ReMix:Final Fantasy V "Ancient Waves" 3:14

Rebecca's father passed away in January of this year, and this beautiful FF5 arrangement has a special relevance for her:

"This is my arrangement of "Beyond the Deep Blue Sea" from Final Fantasy 5, originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu. It's a VERY Uematsu track! FF5 has one of the greatest soundtracks, hands down! The chorus part at the beginning was a combination of VSTs. If it sounds live, I'm very happy! :3

This song (the original, and now, especially this remix) is deeply personal for me. It resonates with a lot of memories, and some of the things currently going on in my life. My dad died this month (on the 3rd), so I'm actually having a difficult time. This song was actually connected to my dad for me somewhat, so there's a lot of wistfulness and pain baked into it. Creating it was a highly emotional experience.

Although this was already one of my favourite songs from FF5, it was sort of a commission. This track was nominated and voted for by my patrons on Subscribestar. If you're interested in voting/nominating in the future, you can subscribe to me here: https://subscribestar.com/rebeccaetripp. A new song (usually a VGM remix) will be chosen every month."

First off, my belated personal condolences, and on behalf of OCR as well; I won't pretend to know this specific pain, but I do know that as a father, he had much to be proud of. Judges did point out that some of the issues (low volume, some hanging releases) that are common to the artist's submissions are here as well, and they're a little frustrated that their feedback isn't being incorporated, but such issues also remain non-dealbreakers regarding evaluation. For my part, I actually thought this was a little cleaner & more emotive than usual; I got Disney/Ghibli vibes, and some legit spine tingles on the more magical moments. Liontamer writes:

"Ooooh, I loved halc's rendition of this theme, so it's great to fire up the source tune again... Per the usual, the production side's OK albeit hampered by some limitations of the samples that Rebecca's seemingly unable to further mitigate or even eliminate, but the arrangement's creative and compensates for the issues. The samples have their drawbacks, but Rebecca provides evolving textures that make up for it."

Roger that; I think the application of some natural water FX worked rather well to reinforce the theme, and the lead strings & woodwind parts were persuasive and emotional - it's the type of music you'd hear playing at a very classy, underwater-themed ball of some sort. Those happen, right? Like a formal version of the "Enchantment Under the Sea" dance from Back to the Future? But I digress; when I first read Rebecca's words, I thought this might be a sad or solemn mix, but it's instead a relaxed, more serene, peaceful, even exploratory arrangement, I very much enjoyed it, and I hope you do as well.