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Old Jul 1, 2016, 04:41 PM
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Jormungand Jormungand is offline
 
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Location: Wisconsin, USA
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Interestingly, Nobuo Uematsu's compositions are over-represented in Final Fantasy XI's story missions.

What I meant by this is that, despite Uematsu only have contributed a handful of tracks to XI vanilla, his music appears most often during cutscenes relating to the original game plus the first two expansions (Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia). I haven't played further to see if his music continues to be reused frequently in later expansions.

In particular, the following tracks from the FFXI OST make up the bulk of the event music used in these expansions:
214 Recollection
215 Anxiety
219 Hopelessness
222 Sorrow
223 Sometime, Somewhere
225 Despair (Memory de la S^tono)

That's not to say none of Mizuta's event music gets played frequently. His "Celestial Thunder" gets tons of plays.

That said, if a player is only focusing on story a plathrough, that player will mostly experience Uematsu's music during event scenes (despite that being merely 6 tracks that are frequently reused). If the player is not allied with Bastok, they will experience almost none of Tanioka's music (Ru'Lude Gardens would be the most frequently heard by far).

I only realized this after recently focusing on FFXI's story. I feel Uematsu's contribution was an overextended effort fresh off FFX. "Anxiety" is the only composition of his I feel has any life to it, and even it wears out its welcome during FFXI's story scenes. It's played very frequently.

Statistically this all bears out: from vanilla to CoP, Mizuta mostly did field/dungeon/battle music while Uematsu's meager 11-track contribution is 82% event music. However, Uematsu's portion in the context of the first two FFXI expansions is very small. Thus, over-representation.

Of course, during the game's heyday, most players who actively played did not only focus on the story. So the average player would not experience this over-representation. An average player who started now however, would experience it.
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