February 23, 2005
Dear Friends...
Tonight I witnessed what I hope will be considered a pivotal night in the annals of orchestral music and video game history.
Tonight marked the beginning of the U.S. tour (in Chicago, IL) for Nobuo Uematsu’s Dear Friends: Music from Final Fantasy concert series.
The funny thing is that I’m what you could consider a “casual” Final Fantasy fan. I don’t play them; I watch them being played by other people, namely my wife. I had purchased the concert tickets as a surprise Christmas gift, after she had been raving about how amazing it must have been to be at the original concert in May of 2004 in Los Angeles, before they had the idea to make it a tour. But make no mistake, the Final Fantasy series and Uematsu’s music has affected me the same it has for anyone who’s witnessed the phenomenon first-hand with the controller.
At first I thought that too many people were underdressed for a concert performance. Some were even overdressed. There were people in what would be considered “black tie” attire, and others in jeans and t-shirts. I would later come to learn when Uematsu took the stage and quizzed the audience that people had driven not only from greater Chicagoland, but the majority (or at least the loudest) of the audience came from out of state. Some as far away as New York, and on the drive out of the parking lot I was behind a car with Ontario plates. A few people even hollered when Uematsu asked if there was anyone in the audience who had come from overseas.
It’s safe to say that this man’s music has a power to draw people together. Dads had driven their children to see this show, girlfriends brought their boyfriends, other friends just all piled into a car and road-tripped to see what is one of the first video-game only music concerts in the United States.
A game did this. A series of games, anyway. Hell, the music from a series of games.
[Originally by bowler from game girl advance, reblogged by ts]
