The Mindboggling, Utterly Ludicrous Scale of Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s Soundtrack

Opinion piece opinion piece opinion piece rah. Well, gentlemen. After millennia of waiting for Square Enix to offer even the slightest indications about the Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Original Soundtrack Plus being a real thing which definitely really exists and will release, I’ve finally caved and reached for the Unreleased Tracks collection which I often see getting linked around on the FFVII Remake subreddit (really the only reason I hadn’t done so earlier was because I didn’t realise the metadata was already tagged and was loath to do it myself). Then I reordered them to fit into a single chronological album, similar as I’ve personally done with Remake’s OST, OST+ and Unreleased collection. And let me tell you – those prerelease remarks about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth having “400+ music pieces” were mighty humble! You don’t understand how large it actually is. Were it not in my grubby little hands, I would not believe it myself. Because with the Rebirth OST Special Edit, Minigame & Gold Saucer Disc and Unreleased Tracks merged into a single album, excluding instrumentals and selecting only a single instance whenever a vocal theme had editions present for multiple languages, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s soundtrack finds itself settling around 635 tracks, running for 27:07:09. Six hundred tracks. In one video game. A single player game with no post-launch content drops, at that. I consider myself something of a soundtrack buff. Listening to them, collecting them and organising them into playlists. I try and independently listen to the soundtrack of every game I complete. Yet I have never seen anything like this. It’s insanity. It’s complete, utter madness. And to top it all off – they’re all still ultra high quality too! It isn’t like they padded the runtime with a bunch of generic orchestras, and the EDM is also very much a minority despite the loud criticisms of Remake being all dubstep (I think it’s just that there’s so much orchestral content it’s hard to parse). The Final Fantasy VII Remake series has Square Enix’s high-tier composers at their absolute A game.

You want symphonic rampage with a big angry didgeridoo running in the back? Gi Nattak got you. You want a heroic Those Chosen By the Planet? What a coincidence. And a heavenly One-Winged Angel? Believe it or not. Literally just give me Bloodborne? Galian Beast says hi. Somehow arrange the original battle and boss themes into a creative, lengthy orchestration? Hell House rises from the floor. Let’s randomly give a side character the catchiest theme you’ve ever heard? Gus kicks down the door. What about, like…a musical heart attack? Jenova Emergence steps right up. Sephiroth in the original game was an amalgamation of John Carpenter’s The Thing and Jaws, so perhaps some filmic horror tracks? Sephiroth now sounds more terrifying than ever. I’d love to see Final Fantasy do another ingame play again? LOVELESS is 13 parts long. Or on that note, what about a massive final boss suite like Dancing Mad? The total final boss sequence is 10 movements long. Screw it, Aerith is now Delta Goodrem? Ok ok. Doggy dubstep song? Doggy dubstep song indeed. Pure, unsullied catharsis? Take a relaxing walk through the quiet Sector 7 employee district, then a breather in Sector 5. So many styles and moods represented. And more. And more. And more. And more, because there’s 600 of these guys.

Side note: For those of you who aren’t fond of Remake making every track such a production, give the Ever Crisis soundtrack a gander (if you can manage to find uploads at least). EC’s Final Fantasy VII section faithfully revisits the original 1997 compositions with Remake-level instruments, and has currently covered 60 out of the 85 original tracks. So quite literally everyone wins.

Back in the PS2 era I find a ‘long JRPG soundtrack’ to have been in the scope of 5 hours 100 tracks, such as Final Fantasy X and XII. Recently, as games have become increasingly cinematic budget-black-holes, I’ve seen the upper limit generally be pushed to around 220 tracks & 10 hours, such as Final Fantasy XVI, Xenoblade 3 + DLC combined, Shin Megami Tensei V + Vengeance combined, Sea of Stars. However, Final Fantasy VII Remake looks at this (already ridiculously high, mind you) statistic, and it scoffs at that. It downright laughs in their faces. Sephiroth alone is going to have his personal OST pass over that 100 track barrier, with (by my current counts) 78 tracks incorporating his leitmotifs (Those Chosen By the Planet, One-Winged Angel, plus Listen to the Cries of the Planet has been newly reassigned to him in Remake, Rebirth and Ever Crisis) or directly linked to his actions and motivations. He’s on track to become perhaps the single most highly-decorated fictional character ever when it comes to the breadth of his music. While it is true that Rebirth’s final track number, ultimately, is muddied on account of this being a gamerip rather than an officially-curated release, from what I understand these are all of the necessary bgm files pulled straight out of the game, and I’ve listened through enough of it to agree with the ripper’s verdict on what constitutes an individual track + how they’ve chosen to cut and edit them (my previous OST+gamerip combination was based off FF7 Rebirth – I Can’t Believe It’s Not In The OST which misses some, merges bosses into ‘complete’ tracks where I feel they shouldn’t have, and loops them more times than necessary). FFVIIMusic’s release could very easily pass for an official release and, for my part, I’m not going to be tapping my foot waiting on that gosh darn OST Plus anymore.

