ArkFullofSorrow.  Yes, ArkFullofSorrow.

The setup a few minutes before it began, from where I was sitting.  It was pretty much exactly like this during the intermission.

This guy's noggin is my only complaint about my seat and the view from it during the show.  This guy was also taking notes about the show.

Ooh. An airship. (FFI-III Medley, I think)

Arnie really liked to chew the fat.

Don Flamenco in the front-center-right. I liked him better in Punch-Out!!

Wizes of red and white.

They would not leave the Square-Enix suits alone.  Nor was my camera nimble enough to evade the the spheroid in the bottom right corner.

That's the opera vocalist during the "Distant Worlds" (FFXI) tune. Here she is just standing there, which she did for most of the song.

Thou hast done well in catching the Chocobo, FFII PSP style.

Operaing it up for the old opera tune.

During "Terra's Theme", those responsible for the visuals showed their rudimentary level rom hacking prowess by using a text editor to change FFVI's credits that show up during the game's introduction to those for the show.

Umetsau and Arnie in a hilariously awkward embrace before "One Winged Angel."

"OWA." Note the glorious choir, the atmospheric lighting, intense musicians... and irritating Advent Children video footage.

This is how it ended. The logos are flaming, which segued nicely from the "OWA" video, which ended with one of those Sephiroth/fire sequences.

Final Fantasy Distant Worlds - Chicago

On Saturday March 1, 2008 the Final Fantasy Distant Worlds "tour" graced Chicago's Rosemont Theater with its presence.  This is where they take one of the local classical symphonies, lock them in a room and make them play nothing but favorites from the Final Fantasy soundtracks until they've mastered them or until they've revirginized. 

Sorry about the hackneyed comment about the nerd-Final Fantasy alignment.  I promise such quips on my part will be few and far between in this write-up.  I guess I'm going to have to scratch that paragraph about the place being filled with social deviants whose conversations consist of nothing but the numbers of the various Final Fantasy games of various volumes and intensities.  Such conversations would make no sense to normals, but today, this Chicago suburb had a couple thousand of them. See, like this:

"7."
"8!"
"10?"
"10."
"6."
"4!!"
"12?"
"7!!!!"
"12!"

You and I, we have no idea what's going on, yet this show was populated practically by naught other than those who speak this exotic and frightful tongue.

Whoops there I go again.  Guess I couldn't resist.  This is gonna be tough.

The following is a concert review of the Final Fantasy Distant Voices tour's Chicago stop.  You might read about this show on the blogs, forums or some corner of the Internet.  Of course, the reports were probably from some delusional, crazed fanboy happy to be in the same city at the same time as Nobou Uematsu.  Now read on as somebody with actual standards reviews the show.

OK.  Why I don't talk about the show as I experienced it?  It actually begins way back on October 18, 2007 when the game news sites across the blogsphere first posted it and began copying it from one another ad infinitum.  As far as I know, this is when the tickets went on sale.  The prices on them ranged between $35-$150 dollars, with the most expensive set giving the holder material goodies (more on those at a later day) and a backstage pass to share space with the conductor and Nobou Uematsau for a little while.

Of course, I, not one to take time out of my day to make the game news circuit, didn't find out about this show until about ten days before the event, so those aforementioned premium tickets were long since sold out (they were gone by October 24).    I would have forked out the $150 if I could (in fact, the evening set me back roughly that amount).  I would probably be a far more interesting guest than most of those who jumped on those tickets: whereas they would attempt to wow him by speaking a few lines of poser, broken Japanese they picked up from that semester of Eastern Asian Cultures they took in school several years ago (I believe Uematsu understands English on a working level but doesn't speak it - don't quote me there), I would ask him why the Blue Dragon soundtrack sucked so much.

Well I didn't find out about the show until some time in late February 2008.  In fact, I was Googling about when I stumbled upon the phrase "Distant Worlds" and I thought it had a strange sci-fi, yet significant vibe to it.  It wasn't the Final Fantasy part that caught my attention, in fact I didn't notice it when I first clicked over.  I thought to myself that if I ever won a mega lottery jackpot, I might start a game company called Distant Worlds.

Later I find out it's a Final Fantasy thing.  Hey, I know that!  Then I find it's a music tour.  We're two for two.  Then I find its only North American date is in Chicago.  Now, I'm not a big appreciator of classical music, and there are only a small handful of game songs I would actually really want to hear outside of their original settings.  But I, as the self-appointed mouthpiece of all things gaming in Chicago, am now bound by duty to go.  So I done went and picked up a ticket.

The seat I had was absolutely fantastic, especially considering I first found out about this show so close to the date.

See that hand-drawn X on the blue 109 section?  That's pretty much were I was sitting.  This was just far enough from the stage to comfortably see essentially everything I wanted (a seat in sections 101-105 likely would have meant tilting my head to see it all).  It is very hard to be much more 'front row center' than this.  The only explanation I have for landing such a wonderful seat is either the show didn't even come close to selling out (indeed, the lobbies outside the show were notably less crowded than the rock shows I usually attend... it could be a size issue, but that doesn't fully explain it) or somebody relinquished the seat moments before I jumped on it.

To top it off, Uematsu made an appearance as advertised.  If my seats couldn't get much more front row center, his seat was front row center.  You know what this means, right?  Yeah, he was four seats away from me.  Literally, four seats away: he was placed at row N seat 3, and I was at row L seat 1.  Seethe with envy all ye star-struck viewers!  As if this wasn't enough, his entourage included a couple of Square-Enix executives who were seated in the same row N, seats one and two.  More on them in the bullets below.

