In less than 36 hours from this post, Final Fantasy XIV’s 4th expansion, Endwalker will be available in early access with the game fully launching on the 7th December.

As I have mentioned on previous Jukeboxes, Soken is great!

Masayoshi Soken, the composer for a majority of the score in Final Fantasy XIV has been a well-deserved talking point in the last few months. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Soken had spent 6 months of the year in hospital dealing with laryngeal cancer. Most of the development team didn’t know that he was in hospital.

While he was in hospital, he wanted to continue working. Arrangements were thankfully made and he managed to produce one of the best songs in To The Edge. The music is just beautiful, the lyrics are fantastic and I am stunned how Soken could produce something this awesome while recovering from cancer!

On May 15th, Square-Enix released the Full Trailer for the ENDWALKER trailer which primarily contains the ENDWALKER theme, but also features motif’s of the previous expansions, A REALM REBORN, HEAVENSWARD and STORMBLOOD.

In a “Letter from the Producer LIVE” hosted by the director of Final Fantasy XIV, Naoki Yoshida, he announced that the expansion would be delayed by 2 weeks from the 23rd November to the 7th December to improve on the quality of the game.

In the meantime, Square-Enix released the official ENDWALKER track via 7-inch vinyl and also upload the song to YouTube.

The motif for the song will be reused throughout the ENDWALKER expansion for different themes such as the battle theme, locations and other songs.

ENDWALKER is performed by the in-house band THE PRIMALS with vocals from Architects’ Sam Carter.

Lyrics:

Heart of ember, autumntide
Cooling swiftly, bleeding light
Smold’ring softly, biding time
Marching forward, left behind

Fire as shadows clash
Forgotten footfalls engraved in ash
Fire will be repaid
‘Fore our echoes begin to fade

Fade away… Fade away…

Heart of ember, autumntide
Burning brightly, hot and white
Kindred severed neverwhere
Sorrow’s silence, we needn’t bear

Tumbling down to the never!

Every step we take
Echoes in our wake
Winding ’round our fate
To forge ahead

Should we lose our way
Tire of all this pain
We won’t be afraid
To forge ahead

Fearless hearts ablaze
(When the world comes crumbling down)
No more time to waste
(Know I’ll be there)
No, it’s not too late
(Though our fleeting moment has gone)
To forge ahead
(You’re not–you’re not alone YEAH)

As we ride again
(As you turn your eyes to the stars)
To another end
(Oh, I’ll be there)
Where it all begins
(With my chorus guiding you)
Forge ahead
(Forge ahead)

Earlier this week, Square-Enix finally released the Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers OST onto streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

This gives me the perfect excuse to highlight one of the biggest memes in Final Fantasy XIV in the last couple of years: A Long Fall.

‘A Long Fall’ is the accompanying score to the Level 80 dungeon, “The Twinning”. The song is a remix of two older themes, “Out of the Labyrinth” (From the Syrcus Tower raid in Patch 2.3) and “eScape” (From the Omega raid in Patch 4.4)

The lyrics for eScape were sung by the composer for Final Fantasy XIV, Masayoshi Soken and the lead English translator, Co-lead of the World and Lore Developer, Michael-Christopher Koji Fox.

When Shadowbringers was released in July 2019, ‘The Twinning’ was one of the dungeons that was included with the initial patch which contained the very catchy tune.

The song became an underrated masterpiece and considered one of Soken’s best works (Of which there are many)

On August 27th 2019, YouTube user kcat729 uploaded a video titled ‘twinning.mp4’ which contained the song but super imposed with 4 copies of John Jacobson from the Double Dream Feet video from 2011.

Word about twinning.mp4 made its way around the various websites such as Twitter, Reddit, the Final Fantasy XIV Official Forums and eventually the developers of the game.

At the Final Fantasy Fan Festival 2021 (Which took place in a closed theatre in Japan due to COVID-19), Square-Enix held a concert at the end of Night 2 of their event featuring their in-house band “The PRIMALS” which is comprised of the aforementioned Soken, Koji Fox and 3 other band members.

They traditionally cover in-game music made by Soken in a more heavy-metal direction but in recent times, their music has created for the game.

During their performance, they had community team members recreate the dance from the twinning.mp4 meme video.

You can see that the team members are wearing red, blue and green shirts. This is to depict the ‘roles’ that you can play in Final Fantasy XIV. Red for Damage Dealers (DPS), Green for Healers and Blue for Tanks.

To promote the upcoming album “FINAL FANTASY XIV: Scions & Sinners”, The Primals created a music video for A Long Fall which shows the members performing the song while Koji Fox is dressed up as a Ascian (whom are the antagonists in Final Fantasy XIV) performing the Double Dream Feet dance and also some in-game dances such as the ‘Manderville’ and the ‘Ball Dance’

You can tell that throughout the official music video and the video from the Fan Fest that they really enjoyed performing this song. Hopefully at the next Final Fantasy Fan Festival in 2023, we’ll be able to hear the song in person.

The official soundtrack for Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers is now available on Spotify and Apple Music.

SHADOWBRINGERS: FINAL FANTASY XIV Original Soundtrack by Masayoshi Soken

Album · 2019 · 88 Songs

Apple Music