Yes, you heard right, the soundtrack for the original Final Fantasy XIV is available for preorder for $50 in Japan…on Blu Ray.
Blu Ray? For Music?
Well, it’s not impossible, nor is it unheard of. Music aficionados have been putting uncompressed music files on Blu Ray disks for a while now. Why, you ask? Why put music on a Blu Ray? I mean, not everyone has a Blu Ray player in their computer, and not many people think to stick a music disk in a Blu Ray player; it all comes down to quality.
High Def Sound is Where it’s at!
Putting music on a Blu Ray all comes down to quality. Blu Rays, as you may know, have a much larger capacity than the standard 700mb CD (around 25GB). This means that a producer can put higher quality uncompressed sound files (which are much larger than your typical mp3) onto a disk. Win win right? Consumers get richer, higher quality sound files, and producers don’t have to deal with compressing an album down to a 700mb CD or an even smaller mp3 format. Unfortunately, there is a catch.
The Sound is Only as Good as the Speakers
Having extremely high quality music files is all well and good, but unless you have the hardware to take advantage of the quality, you won’t notice much of a difference. Unfortunately, unless you’re rocking a pricey set of headphones, or a nice surround sound system you won’t get the full experience of uncompressed audio. If you’re like me, or many others, and you listen to a lot of music on a throwaway pair of headphones, you may as well be listening to the FFXIV soundtrack on MP3.
Wait, Didn’t Square Already Release the FFXIV Soundtrack?
As a matter of fact you’re right! Back when FFXIV initially released in 2010 Square was selling copies of the game’s soundtrack on iTunes and on minidisk format. So, why are they releasing the soundtrack again? It all comes down to PR.
With the upcoming release of FFXIV: A Realm Reborn, Square is doing its best to get everyone’s attention. Although FFXIV was initially a failure, it’s soundtrack was phenomenal. With a majority of tracks composed by series veteran Nobuo Uematsu, FFXIV definitely sounded like a Final Fantasy game. Since A Realm Reborn will be incorporating many of the original tracks from FFXIV, a swanky re-release of the original game’s soundtrack will definitely catch people’s attention.
What do you think?
As of now, the FFXIV soundtrack re-release, titled “Final Fantasy XIV: Before the Meteor”, is only slated for release in Japan. Being a dedicated Final Fantasy fan, I could see myself slapping down the $50 (plus shipping costs for importing) for the high-def soundtrack, but that doesn’t mean anyone else will.
If you’d like to get your hands on a copy of the limited edition soundtrack (which includes a code for in-game items for A Realm Reborn) act fast; there are only 14 copies left via cdjapan.co.jp!
