I had just finished Final Fantasy XV on PlayStation—which I could easily verify on PSNProfiles. Whenever I spend around 50 hours on a game, I tend to feel inspired, and that was definitely the case here. Lunafreya Nox, yes please.

Since FFXV doesn’t really have any particularly memorable tunes to cover on its own, I decided to go with the most classic one of them all—“The Prelude.” It first appeared in the original Final Fantasy and has been featured in many of the games since.

It was made in FLStudio 20 Producer Edition with these VST instruments:

• Spectrasonics Omnisphere
• Vengeance Sound Avenger

Final Fantasy XV is a strange game, so it feels fitting that this turned into a strange song. I didn’t really have a plan—I just went with the flow. The original melody is basically an arpeggiated ascending scale, so there wasn’t much to build on there. Instead, I focused on creating a rolling bassline with a solid beat. The snare might be a bit over the top, though.

I also wanted to include a quieter, “drowning” section in the middle to match a music video I had in mind. Whatever this ended up being, I made it. Hope you enjoy it.

As mentioned more than once by now, is is based on “The Prelude” that first appeared in Final Fantasy I on the NES. Originally composed by Nobuo Uematsu as a last-minute addition to the original Final Fantasy and took him all of 10 minutes to create, never expecting it to become the signature tune of a long-standing series