Balance and Ruin
Balance and Ruin is a free, five disc album (74 tracks) of fan made music in tribute to Square(-Enix)’s masterpiece Final Fantasy VI. It was released last week, on Canada Day, but clearly I couldn’t bring that to your attention until after I let you calm down from the cover of O Canada that I crafted from the fabric of space-time. Time, more so than space.
In case you’re not familiar, Overclocked Remix is a non-profit website that’s been around since 1999. That means I’ve been listening to various works of magic from that repository almost as long as I’ve had access to the internets. My main gripe with it is that it’s tended toward electronica over the years. Understandable since it’s a site started by a dj. If you search around there are tons of covers from tons of games, but they’ve also had some gargantuan collaborations over the years, including Final Fantasy VII: Voices of the Lifestream, Mega Man: The Robot Museum, and of course OC ReMix: Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix Official Soundtrack.
I’ve had time to pick through Balance and Ruin, and there’s definitely some great tracks in there:
Pot Hocket’s take on Kids Run Through The City for Solo Acoustic Guitar
Chad Seiter’s (of Zelda and Star Trek fame) take on Terra’s theme for Orchestra
DDRKirby(ISQ)’s take on the Blackjack theme which has some incredibly great Mega Man inspired chiptunes.
With over 6 hours of free music to be had, you really should consider checking it out. There’s a lot of really fantastic music in this collection.