PLAY! A Video Game Symphony is a touring video game concert, which plays musical medleys from video game series with a live symphony orchestra and a choir. It's been around for a few years now, and last night I attended their performance in their first night here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada at the Jubilee Auditorium.
Those of you who have read my previous two recaps about Video Games Live know that I am supportive of video game music in this form. However, it would be difficult for me to write this recap without comparing it to Video Games Live…in which case I will pretty much always say that Video Games Live seemed to do it lots better. More often than not it was about the presentation and energy than about the music itself...but more on that as I continue with this recap.
There wasn't much in terms of pre-show events. I thought VGL's pre-show with its merchandise hawking and various video game demos, swag, displays and a Guitar Hero competition were lacking at the time (as I've oft-mentioned, nothing seems as exciting if you've been to E3 2006)…but PLAY!’s attempt was very sad; it was barely an attempt. I almost wonder if I possibly missed the pre-show events altogether, as the Ticketmaster site says the pre-show began at 5:30 PM and included "game competitions, demos, costume contest, prizes & more!" But that seems kind of early, and way too early for them to stop if I came in at about 7:15 and saw...none of those things. So I’m pretty sure not much actually went on. Okay, there was a booth where Super Mario plushies were being sold, and a small group playing some video game music out in the lobby. There were also two tables selling official PLAY! merchandise, but there wasn’t much selection. (As we would find out later, today was also supposed to be the debut of the PLAY! official CD, but they were held up at customs.) While looking around, I wondered if they bothered with a costume contest; all I saw was someone dressed as Big Boss, another guy with a red wig that I wasn’t sure that I should recognize, and not-originally-video game characters like a red Mighty Morphin’ Power Ranger and Naruto. It was nothing at all like VGL, where you’d easily find a couple dozen people dressing up.
I went over to the PLAY! merchandise tables and bought the official program book…overpriced at $15 and not even accurate. I’ll just go over the program book for a minute because there are several things I can’t help but mention. The cover shows a wide shot of a symphony orchestra, saturated with blue and black with traces of white and purple. That’s it. It’s not a good shot especially with the oversaturation of colours, and it has nothing to do with video games. Why would you make a cover for a video games concert’s program book and not feature video games on it? Oh, but at least there’s a list of the games/series that this concert supposedly covers, clumped in small text on the bottom. There are 27 of them (28 if you see the program on the web site), which I’ll go into detail later.
If you flip through the book, you will see artwork from the various represented games, mostly the major ones. There would be two pages for most series, one with composer and series details, and another dedicated for official promotional artwork and/or screenshots. Reading through the descriptions of each, you can tell this is an old program from back in 2006. You know how VGL couldn’t use Square-Enix footage in their concert? I’m guessing Square-Enix also didn’t allow artwork to be used in PLAY!’s program book. The last few pages, with only one each “dedicated” to Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger/Chrono Cross, and Kingdom Hearts, did not have any official artwork or even the official title logos of those games. What struck me as incredibly odd is that the background image for the Final Fantasy page is a weird-looking cartoon dog. No joke. It’s not cute, it’s just weird. It doesn’t look like any dog I’ve ever seen in the series. If you couldn’t get official artwork, is it hard to find a picture of a crystal, or a sword, or something at least remotely related to the series? Apparently it was for them. Sorry about the dog rant, it’s just so bizarre.
Fine, so let’s see what possibly useful information this book has. We have “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Suite” from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. We have the “World Of WarCraft Suite” from World Of WarCraft. The “Castlevania Suite” from Castlevania. The “HALO Suite” from HALO. The “Sonic The Hedgehog Suite” from Sonic The Hedgehog. So what you’re telling me is that I paid $15 to find out that the name of each medley from each game is “(game title) Suite”? One of the few that actually has any detail is the breakdown of Final Fantasy’s music; it’s not just called “Final Fantasy Suite”. Once you get over the fact that the weird dog is still staring at us we can see there is “Liberi Fatali, Aerith’s Theme, Swing de Chocobo, and One-Winged Angel”. But as we shall soon see, this information is pointless too, and it will be very clear why.
