “Still More Fighting” that doesn’t include the video’s battle sound effects, you can do so at the artist’s Soundcloud page.

Have you heard any interesting new arrangements, remixes, or covers this week? Let us know in the comments below.