Song Review: Final Fantasy Type-0 rearrangement The Beginning of the End by Takeharu Ishimoto

This rearrangement of “The Beginning of the End” kicks off hard with that fuzzy keyboard and crashing drums, then immediately come the horns and strings. Then comes the guitar and vocals. Then the back up vocals. Now some more horns. More back up vocals! Get hype!

Takeharu Ishimoto has composed so much going on and so much to take in. My entire brain lights up trying to take in every simultaneous instrument. Focusing in on any particular instrument or section let's you appreciate how catchy every part of this arrangement is.

I found this track while perusing SoundCloud a couple years back after finding out that different game composers had been uploading their work to Soundcloud, either officially or under pseudonyms. I discovered this track, and knew nothing about it, except that it bangs. Most of the title on SoundCloud is in Japanese and I never even did the bare minimum of pasting it into google translate, until now.

So down the Final Fantasy rabbit hole I go, and the depths of this thing grow every time I look. I learned that this track appears on a Final Fantasy game I never played or even heard of called Final Fantasy Record Keeper. I don't know what this game is about, but it has a fantastic soundtrack full of rearrangements of Final Fantasy music. One of those rearrangements comes from another FF game I haven't played, but I at least heard of, called Final Fantasy Type-0. That game has a moving orchestra arrangement known as “Beginning of the End” or “We Have Arrived.”

Takeharu Ishimoto's SoundCloud page features a version of this track called Chorus Version, although the only official soundtrack version (VGMdb page) I have found features vocals by Chris Ito and Yumi Yoshitaka. The Chorus version seems to be primarily the same arrangement aside from the vocal changes. Someone more knowledgeable than I would have to go over the tracks to spot all the differences. I assume the Chorus version is just that. A version with all the vocals except for Chris Ito. Without any other information beyond what's on the descriptionless and comments disabled SoundCloud page for this track.

This isn’t an investigation though. I’m here to jam to this awesome, and somewhat mysterious Final Fantasy rearrangement. I’m also here to think about how many Final Fantasy games have been produced. I have played almost ten of them!