According to the program (
http://play-symphony.com/program.php), there are 28 games/series they have music for:
FINAL FANTASY®
SUPER MARIO BROS.®
CASTLEVANIA®
SUPER MARIO WORLD®
METAL GEAR SOLID®
BLUE DRAGON®
LOST ODYSSEY(TM)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG(TM)
ACTRAISER(TM)
SHADOW OF THE COLOSSUS(TM)
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA®
HALO®
PREY(TM)
CHRONO TRIGGER(TM)
CHRONO CROSS(TM)
WORLD OF WARCRAFT®
APIDYA(TM)
KINGDOM HEARTS(TM)
SHENMUETM
SILENT HILL®
BATTLEFIELD 1942(TM)
THE ELDER SCROLLS® III: MORROWIND(TM)
STELLA DEUS(TM)
BLACK(TM)
DAYTONA USA(TM)
THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK(TM)
THE ELDER SCROLLS® IV: OBLIVION(TM)
GUILD WARS®
(The list is the same as on the front cover and second page of the program book but has the addition of Guild Wars. I don’t understand the order of the listing and why Castlevania is listed in between the Mario games…)
Looks pretty impressive, right? You've got several major games and/or game series, though there are some obscure ones (Apidya) and some you wouldn't exactly think of (The Chronicles Of Riddick), but it seems pretty solid. However, they apparently don't play them all at every show, and at last night's performance, this is all we actually got:
SUPER MARIO BROS.® / SUPER MARIO WORLD®
BATTLEFIELD 1942(TM)
SONIC THE HEDGEHOG(TM)
THE ELDER SCROLLS® IV: OBLIVION(TM)
KINGDOM HEARTS(TM)
WORLD OF WARCRAFT®
HALO®
GUILD WARS®
THE LEGEND OF ZELDA®
CASTLEVANIA®Ten themes in total? That’s a little sparse. (By comparison, VGL had ten medleys in its first act alone.) Now, while Final Fantasy doesn't have to be the center of the video game music universe, I really did find its omission odd, especially considering that famed music composer Nobuo Uematsu is apparently involved in this production, mentioned on the first page of the program showing that he's a good friend of conductor Arnie Roth, and that Final Fantasy is the first series mentioned on the program listing on the cover of the program book and their web site. Oh yeah, and that they actually bothered to list the songs in detail in the program book. Considering all of the above, it just seems wrong.
Speaking of which, and I might as well begin the recap with mentioning this; the first tune played by the orchestra is written by Nobuo Uematsu himself, a theme specifically written for PLAY! A Video Game Symphony. Now, I'm not really sure I understand this... If you're not going to open a video game concert with a video game tune or medley or suite of some sort, then you should open with something epic, exciting, energetic, or at the very least enjoyable. If you go to the web site (
http://play-symphony.com) you will be greeted with an auto-playing (and obnoxious) tune, which is pretty much this track. I'm sorry, Nobuo Uematsu, but we all know you can do so much better.
Conductor and composer Arnie Roth came to take his place on the conductor’s stand, dressed fairly well. I’m sure the composer and host Arnie Roth isn’t a bad guy, but he doesn’t quite stir the excitement that Tommy Tallarico and James Wall do for VGL. Before each segment or two, he would introduce the segment or segments, and then after every single one he would motion for the orchestra (and sometimes choir) to stand up for another round of applause. Also, during each segment, they would often cut away from the video game footage and show close-ups of the orchestra or choir as they performed. I noticed the orchestra is up front and very well lit. By contrast to VGL, I felt that these allowances were perhaps trying to show more respect and appreciation for the musicians, however, I still thought taking the extra effort to clap for them after already clapping at the end of each song got rather redundant.
The first medley is from Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World. As expected for anything from the Super Mario universe the music was upbeat and catchy. The video montage showed footage from various Mario games, though I think they only stuck to the “main” platforming ones. It’s a no-brainer that people cheered at the opening portion of the main theme of Super Mario Bros., but the also-popular “underground theme” seemed all too brief. There was also the underwater theme from Super Mario Bros., as well as some music from Super Mario World. In the inevitable comparison to VGL, I thought VGL’s footage montage was much more varied (they included many spinoff Mario games as well), and most importantly, VGL’s was synchronized to the music. It almost looked like it was meant to be synchronized, i.e. lots of underwater footage around the time of the underwater music, which made the lack of synchronization even more evident. I will be complaining about the lack or total disregard of synchronization to the music in PLAY!’s versions a lot in this recap.