In any case – FFVII Rebirth is a big boy. Huge, even. It dwarfs…just about everything. For a comparison of personal interest: An opinion I’ve often expressed is that I find Xenoblade Chronicles to be the only other JRPG franchise which can really play the same game as Final Fantasy when it comes to music, in terms of the high quality symphonic instrumentation and broad spectrum of emotional coverage worked through a large amount of custom cutscene music. The Atelier Ryza trilogy and Atelier Yumia are right up there in terms of instrumentation, but ultimately can’t match up to the same cinematic nuance present in Final Fantasy. Of course, plenty of phenomenal and memorable soundtracks out there simply play to a completely different musical identity, such as my beloved OSTs for the Blue Reflection series, Fate/Extra CCC, Pokemon, Breath of Fire III, Persona 5 or my extra beloved Shin Megami Tensei V (seriously one of the most unique auditory journeys ever), but you just don’t really find cutscene tracks like Room of White, Visions of Wind, Your Girl Finally Made It, The Journey Continues – Goodbye, City of Mako or Elysium, Parting, Majesty, Two Worlds and Two Hearts outside of these two franchises. That delicate & intricate performance which conveys such earnest emotion. And among the Xenoblades, XC2 harbours my favourite soundtrack by far. Sample the first cutscene, first town, first dungeon, first battle. I feel it hits a perfect transitionary stage where its instrumentation is dramatically higher quality than the original Wii game’s music, but isn’t yet as complex as that of Xenoblade 3, so the tracks are more easily remembered. There’s a warmth or nostalgia prevalent throughout the entire soundtrack, an honesty to its melodies that make them immediately stick with you after only a single listen, and its symphonic layers feel wide and open. The Tomorrow With You is a track which could probably only ever exist inside of the Xenoblade series. On the other hand, the symphony which serves as the climax to the main Xenoblade trilogy is still ultimately a level below any of Final Fantasy’s big hitters like Hellfire, Type Zero, The Suffering of Fools or Struggle For Freedom.

The FFVII Remake Series orchestras are generally a lot denser, more complex and therefore attention-demanding than any of Xenoblade’s. They’re genius and I love them, but in some senses a very different type of orchestral experience. I repeatedly find myself referring to the FFVII Remake music as a “symphonic rampage”, or “symphonic trickery”. Yes all of its tracks are plainly just amazing, but imo what really distinguishes this score is that they’re always doing something. Like, there’s always a catch, a gimmick, a bait-and-switch or a callback in the composition which works this real level of genius into it. One of the big questions heading into Rebirth is how they could possibly hope to follow up on Jenova Quickening. That had two phases of incredible orchestra, which then leapt into the most brilliant, aggressive and faithful recreation of the original J-E-N-O-V-A synthesizers we could have hoped for. It’s like, they kind already solved J-E-N-O-V-A for the remakes, so what do they even do for the three remaining battles against the beast? Well, you reach the heart of the Shinra ferry after a rather horrific display where the black robes are forcibly merged into mutagenic monsters. They Call Her Jenova slowly creeps in, then launches into a whimsical march that perfectly sets the scene for Jenova Emergence to ferociously kick in. Just as you’ve started saying to yourself “Okay, it’s synth-based from the start this time so probably just the same kinda vibe as Quickening but without the phase switchup”, the music begins to increase in speed until it explodes over like, as I suggested previously, a musical heart attack. With a choir as if we were Battle Marilith or somethin. Then somehow Jenova Tenacity is once again a completely different experience, slower and more foreboding than any other rendition. Battle on the Big Bridge – Rebirth becomes so much more energetic as Gilgamesh pulls out his final weapon to rush into his last phase. While the Pixel Remaster remains my favourite version of his theme, Rebirth has his coolest presentation ever. Midgar – City of Mako works those eerie Sephiroth chants into the usual opening theme. The lower trumpet is so fun in Junon – Fortified Metropolis. One-Winged Angel – Rebirth is almost entirely composed to be half intro and half outro, letting the listener feel Sephiroth’s panic and insanity like never before. Hearing the choir chanting Jenova’s name in A New Breed of Monster, Night of the Seventh Day and The Age of the Cetra (from what I can tell) in a similar vein to how Sephiroth’s gets chanted is super awesome and clever. There’s just always something to an FFVII Remake arrangement.

