Spoiler-Free Review
Tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour are on sale now.
If you’re reading this review trying to decide whether to go to see FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour, then the answer is ‘Yes’. All the new music you love will be in it, and it is all performed amazingly by the ShinRa Orchestra and ShinRa Chorus.
Surprisingly, you also do not need to have played FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth in order to enjoy this concert. The cutscenes paired alongside the music from FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour very, very loosely retell the plot of the game but without any more spoilers in context than you would get from watching the game’s pre-launch trailers.
Finally, the concert is around two hours long with a 20-ish minute intermission after the first hour or so, and it was all quite tightly paced together.
If you want a more detailed review, jump below the following picture to see on.
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Spoilers Start Here
I attended the world premiere of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and I really loved what I saw and heard as this tightly timed concert very loosely follows the plot of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth from start to finish over just a bit more than two hours. It opens up with music playing over the game’s prologue, and it ultimately finishes pre-encore with the ending fights of the game. All of the in-game chapters in between – the Grasslands, Costa Del Sol, Gongaga, Golden Saucer, and more – are very much represented here both on screen and in music.
What really surprised me though was how the music was arranged, as around a fourth of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour was performed as part of one medley or another. It would often seem that we were spending far too short a period of time with one piece or another before it would seamlessly shift into something else. For a nearly 20-minute segment of the performance, all of the field region pieces, which included Grasslands, Hollow Skies, Junon Region, With Heavy Heart, Mt. Corel, South Corel, Jungles of Gongaga, Cosmo Canyon Region, and Nibel Region, were filed down to around two minutes each and played one after another more or less seamlessly.
Thankfully, the majority of the pieces, such as Galian Beast and Queen’s Blood, were played in full. As a Queen’s Blood fanatic, I thought the live ShinRa Orchestra pulled it off perfectly, even though the deck in the videos that accompanied it was maddeningly simple considering the wide variety of cards and strategies available for people to select and play with. It was also a lot of fun to see the Grand Parade mini-game played in full with all the correct button presses during Rufus’ Welcoming Ceremony, and I could actually watch the parade happen for once instead of trying to keep time with what buttons I am supposed to hit next on the PlayStation 5 controller.
The ShinRa Orchestra played all of this music masterfully, and it was almost indistinguishable from the music heard in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth. This is a truly professional orchestra, and one that knew we wanted to hear the music we fell in love with in the game. I was sitting in the second row from the front, and all the different sections worked beautifully in harmony together, as conducted by the revered Arnie Roth, without overpowering each other. Despite what Mr. Roth said was a compressed rehearsal schedule, they played all of the music like seasoned professionals and there was a lot of heart to it all. I do want to especially point out the horns section during Welcome to the Golden Saucer: they really elevated themselves above and beyond everyone else present.
Surprisingly, the only thing that outshined the ShinRa Orchestra was the ShinRa Chorus. I have attended concerts for many years now, and this was probably my favorite chorus so far. The moment I was most eager to hear in person, the music from the Gongaga Jungle, had the perfect amount of haunting vocals present, and I honestly would have believed it was faked if I didn’t seen the people singing firsthand. And this was not a one-off situation, either. Whether Loveless Symphonic Suite- Gift of the Goddess or Sephiroth Reborn Symphony was being performed, the ShinRa Chorus was crisp, easily heard, and blended so well together they overshadowed everything else in a positive way.
Towards the top of this review, I talked about how FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour does not spoil the plot of the game beyond what you would see in the pre-release trailers. And this is quite true. While you will undoubtedly recognize the different areas of the game if you’ve only seen the trailers and maybe played FINAL FANTASY VII when it came out for the PlayStation One, you will not be spoiled on this new game’s story in a significant way. In fact, the heavy story beats from the last fourth of the game, including the moment from the apex of the story that I most wanted to see, is not present at all. If you’ve played FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, then you will know what I am talking about content-wise.
For me, this…was surprising. A lot of the biggest, heartfelt moments in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth come from this absent content. To see so little of those big emotional story beats from the last part of the game, other than perhaps a little bit in the medley of A Portentous Sky and End of the World and in the encore, surprised me. I was fully expecting to cry during this concert from the one part of the game that made me gasp and do so, and I was surprised that didn’t happen. (And yes, I am being purposefully vague, but you know what I’m talking about if you’ve played the game.)
FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour ultimately made me feel like SQUARE ENIX wanted to err on the side of caution to not fully spoil the game for people who either haven’t played it or haven’t finished it yet. Even of the new content FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth plot-heavy cinematics present, it felt definitely like it was made up of clips that you wouldn’t quite grasp without surrounding context. Considering that other SQUARE ENIX concerts previously did not shy away from indulging in spoilers to great effect, it makes that choice here all the more baffling for me. After all, if you’re coming to a video game concert, you assume that you’re going to be spoiled on the full game.