Battlefield (1942?) was next. Whereas VGL was good about having footage approved for “Everyone” by the ESRB, I wasn’t sure that PLAY! went with the same guidelines. After the first half of the Battlefield segment that seemed to focus on cut scenes and the like, the second half of showed a lot of gameplay action, and many a virtual soldier tossed their bags of equipment up in the air as they were shot down. Arnie described this music as “epic” (a word he overused this evening), and I’m not so sure I remember agreeing with him in this regard.
Sonic The Hedgehog was next. It retained the same feel as the Super Mario Bros. theme, being upbeat, familiar, and with colourful footage. The montage began with a segment from the Sonic Unleashed teaser where, from Sonic’s perspective, he looks at a ring and tosses it into the air (though the footage cuts away before he becomes a werehog, if you’ve seen that particular teaser). It continued with a silhouette of Sonic that had various game boxes of several of his games (but not all) flying by. An amusing point is when the box for Sonic Unleashed came on screen, and an audience member said “boo”, followed by laughs from a fair number of others from the audience (referring to how that game wasn’t very good). This is another game that has a VGL equivalent, and again, VGL handled it better, with its overall-series-spanning montage. To be fair, I did like the footage from Sonic The Hedgehog (Xbox 360)…except they repeated parts of it (and too bad the game wasn’t good from what I hear, but that’s another story).
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of those games I wanted to play but just never got around to. I hope the music and montage here are not representative of the game, as I found myself looking at my watch throughout this long piece. The music was long and grandiose, but I’m not sure that it’s as “epic” as Arnie once again said. Perhaps there’s something to be said about pre-familiarity with the game series to enjoy a montage, but I really don’t think I should be thinking “when is this going to end” when I’m watching it. It almost pains me to say that considering how epic I’ve heard the game actually is.
A series I have played recently, thanks to my friend Pat lending them to me, are the Kingdom Hearts games. VGL was denied Square-Enix footage, but apparently PLAY! was able to get away with using Kingdom Hearts II footage. Most of it is from the opening sequence in Kingdom Hearts II which recaps the events of the first Kingdom Hearts game, and also some of what happened in the GBA “midquel”, Chain of Memories. (You’d think that being allowed to use the footage would make this medley better than the VGL version, but when I think about it, there was really nothing wrong with VGL’s Disney-focused version.) Speaking of memories, this could have been more memorable…
After those forty-some minutes, it was time for the twenty minute intermission. Having only heard five medleys (ignoring that bad opening theme), I felt that something was amiss. I figured that maybe they’d lump the remaining tunes in some big medley, but no, the second half was in the same format as the first.
World of WarCraft is something I never got into, as with many MMOs, as I guess I always had enough games to play and was never keen on spending a lot of time on a single game that’s never meant to end. The music was indeed more epic for this one; the footage wasn’t bad considering it was entirely of full-screen pre-rendered cinematic scenes. I wish I could’ve said more about the music itself but for whatever reason it wasn’t as rousing as I remembered VGL’s to be. And again, it wasn’t synchronized very well if it was meant to be at all.
Halo was next. I have played the first Halo, and I guess I’ll keep my comments to myself because of any Halo fanboys that may be reading this. What I will say, though, is that the ridiculousness of Tommy Tallarico rocking out on the Halo 3 teaser which he did twice before in VGL was actually very rousing. The Halo theme itself is supposed to be epic. But unfortunately this is a review of PLAY!, and I’m not sure what I’m missing here, but if this is the same tune, why was it not exciting?
Arnie told us that video game composer Jeremy Soule, who was scheduled to appear at tonight’s show, was sick and could not come to Edmonton. So while VGL has a few guests, PLAY! meant to have just one and he couldn’t make it. I guess that’s not fair to Mr. Soule, as it’s not like he asked to be sick, but in any case that meant we were stuck with Arnie Roth and his fixation on the word “epic” as he described the music from Guild Wars that Mr. Soule had written. You could pretty much substitute “Guild Wars” in every occurrence of “World Of WarCraft” two paragraphs ago, except that it felt less “epic” and I haven’t seen any VGL version. Let’s just move on.
