Hello, and welcome to Fragments of Melodies, my project to rank every single song in the mainline Final Fantasy video games! I grew up alongside these games, and I've been listening to these soundtracks for nearly 30 years (starting with a ludicrous MIDI file collection)! My love of Final Fantasy is matched only by my love of its music so I thought what better way to honour that than deciding on an ultimate order for every single song.
Before you ask: yes, I do realize how ridiculous this is. There are easily 1,500 songs (I haven't even counted them yet, it's probably much higher). I will probably end up spending like a year just going through Final Fantasy XIV alone. And how is it even possible to rank that many songs, realisitically? But before I get ahead of myself, allow me to explain how I intend to tackle this list.
So how does this work?
My plan: listen to a set number of tracks from each game's OST in order (starting with the NES classic Final Fantasy), post a few thoughts about each track, and then rank them in an ever-growing list of all Final Fantasy music. I'm aiming to start with 10-20 tracks per week. I will insert the new songs into my master ranking list and indicate where it landed. I'll probably post the top 100 overall every month or two to see how that keeps evolving as I encounter new songs, also.
While I'm ranking, I'm also logging them into a spreadsheet to keep track of the songs, with key song details (track no., ranking, length, composer, arranger, etc.), some categorization (e.g., town themes, battle themes, airship themes, etc.), and recurring motifs. I'd like for this to function as a reference for me, and really for anyone who is interested in these details!
But why would you do this?
There are three main reasons I'm undertaking this project:
Firstly, I listen to and think about this music a lot. Despite the size of the Final Fantasy fandom, I haven't really found a comprehensive list of every track in one spreadsheet. Closest I've found is this, which is a tracker just for FFXIV. I set out to correct that while also posting about it, but decided that my main feed on Bluesky was not the place for it as it would probably just get me muted by a bunch of mutuals, and so this blog was born.
Secondly, it's fun to rank things! I like doing this silly exercise and figure out which song is my favourite, and which ones I think are terrible. Discovering where I am in agreement/disagreement with the fan concensus. And it's nice to think about what makes me glom onto some songs and not others. It's ultimately a matter of taste, but I want to better understand why my taste is the way it is.
Lastly, I love the idea of following the growth of an artist. I'm admittedly influenced by shows like Just King Things and The Great Gundam Project, which are focused on approaching media in chronological order and seeing how their ideas grow and shift over the course of a creator's (or series of creators) work. I'll write more about this as we go along, but for this project, it will primarily be the work of Nobuo Uematsu, arguably the most influential video game composer, the GOAT himself:
Nobuo Uematsu, bent over a music stand doing God's work
OK, that's plenty of preamble, I'll put this in the About section with some additional info about me if you're curious, but let's get to the important bit: the ranking.