ReMix:Final Fantasy Adventure "Forgotten Palace" 3:21

From July 21st, 2003 to July 27, 2010, ReMixers Big Giant Circles & Ziwtra basically created their own Final Fantasy Adventure album, trading off & on between them for 9 mixes of the game, with no other artists involved. Today, almost eleven years later, their duopoly ends as OCR finally sees a 10th, non-Jimmy, non-Youngjin FFA mix in the form of this lovely classical arrangement from Rebecca E. Tripp:

"This is my orchestral arrangement of the "Mana Palace" theme from the original Seiken Densetsu, also known as Final Fantasy Adventure. It's a Game Boy classic. :) The gameplay is pretty simple and fun. I'm very into this soundtrack, though I'd never bothered with it before for some reason.

This track got nominated and voted for by my subscribers on Subscribestar. If you'd like to have some influence on what music I create each month, you can subscribe to me as well! Here's a link: https://subscribestar.com/rebeccaetripp."

I definitely thank Rebecca's subscribers for supporting her & for nominating this source; it took a decade, but it's great to see the game back on the homepage, and she's put together a charming, lower-key symphonic piece with a mixed palette of bells, harp, many woodwinds, & strings. Judges were unanimous, while most also observed that this was a bit more traditional/expected than some of Rebecca's more recent work; Jivemaster writes:

"Another whimsical take by Rebecca. Things start off with twinkles and begin to fill out 0:38. The arrangement here moves at a steady pace and adds nicely to the original. We get a breakdown of sorts with a harp 2:20 which is accompanied by other instruments to begin closing things out. Things are over pretty quickly but it gets the job done. I think the sounds used here worked well. Perhaps not quite as technically interesting as your other works, but still solid. Mixing is fine and production doesn't have any major issues."

Rebecca's been expanding her repertoire & trying new ideas so in some ways this feels like a return to the core pillars that defined her preceding work, but that's in no way a bad thing - as Joel writes, this gets the job done, and I especially like the additional source cameo at the very end. Rexy concurs:

"As a complete whole, I sense a simple arrangement with enough attention paid to delicate dynamics and textural shaping to get it onto the front page. Nevertheless, the site hasn't had any FFA coverage for ten years, and what you did is enough to give it some time back in the spotlight again. Nice work."

I think "simple" is really a relative term, here - compared to the artist's other work, it feels accurate, but there's still a solid, satisfying amount of layered part-writing at work. Great stuff from Rebecca, and great to see FFA after so long!