One other, minor, issue, I had with the cutscenes was that it felt like some of them didn’t know quite where to end and so more or less just cut themselves off. Without spoiling everything, I was surprised that Towards Mt. Nibel and Main Theme of FINAL FANTASY VII- Battle Edit ended the way they did on a slightly weird note. That said, there are others, like Galian Beast or Cosmo Canyon- Sanctum of Planetology, that ended perfectly in a fully satisfying way cinematically.
Finally, one other issue I had with the concert was the performance of No Promises to Keep- Loveless Version. To my great surprise, it was presented as only an instrumental. While the strings section was clearly intended to replace Loren Allred’s voice in the performance, I think they struggled to do so here. This was an especially jarring choice since they played the full game cinematic against it where the song is in fact vocally performed. While I understand that Ms. Allred can’t come along for a full worldwide tour, I was surprised they didn’t have a guest vocalist to fill in.
Now, all of this does not detract much from the concert. Far, far from it. SQUARE ENIX and AWR Productions have managed to create a breathtaking concert that shows off a lot of the new music in FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth over slightly more than two hours. And honestly? I adored it. Jungles of Gongaga, even though it was part of a medley, was everything I wanted to hear in person, I loved Loveless Symphonic Suite- Gift of the Goddess, and Galian Beast is probably one of the best pieces that HAS to be heard and seen live.
There are two encore numbers, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as they have been mainstays of any FINAL FANTASY orchestra performance for over a decade-and-a-half now. And the reason they always fall into those encore slots is because they are so beautiful to hear in person and so strikingly different from each other that everyone has to hear them at least once in person.
Ultimately, if you love FINAL FANTASY VII, and even if you haven’t quite yet gotten around to playing FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth, you should attend FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour.
Review Update (September 19, 2024)
Since the original publication of this concert review, I attended the Munich, Germany performance of FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour at the Olympiahalle. At that performance, Eric Roth (who previously conducted the A New World: intimate music from FINAL FANTASY concert that I reviewed in 2022), conducted the ShinRa Symphony Orchestra. While I would say there was less cosplay at the Munich show than at Los Angeles, the cosplay that did show up was no less amazing.
The concert was still absolutely amazing to watch. The overall setlist was the same as during the Los Angeles debut performance, but the changes that Arnie Roth discussed with me during his interview to shift the Golden Saucer songs starting with Bare Your Soul to after the intermission was implemented for this performance. In my opinion, moving both that song and Welcome to the Golden Saucer to after the intermission really helped to even out both halves of the concert in a very positive way.
Eric Roth was energetic, and he kept stepping back and forth on the stage while working his magic upon the orchestra. Both him and the other conductor, Arnie Roth, are excellent in the conducting roles and I honestly do not prefer one conductor over the other. Eric Roth also interacted with the audience between a lot of the different pieces being played, and he made sure to introduce the different musical numbers after he finished conducting them. I enjoyed his light banter, and I could tell he really loved conducting the music on stage.
Something I also experienced for the first time during this show was the use of stage lights. Each song performed had a different color of light or lights backing it up across the stage and the Olympiahalle. For example, Queen’s Blood had a mixed blue and red motif, Galian Beast was solid red, and Aerith’s Theme was white. These lighting elements really enhanced the orchestra performance by adding a visual ‘pop’ of color to the audio/video components already present. I really hope this is something that FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour and AWR Music will be implementing whenever possible at future shows.
If you asked me what performance was better, I would be hard pressed to tell you. Both the Los Angeles and Munich ones were fantastic, but I really think the edge goes to Munich solely due to the rebalancing of the setlist before and after the intermission. If you can attend this concert somewhere in the world, and you’re a FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth fan, then you should definitely go – whatever issues I listed elsewhere previously in my review notwithstanding. I certainly wouldn’t mind attending a third time, if possible.
At the close of this updated review, there is one last thing I want to point out. When the opening notes of Aerith’s Theme played in Los Angeles, there was what I would describe as a ‘gasp of happiness’ that overcame the crowd. You could tell that a lot of people in attendance were excited to hear that particular piece live – most likely for the first time ever for them. When I went to Munich, I was definitely surprised to hear that exact same sound wash across Olympiahalle during those same opening notes. There is apparently something absolutely universal, no matter what country you’re in, about Aerith’s Theme for fans of FINAL FANTASY VII and FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth.
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Tickets for FINAL FANTASY VII Rebirth Orchestra World Tour are on sale now.
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