MUSICAL MAGIC: DISTANT WORLDS
F
inal Fantasy has a lot of different legacies. To borrow an old phrase, it has its fingers in a lot of pies - and it’s tough to tell which are the tastiest. Without a doubt one of the series’ most important and enduring legacies is its music - which has now found a new lease of life through a vastly successful concert series.
Roth had discovered a new outlet - and would play with one-off FF concerts such as ‘More Friends’ as well as more general game music-based shows such as ‘Play: A Video Game Symphony’ over the following years. By 2007, he was ready to make FF concerts a regular fixture.
Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy tours the globe playing excerpts from the scores of each FF title to sell-out crowds, giving fans a chance to experience the music behind the series in a whole new way. Distant Worlds’ story begins in 2004, when Square Enix America decided to bring the concept of a FF concert West for a one-off special. The concept of a video game music concert was nothing new in Japan, but this was a first of its scale in the West. That year during E3 in Los Angeles the first ever North American FF concert was performed to an audience of mostly press and industry folk. After this success Arnie Roth, the owner of AWR Music Productions, decided to perform a public variation of that concert, ‘Dear Friends,’ in Chicago. The single performance in February 2005 was a sellout success - and more concerts were quickly planned with Roth conducting across America. 110
Named after the soaring vocal title track of FFXI, Distant Worlds was born. The show has since played in Australia, Canada, Japan, Poland, Singapore, Scotland, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the UK and all across the United States. In the coming months the show will also finally debut in France, Germany and Malaysia. That’s quite a line-up. Distant Worlds is one of many aspects that marks Final Fantasy as more than some video game fad; it’s a cultural phenomenon - and a significant one.