But before I dredge long posts from elsewhere, I'd like to also take some time to introduce music I've been spinning lately.
My food breaks over the last few weeks have been accompanied by this curated playlist of Final Fantasy XI cutscenes. I've long had an interest in this game, but the likelihood of actually playing it in the near future is low, as much due to currency conversion issues as from planning out how to use my free time.
Just cutscenes misses out on a lot of the experience, of course. A key part that even an uncommentated walkthrough could cut out is getting through PlayOnline before even getting to play.
That Squaresoft had massive dreams during the turn of the millennium would be an understatement. Its easy to forget with how the service turned out, but PlayOnline was to be their own walled garden in the internet, the crossroads of dot-com bubble's highs with Japan's own game industry bubble.1 Like their other ventures of the time, it did not pan out as expected, and while DigiCube was the biggest flop from the business side, POL became a long-standing thorn for the whole of XI to this day. Players have to deal with a protracted login process while developers pin the blame for inability to alter/add certain features to XI due to its code being so entwined with POL.
And yet, there's still a charm to it that's endemic to the era. Optimism for the possibilities of instantaneous communication across the globe abounds in its presentation, both visual and aural. Noriko Matsueda filled the brief masterfully, providing tracks that hit with the same kind of synth cozyness that Nintendo aimed for a few years later with the Wii's built-in channels. While those are the highlights, she also brought quite the variety to the other options one could pick to score their POL usage, hitting a similar kind of spot as Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf/Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider. The final three tracks by Kumi Tanioka, which score XI-specific pages of the portal, bridge the styles of both worlds neatly (a given since she did some music for the game).
The above is the playlist of the official release of the POL soundtrack, which was disc 2 of a set with "additional" XI tracks (material from the most recent expansion which didn't fit its CD + newer songs written for subsequent small scale add-on scenarios). If you look around YouTube, there are fan-made playlists with more tracks, most of them from the online version of Tetra Master which was only available packaged with XI and the POL Viewer, shut down in 2010 with no official release of its music anywhere, puzzlingly.
Just as mystifying, however, is the near-complete lack of online footprint for the other "digital table game" on the PS2 version of that package. Square went as far as developing their own take on mahjong, JongHoLo/雀鳳楼, but I cannot find any trace of its music, or any video of the thing being played. This is a cursory search for what was supposed to be a quickie "coast", but with how Doman mahjong has attracted a dedicated playbase within Final Fantasy XIV, its bewildering how its "older sibling" is almost entirely MIA.
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Produced by local online game junkie Yasumi Matsuno, who pulled triple duty while also working on Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Final Fantasy XII, natch.