The hindsight of PLAY!’s lacklusterness is catching up to me as I begin to recall VGL while still watching PLAY!. I have some hope when Arnie announces Zelda (“It’s Zelda time!”, he says, which seems a little too casual) but is dismayed that he doesn’t use the word “epic” here when he should. The Legend Of Zelda is probably my favorite game series, and I’ve always loved the music, so much so as to get teary-eyed when the original theme played during the end credits when I first finished Twilight Princess. Twilight Princess footage makes up the bulk of the opening of the montage. (Why does both PLAY! and VGL use the beta footage from the trailer where Link picks up the cats? There are no cat-carrying scenes in the final version of this game that’s already two years old!) Then it cuts to footage from the first Zelda game where the old man gives Link his first sword in lovely 8-bit style. Why is the audience laughing? I get that this is amusing when juxtaposed against the Twilight Princess footage, but for tunes that are supposed to span a whole series it should almost be expected that they would show games throughout the series’ history, including the beginning. I’m beginning to think the audience is younger than I thought if it generated the response it had… I will give PLAY! some kudos for including the Dark World theme from A Link To The Past. However, and I hate to sound like a broken record, but VGL did it so much better with its montage and synchronization. I really should have been more excited about the Zelda theme.
I am half-glad and half-disappointed when Arnie announces that there is one more theme left. I was not writhing in agony throughout the course of this concert, but I never felt wowed. With only one suite left to play, the wearied part of me was glad it was almost over, but another part of me (the cheap part?) was thinking “this is what I paid fifty-three bucks for? At least give me more chances to be impressed!” Taking a cue, perhaps, from VGL the last time it was here, the finale tune is from Castlevania. Another series that I am a fan of both its games and the music, I should have been impressed. But taking much of its music from Curse Of Darkness, a PS2 game I haven’t played (and heard wasn’t very good), with more footage than should be expected from Castlevania Judgment (the fighting game I rented very recently, which also wasn’t all that great), I’m really wondering what they were thinking. Sure, they played the famous “Vampire Killer” theme, but not a whole lot of it.
Arnie walks off stage. Applause. Someone shouts “Encore!” More applause. Arnie returns and bows. And…walks back. No encore. I always thought it was expected at concerts to have something saved up for an encore. Didn’t VGL have TWO encores? Arnie doesn’t return. Oh well.
On the way out, I run into an old co-worker from my days back at Playdium (hi, Graham) and tell him Video Games Live is much better. It was more a gut feeling at the time, but now that I’ve had a chance to look back at all this, I became more sure of it. Of course, I also had more time to think about it last night while being stuck in the Jubilee Auditorium’s parkade for 22 minutes.
Anyway, the music itself in PLAY!, other than the video synchronization problems, I guess wasn’t too bad overall. This is a symphony orchestra, after all, they do have talent. But for whatever reason, when compared to the Video Games Live versions, there was a lot less energy and excitement throughout the show. Maybe Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall (and their various guests) have more of a knack of being more relaxed, fun, and exciting, than Arnie Roth in his conductor’s suit and by himself. It also hurt that the many advertised tunes weren’t played at all - where’s Chrono Trigger? Final Fantasy? Metal Gear Solid? Silent Hill? Don’t advertise what you’re not going to play. Video Games Live had nineteen medleys last time, PLAY! had only ten. Video Games Live has segments where a person comes on stage and plays interactive games with musical accompaniment; even if you weren’t the one playing, it was a lot of fun to see; PLAY! did not have anything like that. VGL has relatively vibrant pre-show events, including a costume contest and game demos, PLAY! did not have much other than selling Mario plushies.
I didn’t set out to write such a scathing review, but I really do feel that there are indeed better ways to spend the time and money. If you are a gamer, which you probably would be if you wanted to see this concert, then save the $53 for another game. If both Video Games Live and PLAY! come to your town, I would by far recommend Video Games Live.
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But this is still so exciting, I even made a wallpaper to explain it!
I CAN'T EDIT MY MIIS! 