Now that I’m satisfied with my available version of FFVII Rebirth’s OST and excitedly listening to it, I was thinking it an opportunity to start updating my favourite OST tier list, thus musing on the contrasts and comparisons between it and the GOAT Xenoblade 2. I must say, trying to account for the Final Fantasy VII Remake series in this ranking is tough. Not tough as in I’m forcing myself to prop it up due to my FFVII bias or that I have to cede it isn’t good in isolation – tough because there’s a billion bloody tracks, they’re literally all amazing, and it’s therefore overwhelming – suffocating even – trying to concretely evaluate it in the same manner as other JRPG soundtracks. How do you even begin to breach into this when Rebirth has six tracks to every one of Xenoblade’s, and I’ve relistened to the latter so many times over the past seven years? I have sat through Rebirth in its entirety before and catalogued a selection of personal favourites, but even when trying to be picky said favourites list is still 70+ entries long. So in this particular interaction, under this lens, I think you could describe Final Fantasy VII Rebirth as suffering from success a bit. I put them on shuffle or listen through specific sections, and I have the time of my life while doing so. But in totality, it’s hard to know the FFVII:R soundtracks as intimately as something on the scale of XC2. Perhaps it may even be impossible. It definitely makes the broad listening experience less memorable because of content saturation. Listening through FFVII Remake and Rebirth tends to take over a week, as opposed to smaller things (as if 5 hour OSTs are small lol) which you can get through in a much more connected manner. However for me I just don’t personally mind it that much, because I myself really love its composition style and because I’m already used to sorting OST playlists. At the very least I always make an overworld and battles playlist after listening to a JRPG soundtrack (ie “Overworld – Xenoblade 2” or “Battles – Harvestella”), then add relevant pieces to my “Final Boss” and “JRPG Nights” lists. and with longer showings such as Xenoblade 3 or FFXVI I did pick up the habit of adding tracks to a curated playlist while listening through, for example. For me personally it’s not detrimental in FFVII Remake’s listening experience to select the 100 or so that really leap out at me, and then if I ever want the full experience I can get into the whole album collection. Quality and quantity. I definitely do have a nostalgia for the days back in high school when I’d just have a meditative few hours lying in bed sinking into the landscapes conveyed through the FFXII soundtrack though. FFVII Rebirth really tips into the area where you start to ask if it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, because man if it ain’t the most overkill soundtrack ever. But ultimately I’d say that with this series in particular, from the perspective of an OST fan, its scale must be a good thing because I personally do really adore FFVII:R’s music, so the fact there’s so much of it at such consistently high quality is just wild. I really am just constantly awed by the soundtrack whenever I listen to it. It’s just really, really hard to try and evaluate in full because not only is the length a huge barrier, but its compositions are so leitmotif-heavy with so many moving parts to the orchestras, that they do ask you properly concentrate on them and what they’re doing, and their arrangements sort of expect you to also have some cursory knowledge of the FFVII, Crisis Core and Advent Children OSTs as well (this is true of the games themselves though, they’re unifying Compilation history into FFVII’s most central story). There are obviously cozy town themes peppered throughout, but by and large these aren’t relaxing or endearing soundtracks like a lot of other JRPGs are, they’re predominantly about symphonic spectacle. You’re here to listen to the composers showing off.

FFVII Remake totals out to about 20 hours when properly merged, Rebirth comes to 27 hours. Combined total of 47 hours. Xenoblade 2, however, is a nice and simple 5 and a half hours. Which is probably still quite long for anyone coming from film, anime or non-JRPG game soundtracks, but at this point in time is comfortable listening as far as JRPG high tiers are concerned. It, as well as some musically-adjacent peers like Final Fantasy XII and Atelier Ryza 1-2-3, is a fantastic length to just sink into over two or three nights. To get through FFVII Remake soundtracks, however, is a committment and a half, functionally akin to playing a whole game in itself, with arguably a larger mental effort required. While I was having this discussion in my head and wondering about what situation anyone could possibly ever ask me for these observations, I decided to properly compare the length. Chucking the complete Xenoblade trilogy soundtracks from the Xenoblade Trinity Box release, the Xenoblade X soundtrack and a gamerip of the few new tracks from Xenoblade X Definitive Edition remaster into a playlist. The result? 428 tracks, 26:07:47. Meaning that Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, in an individual, single-player experience of roughly comparable gameplay length to a Xenoblade title, has a substantially larger track count than the entire Xenoblade Chronicles series up to this point and runs roughly an hour longer.

