ARR has a better fitting soundtrack. The overall feel of the soundtrack lends itself to being part of the franchise very well and did a much better job than 1.0 did. The battle musics themselves are really well done and usually "click" in the situations they're used in.
...except that it has some really terrible samples in comparison to FFXI. Oh sure, they're a higher quality than FFXI's but it lacks a lot of punch and preciseness. There's too much reverb and it ends up sounding like hearing through rainfall or a shower: you can definitely hear a really good track, yet it's hard to try to focus on most parts. When you hear two songs played after one-another even from 1.0 the difference is really startling: a trash pack with normal fight music in a dungeon (ARR music samples) and then see the cutscene with Uematsu's music (tastes aside, the samples are fairly sharp and precise like FFXI's pre-Adoulin).
Sure, FFXI had great music, but outside of a few pieces here and there it lead to me just turning off the music after a few days of returning because they're pretty basic themes. ARR looks to keep my interest a lot more (and ironically because they're positional/time themes and not zone themes that loop forever) and it sucks that the samples are inferior in terms of clarity.
WFOAssassin wrote:
I think you picked like the one bad example. This should be the title screen music... FFXI always love the blaring horns before you log in, lol. Overall, the music in FFXIV : ARR is great, imo. The surrounding areas and other towns seem to fit well for me.
Ok, you can turn down the volume of the music but be careful when you log out because if you're not prepared you'll end up with A HEADACHE ON THE CHARACTER SELECT SCREEN OH HELP IT'S DRUMS AND TRUMPETS AT FULL BLAST LOUD NOISES.
Edited, Jul 27th 2013 5:38am by Viertel