I'm not digging it.
These arrangements sound like reasonable re-interpretations for an arranged album but are in no way "identical" to the originals; far too many personal, idiosyncratic musical choices have been inserted by the arrangers to claim that these are representative of the original sound and reproduce its intent.
For example, the original Mysidia theme was a melodic exchange between xylophone and flute. This arrangement of Mysida removes the contrasting "dialogue" aspect of the melodic instrumentation entirely, replacing both original instrument choices with a rustic fiddle (a fairly annoying-sounding one, to my ears) taking the melody all the way through. This is not a subtly enhanced version of the OST track; it's someone's personal arrangement project.
The boss battle theme, as another example, has too many alterations and added gestures made to claim it's simply reproducing the original music with higher sample fidelity. Right at the start, the arranger reinterprets the iconic FF two-note battle bassline as an electric guitar riff, which changes the vibe and is a choice I don't agree with, and then substitutes solo violin for the original's string section to carry the melody, which is a choice I hate. He then throws in a hammond organ, almost like a winking meta-reference to Uematsu's penchant for using it in other works, that was never present in this track and adds a different color that wasn't there.
I don't think these are bad tracks overall, but they add up to a very different vision of the OST, far too heavily inflected by the arrangers' own tastes.
I suppose I'm not the audience here, as I'm not really interested in these pixel remasters. To me, they look inferior to the originals across the board, but I appreciate that Square is at least trying to faithfully reproduce the original sprite-based visual aesthetic. But I think the modern, pseudo-realistic sampled library sound clashes terribly with that vintage, low-res aesthetic (in the same way the awful high-res font does.)
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