Some other game soundtracks I cross-checked on my mp3 player:

GameTracksRuntime
Atelier Ayesha823:13:38
Atelier Ryza 1612:04:21
Atelier Ryza 2602:16:18
Atelier Ryza 3693:05:31
Atelier Yumia884:13:36
Chrono Trigger642:30:55
Chrono Cross673:03:29
Earthbound1663:17:24
Elden Ring (base game)673:23:41
Final Fantasy VI623:10:37
Final Fantasy VII854:36:21
Final Fantasy VII Remake combined31315:20:16
Final Fantasy VII Remake InterMISSION combined914:04:38 (keep in mind it takes only 4 hours to play this DLC chapter)
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth combined60226:02:47
Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age1025:50:53
Final Fantasy XV combined*28217:06:24
Final Fantasy XVI + From Spire to Sea2179:57:57
Fire Emblem Three Houses1348:46:22
Kingdom Hearts2298:51:30
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain522:46:57
Metaphor ReFantazio1315:39:55
Mother 32476:07:38
NieR Automata483:43:46
Persona 5 (original version)1103:47:31
Sea of Stars2019:00:43
Shin Megami Tensei IV1134:38:22
Shin Megami Tensei V + Vengeance2079:38:04
Smash Ultimate (unique tracks only)*22614:42:42
Star Ocean: The Divine Force894:02:32
Stellar Blade18910:05:02
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild2106:22:57
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword2187:24:11
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom33711:09:06
Valkyrie Elysium1224:44:44
Valkyrie Profile752:01:28
Xenoblade 1 Definitive + Future Connected995:26:11
Xenoblade 2 + Torna1166:11:31
Xenoblade 3 + Future Redeemed1428:58:31

*FFXV includes both volumes of its own OST, Comrades and the DLC (except for Episode Ardyn because I don’t have it).
*Smash Ultimate only counting its own soundtrack and custom arrangements, not including tracks which are just put into the game as-is.

The largest individual non-Final Fantasy game soundtrack I’ve personally seen released is last year’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, clocking in at a surprising 337 tracks with a runtime of 11:09:06. Which is massive. But it’s still about 70 tracks and nine hours shorter than the completed Remake soundtrack (OST, OST+, Intermission, Unreleased), let alone Rebirth’s 600. Plus, with love and respect – most of the tracks in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are a lot, lot simpler than the expensive, multi-phase symphonic trickery which defines the FFVII Remake series. Now, don’t get it mistaken, Zelda here is deliberately doing something else. Lots of people have mocked the ambient OST direction, and perhaps that’s just inevitable when Skyward Sword immediately prior had brought out Zelda’s greatest orchestration yet, but I adore the Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom soundtracks for their incredibly artistic musical direction. I’m not trying to judge TotK for something it clearly isn’t intending to do. Nevertheless though, length aside it’s just not really something which can dethrone FFVII Remake. They’re playing vastly different games. The audience quickly latched onto the Colgera battle theme for its multi-phase symphonic performance which stood out among the airy bgm of the open world (though my personal pick for battle theme is Demon Lord Ganondorf Second Phase (Part 1)‘s unusual sound, just like I loved Monk Maz Koshia in BotW’s Champion Ballad and the Gohma battle from Echoes of Wisdom), but FFVII Remake is just, like, okay…every battle theme is Colgera ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are still longer soundtracks out there in gaming, but to find them you’d have to really be honed into long-running live service games like Final Fantasy XIV and Genshin Impact. In those instances, it’s also further debatable whether these should be discussed as simply the “FFXIV soundtrack” and “Genshin soundtrack” in a singular collective, considering they’re expansion-based games and so it’s more like they’ve built up their tracklist over 15+ individual soundtracks each. Then, of course, if we were to give FFVII:R that same lenience by treating the FFVII Remake trilogy as a single project, mentally linking the three entries to be a single gigantic game and therefore a single enormous music playlist, things blow completely out of whack. Putting the Final Fantasy VII Remake Original Soundtrack, Original Soundtrack Plus and Unreleased Tracks, Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade Original Soundtrack and Unreleased Tracks, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Original Soundtrack, Minigame & Gold Saucer Disc and Unreleased Tracks into one magnificent group comes to 1039 tracks, taking 46:32:03 to get through them. And golly the LG G7 ThinQ I use as my main mp3 player has not been happy about having all those opus files in a single queue lol. Yes the FFVII Remake series does have a massive advantage in that majority of its score is based off of FFVII’s original leitmotif-heavy soundtrack, but even still – 1000 tracks, 47 hours of music in an offline, single player, story-centric series, and still yet to show its full hand. Square Enix literally how on Earth did you accomplish this. And there’s still a whole other game yet to come. Whew.

Leave a comment

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