Now for some general observations from the evening:

• The Rosemont Theater's capacity is at around 4300, and there wasn't nearly that many people there tonight.  I would estimate an attendance of 3000 at most.  The lowest level (sections 101-105) was entirely filled, but there were many seats in the lower level that were not, although a solid majority of these seats had butts in them.  Although I didn't actually see it for myself, I heard the balcony was only about one-fourth filled.
• Speaking of the crowd, they were a very diverse, if not pretty lame (although not quite as lame as you might expect) bunch.  As far as how they came dressed: ran the gamut from very formal (I saw a couple tuxes, some expesnive dresses with pimped-out ice) to typical gamer attire (completely ungroomed, video game-themed t-shirt with pit stains and raggedy jeans or sweats that are either two sizes too big or small).  Outside this range were a few cosplayers (I counted Ultimeca, Cloud, White Mage, Red Mage, Tifa and perhaps a Moogle or two).  There was also a wide range of ages, many adolescents and many baby boomers (perhaps parents?).  Median age, though, was likely around 25.
• The stage setup was essentially that of a traditional symphony: conductor in front (named Arnie Roth) piano to the side, winds, brass, strings together forming a semicircle, percussion in the back...  you know the drill.  Behind them was a area for a choir to stand, file in and out.  Lights would shine along the back wall making for an interesting, if not minor effect.
• There were three video monitors that showed video footage from the respective games the songs were heard.  At the beginning of each song, there would be the roman numeral from the game it came from superseding a shimmering crystal followed by the game's official logo.  I thought this was a nice touch.  The visual quality of the moving pictures on these screens was unexpectedly good.
• What wasn't neat or unexpectedly good about the video portions, though, was the fact many of them suffered from 'on again off again' syndrome: you know, video footage for a little while then blank for a few seconds.  While this nuisance was present in many, if not most of the video presentations, only in a few performances did it really notably detract from the experience.  Still, this shouldn't have happened.
• Another video complaint: reused game footage.  Seriously, we saw FFI Fighter running through Corneria Castle's lower floor for every FFI flashback.  Look, I pay to review dinky Xbox Live Arcade games and I make a point never to reuse game footage (although I did once for a few seconds - see if you can spot it).  You mean to tell me that in the vast expanses of the Final Fantasy games, these professionals couldn't get enough video to avoid recycling clips?  They had to have shown the poor Malboro getting smashed by Cloud's Meteors and the part of the FFVII intro FMV just before they zoom out three times each.
• But if you didn't want to look at no monitors, you could've gazed upon the musicians themselves who looked really into what they were playing, and that's always good.
• One annoyance of the show was that there was light, but full enough and quite long, smatterings of applause after every song, which struck me as unusual and awkward.  Not helping matters is the fact Arnie was milking it for all it was worth, turning around and bowing, at times taking multiple bows, after every song.  So that's one demerit for the crowd (like I said, pretty lame) and another for the conductor (who fittingly enough strikes me as a pretty lame kind of guy).
• About taking photographs: Okay, I absolutely hate playing paparazzo.  When Uematsu was escorted to his seat very close to me, I was quite surprised when it happened, although not surprised enough to refrain from snapping a picture.  When I did, it felt like a part of me died.  I felt so slimy.  Granted, it wasn't for me, it was for the readers, but I know I wouldn't appreciate people snapping my mug at every opportunity and I can totally sympathize with fed-up celebs directing their swinging fists at the faces of prying photographers. 
• Speaking of photos, during the intermission, awestruck Squarebees wouldn't leave the executives alone (Uematsu returned to the show a song or two into the second set and split during the opera tune), constantly bugging them for photo ops.  They were good sports about it and all, but come on... They're suits.  They probably only have tangential interest in the games and see them solely as a way to make money.  They're not the creative minds who provided the unique efforts of the game series.  They're doing generic but essential executive work which probably doesn't radically differ from the executive work of any company of Square-Enix's size and scope.  It's like eagerly snapping a picture of the Assistant CFO of Varsitybooks.com or the Vice President of Marketing of CenturyTel Communications - just stupid.
• Arnie went on, a suspicious number of times, about how some of the songs from the evening's set were the first to have been performed, professionally by a symphony, live.  Balderdash.  For starters, every song in the concert was performed at the first Distant Worlds show in Stockholm, and in almost every case, the exact same video was used (renegades have youtubed pretty much the whole Stockholm show).  Not only this, but they removed the opening theme from Final Fantasy III DS, which was present at the Stockholm show.  This, and most of these songs are on other orchestrated FF collections.  Minor detail, but he sounded more like a lying pompous jerk having said this several times.
• It also bothered me to no end that the show was advertised on one of the local news stations and they said the show time was 8:30, when the actual show time was 8.  I feel kinda sorry if anybody actually took that time to heart and showed up and missed some of the show's best moments.  I find it bothersome because well... When I, an amateur but moderately serious reviewer make even vague statements with possible disagreements about a cheap XBLA title, the mouthy trolls of the Internet won't let me let this down.  Network talking heads make major and obvious errors about easily verifiable and important facts with no ostensible efforts for correction or discipline.  Nobody ever said this was gonna be fair.
• The tentative set list was actually revealed long before the show, so I knew what I was getting, I just didn't know which order.  Plus, hey, Youtube, Stockholm.

On to the next part...